1.27.2007
Hail To The King, Baby
Posted by Chris Morley

It's awesome working for Velocity Micro. We've just successfully moved our products all over to Vista, and it's been quite a haul. We have put a lot of time and effort into this transition to make sure that we deliver the best solutions our customers could ever ask for. We're among the first, and even Microsoft has been impressed with some of the back end deployment accomplishments we have made, well ahead of our competition. Huge props go out to everyone involved, including production, marketing, support, sales, and research and development - all of you guys and gals are awesome.

Lately I've talked a LOT about our new home theater systems based around Vista Media Center, the CineMagix Grand Theater and the CineMagix Pro Cinema. Both of these systems are capable of high definition media playback - OTA HDTV, Blu-ray, and even digital cable. We couldn't be happier. Of course, it's a great excuse to get cable drops in our R&D lab and all the premium packages. We leave some of our media centers running so they can record in high definition all the prime time shows that we love - 24, The Office, Scrubs, etc...then we use Media Center to burn copies for those who want to watch it at home. All very cool technology, and it really brings the PC into the living room in a way that hasn't been done before.

I've always found it odd that some manufacturers try to shoe horn a desktop into the living room. I think that's the exact opposite of how it should be done. When we sat down and sketched out our plans for our media centers, we started on the couch. What did we want to do and how easy can we make it for our customers? To give you a specific example, while I love having PVR functionality in my cable box, it's clunky and prone to quirks that are very annoying - like going "live" when it finishes recording a show that I may be watching with a 5 minute delay. It happens often, and my wife is probably tired of hearing me say "I cannot WAIT for our media centers to launch so I don't have to deal with this anymore." I then have to fast forward from the beginning to the point that I was "kicked out." I don't have to worry about that anymore, but if I ever have to fast forward, it's about 30x faster than my cable box, which is awesome if you've ever tried to fast forward through an hour of programming.

So all the features that we wanted to have came from deficiencies in consumer electronics. We wanted better up scaling DVD performance, so we went with PureVideo HD and AVIVO technology that uses GPU power to clean up standard definition DVDs. The result is awesome and with a 128 score in HQV, a popular home theater benchmarking tool, the resulting image quality is equal to that of $3,000 DVD players. So starting at half that price, you can get a Velocity Micro media center - the CineMagix series home theater system - with 10-bit video processing. Cool, huh?

[1.27.2007 @ 2:02 PM]  [Digg it]