In case you forgot, Sezmi plans to roll up live broadcast and pay TV along with web videos, on-demand movies and DVR functionality in a single, easy to navigate set-top box. Needless to say, this is a tall order, and most of us probably relegated Sezmi to the vaporware bin. However, trials of the product have begun in LA and a $US25 million cash infusion from investors has given the project new life. In fact, it seems that Sezmi spent the last year working out deals with the likes of Sony Pictures, MGM Studios, Paramount Studios, Warner Brothers, Lion’s Gate Entertainment and Universal Studios for on-demand streaming, and ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, NBC, Turner, MTV Networks Discovery Channel, Telemundo and Univision for TV content.

Sezmi plans to offer a tiered pricing plan that starts with Sezmi Select, the entry tier, which will offer all local channels (in SD and HD) as well as access to on-demand content for $US4.99 per month. Sezmi Supreme will include cable and local channels for $US24.99 per month.

[Sezmi via Variety and Zats]

Appropriating channels aside, I actually really like the look of this HL-B54S soundbar from LG. On top of its 4.1 surround sound, it incorporates a slot-loading Blu-ray player, Wi-Fi for BD-Live access and streaming clips from YouTube, and an iPod dock built-in. It plays back all the lossless audio codecs, connects to your TV via HDMI 1.3, supports DLNA for accessing your content on your network, and has USB slots that support playback of DiVX and MKV files.

The unit does look to be quite deep though, which might mean it’ll stick out a bit far under your TV, but if you need the convenience of an all-in-one unit, don’t have a Blu-ray player and can’t wire up your house with proper 5.1 audio, I reckon this could be worth checking out. $1499 is even a pretty good price…

[LG]

Boxee’s fantastic media centre software has always been just that: fantastic connected media player software. Today, the company says its going to announce hardware — a Boxee Box, even.

Boxee’s post on the box has nothing in the way of details yet, so I’m just going to have to take a WILD guess at what this thing will look like: It’ll be a box, with an Ion chipset, a medium-sized HDD, HDMI-out and a Boxee sticker. Just a theory!

We’ll get to see the box — assuming it’s not just this Boxee-compatible Myka number we saw a few days ago — come December 7, when it gets the full unveiling treatment. Also interesting, though probably a little aspirational:

* make it easy for users to consume and find content – no matter what the source
* give content owners, aggregators, and developers the tools to create unique experiences with a variety of business models
* enable CE companies to enhance their Connected devices

This will be the first connected device running Boxee, but the idea is to provide consumers with a way to get Boxee in their living rooms, no matter whether it’s on a Connected TV, game console, set-top box, BluRay player, computer, etc.

Multiple Boxee Boxes! Boxee Boxen! [Boxee]

Instead, Dell has turned to AMD chips starting with a base Athlon processor (which can be bumped to an AMD Athlon X2, and AMD Athlon Neo X2). A single hard-drive squeezes inside (up to 1TB) along with as much as 8GB of RAM. And you can choose between integrated graphics and an ATI Radeon HD 4330 512MB card.

That should be enough power to drive 1080p out of the HDMI port (through an optional Blu-ray drive and TV Tuner if you’d like). You also score four USB ports (two front, two back) along with two eSATA ports for easy drive-expansion.

The Zino HD goes on sale today. But I haven’t spotted it on their site just yet. I’m interested to see what you really get in that base $US250ish rig. and how much a few of these key upgrades will cost. If Dell keeps the price down, the Zino HD could be a no-brainer when compared to the Atom and Ion-based systems floating around. [Dell]

UPDATE: Dell’s press materials they sent out said the Zino HD would start at $US250. As of right now, the cheapest configuration online is $US360. We’ve contacted Dell for clarification.

UPDATE 2: This is fun, isn’t it? Swap out Windows 7 Professional with Home and the price drops to $US260. I have no clue why a sub-$US300 computer defaults with a $US100 OS upgrade.

