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Richard Vanderhurst reviews the ATI Theater 650 Pro

16-Jun-09

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The leader in Television tuner technology up till now has been ATI’s Television Wonder Elite. Tuner cards featuring the Theater 650 Pro chip will be available from makers like MSI and Sapphire, and those products should range between $100 to $150. The new chip offers enough of a lift to image quality that TV-on-your-PC fans should give it an intense look ; just know that CableCard technology for Computers is anticipated to hit next year.

The Theater 650 Pro boasts a new video decoder together with many picture-quality tweaks and performance enhancements. Some of the highlights include support for NTSC, Chum , and SECAM signals, plus digital Television thru ATSC and DVB-T ( the EU digital standard ), and hardware MPEG-2 encoding to spare your CPU from doing all of the heavy lifting. Watching the standard Television signal, as well as sending DVD test photographs from a set-top DVD player, we saw proof of the enhancements ATI made to the Theater 650 Pro.

On the standard moire pattern test screen, we managed to see fine, detailed lines that were blurred out on last year’s Theater 550 chip. Still, no Television tuner for a PC–the Theater 650 Pro included–provides the image quality you get with even the most simple cable-box-to-TV hookup. Many clients will select to use Windows XP Media Center Edition as their front end, and our Theater 650 reference board hooked right up to the Media Center OS with no issues.

The Theater 650 Pro is also compatible with Media Center alternatives like Cyberlink PowerCinema and Snapstream’s Beyond Television . Really, a new version of that software, Beyond Television 4.3, is launching on Thursday, June eight, and Snapstream is touting its Theater 650 Pro compatibility as a major selling point. Recording Television on a Computer is a hard subject that frequently leaves casual users either confused with the variety of hardware and software decisions out there or else unhappy with the less-than-stellar results of their recordings.

When standard-definition wire signals are sent to your Computer , the final image quality goes from just OK to downright hideous, even with a card powered by the wonderful ATI Theater 650 Pro. Over-the-air HD recording is better but needs a compatible Television tuner card and the forbearance to hang an antenna out of your window and find an HD signal. Naturally, all this is predicted to switch sometime next year when new Computers are CableCard compatible

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Richard Vanderhurst reviews the Vista View Saber 2020

15-Jun-09

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Home theater Computer fans are a variable bunch, and many off-the-shelf products from name-brand Television tuner card makers don’t meet the wants of their specific setups.

Specialty seller Vista View has a new card that’s a decent fit for users who wish to have a top quality twin analog Television tuner that works with Windows XP Media Center Edition and can fit into a low-profile x1 PCI Express slot. The Vista View Saber 2020 is a low-profile card with 2 coaxial connections for Television and FM radio and a port for connecting a two-input S-Video breakout wire.

The card supports a number of common Television standards, including NTSC, Buddy , and SECAM.

Installing the card was simple using the setup CD, including basic drivers and a custom DVR application called SaberView. The card also works alongside Windows Media Center Edition and third party apps, for example SageTV. While you may use the standard MCE remote if Media Center is your front-end application, the card does not include a remote to be used with the bundled SaberView DVR application.

SaberView will appear really stripped down to any one used to Media Center, SageTV, or Beyond Television .

There’s an absence of hand-holding while setting up your Television signal, and the interface has a sparse Windows Explorer look, in contrast to the icon-heavy 10-foot interfaces common in other DVR apps. Still, for basic viewing and recording of a Television or FM radio signal, it suffices, and it gives non-MCE users an absolutely functional DVR setup right from the box. The card’s onboard hardware encoder handled 2 video inputs concurrently, without any stuttering or slowdown.

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Richard Vanderhurst reviews the Iomega Home Media Network Drive (1TB)

13-Jun-09

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For approximately $130 for the 500GB version, the Iomega Home Media Network Drive is a sound buy for any home user. Iomega NAS servers are understood to be straightforward to use, and the Home Media Network Drive is the organization’s easiest so far. The Home Media Network Drive has a particularly fascinating way to restrict users’ access to the share folder.
Each share folder contains a switch, with the decisions of “Everyone” and “Secure.” The previous permits everybody to access it openly. Checking its box permits the account access to the folder. Not like the Iomega StorCenter ix2 that supports drives formatted using either FAT32 or NTFS file system, the Home Media Network Drive only supports those formatted using FAT32. This is upsetting as it’s difficult to format a tough drive bigger than 32GB using FAT32 and most external hard drives are much bigger than 32GB. Sharing an external drive is so simple as plugging it in.

