For those that celebrate it and are wondering what to get that special geek in your life (or for yourself). I suggest the following (no, I'm not getting paid, but some of these folks have been good to the community):

A new SDTV tuner.
A new HDTV tuner.
Or perhaps this one.
An antenna for that new HD tuner.
A remote.
A Dragon.

Happy Holidays to all!

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I'll bump this one up since it's that time of year again.

I'm expecting my first baby in January, so I decided to buy a video camera. I was torn between buying a nice HD camera and buying a Nikon D70/D80. My wife talked some sense into me and convinced me that I need something that will be handy, and not a pain to lug around.

That lead me to the Sanyo HD1A. I got it for ~$479 shopping from pricegrabber.com and pricescan.com

I must say, I'm very pleased. The reviews on it aren't very good when compared to other (~$2000) HD camcorders, but it looks tons better than any SD camcorder. I still haven't gotten an HD tuner for MythTV, and can't stand live TV so I only watch SD from the PVR-500 on my 50" Plasma. The true 720p @ 60fps from the Sanyo HD1A looks better than anything else I've seen on it.

But as for Linux compatibility... I records to SD in MPEG4. The docking cradle has 1 button for syncing that makes it get recognized as a USB mass-storage device. So my wife can film, dock, push sync, then go to video manger on the MythTV (after I setup auto fs and created the appropriate sym-links of course) and there are all the new videos. Same goes for image gallery. She has the same ease of use with the camera as she does a DVD.

WAF in tact! That's cool. It's like geek'n for free.

Hi,

And we were to add the softwhere patches to allow the camera to show up as a pip (with only one tuner) while watching a prerecoded show, just to keep an eye on that soon to be new baby

My wish is small..

Mike

Watch out for screen burn-in. I couldn't do this pip thing on my CRT-based projection TV without burning a permanent view of the PIP window into my screen. If you have a LCD or DLP based set, you could get away with it. Plasma, OTOH, still has the burn-in problem, like CRTs. (Ignore the marketing people at the stores who say, "that's old advice, new plasma sets don't burn in." Look at the warranty for the plasma set - it will disallow warranty coverage for sets with burned in images...)

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