UPDATE 3: OK, it looks like the website pricing updates are done. My base configuration is down to $US230 with a 1.6GHz Athlon, 2GB RAM, DVD drive and 250GB (7200rpm) hard drive. Bumping the specs up to a dual-core Athlon puts the price to $US289.

Here are the specs:

• Disc formats: Blu-Ray Disc media, including BD-R/RE, BD-Live and BonusViewTM, DVD/DVD+R/DVD-RW, CD/CD-RW, MP3 or JPEG files on disc
• Audio formats: LPCM, MP3, Dolby® Digital, Dolby TrueHD, DTS®, DTS-HD Master AudioTM and WMA.
• RJ-45 connection for internet access
• IR-remote in/out jacks for system integration
• HDMI output (V.1.3a with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HDTM bitstreams and high-resolution video)
• Front-panel USB jack for additional BD-Live memory or MP3 or JPEG file playback
• Optical and coaxial digital audio outputs
• Dimensions (H x W x D): 66mm x 440mm x 352mm
• Weight: 3.7kg

Anything there that makes you want to spend enough cash for two PS3s?

[Convoy]

Apparently, Myka goes beyond Hulu and Boxee allowing you to “browse to any web site and play video content directly onto your TV”. So there appears to be some sort of web browsing feature on this, although it seems like they left BitTorrent out of this one lest they cannibalise their original Myka player. The ION is available now for $US379 (Wireless-N and Blu-ray add on brings it to $US644). But why would you spend nearly $US400 on something that only does part of what a PC can do, when you can buy an actual, compact HTPC for less money?

Want Boxee and Hulu to play in high-def on your TV? Meet Myka ION

LINCOLN, Mass., Nov. 5, 2009 — Myka, makers of the magic box that downloads and streams high-definition videos onto your TV, is introducing the Myka ION — the first Web-to-TV product that can easily run Boxee, Hulu and other leading Internet video services.

Myka ION is powered by the Intel Atom Processor 330 and NVIDIA ION Graphics Processor, giving Myka ION fast media-player performance at a low cost.

Myka ION lets you browse to any Web site and play video content directly onto your TV — bypassing your PC entirely. No messing with conversion software, no tinkering with anything. Plug it in and it starts working right away.

“Technology has finally caught up with what consumers want out of Internet video services,” said Myka President Dan Lovy. “They want to be freed from their computers and watch the growing variety of Web video content on their large-screen, high-definition living room TVs. And they want to do it without a lot of hassle and without video quality suffering.

“We’ve heard them loud and clear and we’re proud to present the Myka ION, the first product to take advantage of the latest processor technology and finally give Web video consumers what they want.”

The Intel and NVIDIA processors do all the heavy lifting, such as video encoding/decoding during playback, resulting in seamless, high-quality content beamed directly to your TV. The Myka ION is actually a mini-PC in itself.

With the Myka ION, you don’t need to do any work to figure out how to get a downloaded video to actually play on your TV. With a wide range of file formats supported, you don’t need to think about it at all. Just plug it in and enjoy.

[Myka]

In other words, bumping up the refresh rates beyond 60 Hz may have eliminated the problem of motion blur, but some complain that the activation of the ME/MC circuit that kicks in when LCD sets achieve these high refresh rates desegregates the picture. As the video put together by HDGuru illustrates, this is a very real problem.

That having been said, LCD buyers have a few options. Most sets offer an option to turn off ME/MC although that will result in lower motion resolution. You could also opt for a plasma set that doesn’t suffer from this issue. It also reinforces a point I made with yesterday’s article — you don’t need to spend extra money on a LCD just because it advertises 240Hz. You probably won’t see any additional benefit with that set than you would with one that tops out at 120Hz. Check out HDGuru for the full details and results of the test. [HDGuru]

The goal here is simple: Play all the videos that I have ripped from DVD, downloaded from the web, shot with my own cameras or obtained in some other manner, no matter what the format. It sounds simple but Apple TV can’t do it. Video codecs and containers are a nightmare to keep track of, and even more of a nightmare to convert.