Once connected, a share folder will be made for the drive and you can obtain access it as well as configure access privileges for it the way you would with any other share folders. You can copy files that may be viewed and retrieved using Windows Explorer, or create revive points that may be used to recover the complete PC to prior working states. It is an example of the swiftest single-volume NAS servers we’ve tested. We test NAS servers’ throughput by timing how long it takes them to end writing / reading a specific amount of information. In comparison, the Home Media Network Drive was simply a tad slower than the Western Digital My Book World Edition, which scored 120.1Mbps and 206Mbps for the write and read tests

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Richard Vanderhurst Discusses Initial SEO Strategies

31-May-09

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Search engine optimization or SEO is a set of strategies done to improve your web site search results when a user keys in a certain keyword or phrase. According to Richard Vanderhurst, no matter how brilliant your SEO strategies may be, it is highly recommended to have them lined up to be implemented one at a time. This allows you to determine which of your SEO efforts are working and which ones are not. This, then, enables you to focus and develop the strategies that give you favorable results and saves you the time you lose from repeating the ones that don’t. In addition to that, implementing various SEO strategies all at the same time can cause them, including the successful ones, to be ignored by search engine crawlers.

Richard Vanderhurst stresses that the best initial SEO strategy is coming up with a design for your web site. Focus building the elements of your web sites that search engine crawlers get attracted to such as tags, links, navigational structure and content, just to name a few. This negates the common misnomer that SEO efforts should only be launched after the web site has been built.

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How do you start doing SEO before building your web site? Know your target. Richard Vanderhurst suggests that it is important for you to know the type of search engines are most valuable for your web site to be ranked. The three types of search engines listed below vary according to the way information is indexed or cataloged.

• Crawler-based. Google, Yahoo and MSN are search engines that fall under this category. Crawler-based search engines make use of an automated software agent, more commonly known as a crawler, to “crawl” and index web sites. The collected data is kept in a central repository where search results are pulled.
• Human-powered. Sometimes referred to as directories, these search engines rely solely on the indexed information that people submit and return as search results. One example of a human-powered search engine that is currently drawing a lot of attention on the Web is Mahalo (www.mahalo.com).
• Hybrid. As the name suggests, the hybrid search engine is a combination of the crawler-based and human-powered search engines. They are mostly populated by crawlers, but people are also able to key in their web site information.

It is important for you to know the distinctions of these search engines to be sure that the indexed information of your web site available online are accurate.

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After determining which type of search engine it is most beneficial for your web site to be ranked, another way to focus your SEO efforts is on your site’s page elements. This is to ensure that your web site is indexed properly to meet the search engine’s criteria.

Richard Vanderhurst enumerates the two main criteria that every search engine looks for in a web site: text and tags. The text or keywords is one of the most important elements in your website. Search engines analyze keywords according to their relevance on a certain page of your site as well as the content and the frequency in which they appear. On the other hand, there are two kinds of tags that are essential in every web site. They are meta tags and HTML tags. In a technical sense, meta tags and HTML tags are the same, but appear on different places. The two important meta tags that every web site should have are the keyword tag and the description tag, which refers to the keywords applicable to your site and the description of your page, respectively.

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Richard Vanderhurst discusses Linking tips for 2009

15-Apr-09

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Links don’t look like much on the outside, but in truth, they are one of the most significant pieces in your SEO puzzle. It is true that the content connected with your links is very important, but even more so is the links themselves, both internal and external. Without these links, your content is left in the dark; no one would be able to get to them. But Richard Vanderhurst makes it a point in his lectures that links should be made with conviction, and only links that lead to related material should be created.

Once linking had been added to the list of criteria for search engine crawlers, black-hat SEO went on the rise. This meant that people were building up sites full of links, some related, but most completely irrelevant. In this way, they hoped to achieve a maximum exposure on the web by linking their sites to unrelated search topics. Needless to say, the search engines quickly caught on. The perpetrators are now black-listed and crawlers were reprogrammed to assess links in a different manner.

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In his lectures, SEO guru, Richard Vanderhurst, explains that ever since this search engine spam has been found out, it is a common necessity for external, or in-coming and out-going, links to share relevant material. In other words, if your link is related to your content and your content is related to the destination of that link, you have made an effective connection. But if it’s not, you have a waste of a link and crawlers will stay away.

A sense of balance is also a good thing to have when dealing with links. Don’t use too many links on your website or else crawlers might flag you for black-hat SEO. But don’t make them sparse or else other, more efficiently-linked sites will beat you out for top spots. The best plan is to assess each link individually before you apply them and figure just how effective it will be. Is it linked to relative material? And will it truly be of value to you and your site?

Apart from links connected with other sites, you must also remember links within your own site take users from page to page. These are called internal links. Richard Vanderhurst suggests to his students that navigation throughout your site should be simple and straight forward. Guide them to where you want them to go, but also let them explore with a site map. The presence of them not only allows crawlers to delve deep into the pages of your site, but also gives users the ability to easily find their way.

When designing your site map, keep in mind that it is primarily for the users benefit. If your site goes several levels deep, decide which level your visitors are most likely to dwell on and build the map accordingly. Also, make sure your map isn’t overloaded with depth; this is an easy way to crash it.

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