Smart Home Blog

A new line of HDTVs from Toshiba – Power TV will be equiped with external battery. So, its owners will be able to watch favourite TV shows about two hours after power cut. Not bad, especially during Champions League play-off. Additionally, Power TVs will have two cool features – “Auto Signal Booster” to improve video from weak signal and “Auto View” to optimize picture settings according to the ambient lighting condition. Also HDTVs of new Toshiba’s line will have low power consumption. So, consumers will be able to decrease their electricity bills and save environment.

Company Xtreamer released its new network HD media player iXtreamer with unique feature. It sports iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch dock which allows to playback media content from Apple devices on your TV. But even you don’t have such devices still iXtreamer can be an option. Except common features such 1080p video playback from internal 3.5″ HDD, attached USB storage or network shares, connection to network using USB WiFi adapter, HDMI/Component/RCA/SPDIF outputs the player supports DTS MA and Dolby TrueHD with 7.1 channel audio, HD MKV files and Blu-ray ISO rips. it also compatible with Logitech Harmony universal remote controls. Attractive design and reasonable price in $226 are also plus. So, don’t miss a chance to take that great device!

[via eHomeUpgrade]

Using application VPlayer it’s possible to watch live stream from VDR directly on the Android-based devices. Sure you should have working streamdev-server to do that. Communication is done via WiFi. Possible use 3G as well but IP filtering in the streamdev-server config file should be define properly. Also don’t forget about possibility to convert VDR stream on the fly to adopt its parameters for specific output device and limited bandwidth.

[via yaVDR]

The self-made home automation system demonstrated on that video has GUI similar to LCARS interface from Star Trek. You may see following components in action in that video: Agenda/Calendar, Shopping list (Groceries), Rain radar, Train departure times, Library & Media player connected to home cinema set, Internet browser.

A two weeks after releasing of Boxee Box the Boxee team released the first update of its firmware. There is a few reasons for such early update. First of all the developers didn’t have a time to test the new version of the Boxee. It was released together with Box. Secondly, the latest Boxee version is used by ordinary people with Box and not by geeks only. So, developers got new kinds of bugs. And finally, Boxee team should solve some hardware related problems like WiFi connection, for example. In any case that update made Boxee Box more stable and reliable by solving a lot of reported problems with media playback, wireless connection, management of network shares and more. Hope Boxee Box owners will be more happy now.