This isn’t about photos and music. Apple TV is better at both of those than any of this stuff. It’s also not about renting movies or buying movies, or even streaming movies. Roku has a nice cheap box for that, and Apple TV is suitable if you just want to live inside Steve Jobs’ media store. This is about playing non-DRM movies, pure and simple.

The names might be familiar to you: The Popcorn Hour C-200 by Syabas is quickly gaining cult status (and has its own hacker wiki), while the other four smaller boxes come from brands you probably have experience with, including WD, Seagate, Netgear and Patriot.

My two main tests were simple — I loaded PC and Mac formatted external hard drives with a variety of files ranging from H.264 MP4s to WMVs of several vintages, from raw AVCHD files in MTS wrappers to the hot new DivX 7 MKV. Then I browsed through my local network to a NAS that had a cache of similar files. Could I see them? Could I play them? These shouldn’t be issues, but they’re big issues.

Here’s a rundown of each machine and how they fared in testing:

As you can see, there were clear leaders given my criteria above, but what struck me was how each one differed. Truth is, depending on who you are, any one of these might be the best fit. Here’s what really separates them:

WD TV Live

I would have given this thing the solo spot at the top if it weren’t for a few dings that might very well be fixed in a firmware update: It won’t show you DVD menus on ripped DVD images, and when you play files with the suffix .m4v it won’t fast forward or rewind. Weird bug that can be fixed if you just change .m4v to .mp4, but since that’s the default file naming for Handbrake’s “Apple TV” profile it could be a problem for people, like me, who spent months ripping their entire DVD collection that way.

WD’s strengths include a friendly user-interface with handy video previews, some promising early online services (including Pandora), and the most reasonable photo and music handling I’ve seen in this cluster of gadgets.

Seagate FreeAgent Theater+

I loved this when I tested it a few weeks ago, despite its fugly interface, and it holds up under testing. It does better with ripped .ISO files than WD, doing both DVD menus and chapters (and it doesn’t have that weird .m4v bug either). Video was better, especially when running 1080p content.

The tradeoff is that the interface is bad, and there’s almost nothing in the way of online services. It gets points for making an attempt at sorting music and displaying photos, but if that’s a priority, WD is the better call.

Popcorn Hour C-200

Hardcore AV nerds love this thing, and I understand why. There are more ways to get at video content than in any other set-top box I’ve ever seen, and if you really know how to hack, there’s really not much it can’t do.

It’s a big ole thing — they call it a “network tank” and — despite reminding me of the far cooler ones in Tron — I get it. It has an internal BitTorrent client and you can plug in a Blu-ray drive, for god’s sake. I found very few video formats that it wouldn’t support (FLV was one) but I had to take major points off because for being so big, it has a lame interface, and it comes with an RF remote that only worked when I stood within 1m of it. They even mention that there might be problems with interference, and if people experience that they can buy the IR remote. Great, thanks.

My only question — and it’s not rhetorical — is why spend $US300/$AU599 on this (plus extra for the optional internal HDD and the IR remote) when you can just buy a home-theatre PC?

Patriot Box Office

This was the dark horse of the group, being a late entry by a company known only for computer memory. I was surprised at how well it held up. It actually could decode more tested formats than any other device in this lineup — it did Flash video (FLV), which the three above can’t render. Only the WD and the Patriot show you video previews, too. As small as it is, there’s space for a 2.5-inch SATA drive in there and even a BitTorrent client. You can copy files to and from different drives and the network, and it’s the cheapest of the lot at $US130.

So why did it come in a distant third? Unlike the three above, it can’t read Mac-formatted hard drives, and its video quality was noticeably the worst of the batch. That said, if you are a hacker sort and want something to play with that doesn’t cost as much as Popcorn, set your sights on this.

Netgear Digital Entertainer Live

As you can probably tell by now, Netgear had the most disappointing box of the lineup, despite its Apple TV ripoff look and feel. Lack of Mac media support and the inability to read key file formats — like DivX 7 and AVCHD — meant it couldn’t pass muster with real video fanatics. Its biggest point of woe was the fact that it didn’t support any file over 720p in resolution — whether that’s a software thing or a hardware thing, it’s sure not future-proof and probably best to stay away.

I also didn’t like the fact that its interface is laid out entirely for retail, like an Apple TV without the panache, or a Roku box that costs more and doesn’t do Netflix. Local files were not a priority, and despite the friendly interface, it doesn’t even make an attempt to differentiate photos and music. I did give it a gold star for online services, but only because it had the most in this group — if online services are what you love, buy a Roku, or a TiVo, or an Xbox, or a friggin’ Apple TV.

Still not sure what you’re looking for, check the spec comparisons here:

The HDTVs included models from the top-tier brands of (alphabetically) LG, Samsung, Sharp and Sony – from the mid-line to top-of-the-line models. All of the units were from the 2008 model year. Differences between the 2008 and 2009 models are primarily in their marketing hype. For this article we had three flagship top-of-the line LCD models from Samsung (LN-T5281F), Sharp (LC-52D92U) and Sony (KDL-52XBR4). By studying the top-of-the-line models from the market leaders we were assured of examining the state-of-the-art for each display technology and each manufacturer. The consumer mid-line models included LG (42LG50), Samsung (LN40A550P3F), and Sony (KDL-40V3000). The remaining two LCD units were consumer HDTVs but not commercially available models.

The top-of-the-line Sony XBR and Sharp units had 120 Hz screen refresh, the top-of-the-line Samsung had strobed LED backlighting, and all of the other units had standard 60 Hz screen refresh. The goal was to determine the degree to which this varied advanced technology affected visible motion blur.

DisplayMate analysed the blur using moving test patterns, moving photographs and live video (a Nikon D90 DSLR with a shutter speed of 1/160th of a second was used for the photography) and found that no actual motion blur detectable in any of the live video content — although there were incidents that were passed off as defects in the source video or temporary optical illusions.

After extensive side-by-side objective testing with moving test patterns, moving photographs and live video we found that there was no visually detectable difference in motion blur performance for current mid to top-of-the-line LCD HDTVs, regardless of their Response Time, 60 or 120 Hz refresh rates, strobed LED backlighting, or motion enhancement processing. While there was considerable motion blur in the moving test patterns, motion blur was simply not visually detectable in real live video content during our extensive side-by-side testing. With only a handful of minor exceptions, whenever blur was seen in live video we always found it to be in the source content or a temporary visual illusion that disappeared when the segments in question were reviewed. This is undoubtedly due to the way the brain processes and extracts essential information from dynamic and complex moving images.

In other words, DisplayMate thinks you are probably seeing things. Don’t be fooled by manufacturers charging extra for fancy motion blur technologies or claims of exceptional response times. If you purchased a mid to top tier model you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. Of course, this test doesn’t remotely cover all of the LCD brands out there, so I have to ask — based on your experience, do you believe that LCD makers have finally tamed the motion blur beast? [DisplayMate]

The design is basically one sealed sound chamber filled with enough speakers for an authentic surround sound experience: four 2.6-inch flat speakers and two 4.5-inch passive radiator speakers. You’ll find a 2×10W Class D amplifier squeezed in that shell as well.

Plugging in or operating off a built-in lithium polymer battery, the i24R3 has no inputs, instead receiving signals over 2.4GHz wireless USB or A2DP Bluetooth — yes, from software like iTunes and devices like iPhones.

And while we have no idea how it actually sounds or how much it actually costs, we have too many regularly intoxicated friends with too good access to aerodynamic implements to ever invest in one of our own. [Michael Young via The Design Blog]