SanDisk hit the market this week with it’s latest release, the TakeTV™ Video Player, operating as a flash drive to take video directly from your computer to your TV without a ton of wires or equipment. It’s a quick and easy fix to the connectivity issues a lot of us have been operating under (my own rig is a complicated set up of wires from my PowerBook to the entertainment center’s receiver, which means anytime I want to watch a something I’ve downloaded the computer is basically off limits and tethered to the TV). So now you can toss the USB solution, forget about fuzzy wireless, and go straight from your laptop to your TV without a lot of complication.

Just plug the Take TV into your USB port, drag and drop your video files, then drop the unit into its portable AV dock and you’ve got a direct line to your video from any screen or entertainment system. The Take TV unit is about as small as a standard flash drive, and the dock and remote collapse easily for video on the go if you’re the traveling type. SanDisk is also launching its own video download system to pair with the device called Fanfare with both free (if you’re not bothered by ads) or pay service for content from CBS, Showtime, and the Weather Channel (????). This may explain why the Take TV isn’t compatible with iTunes downloads, so don’t be surprised when those files don’t work when you transfer them — there’s no love in the competitive portable video market.

The 4 GB Take TV is well priced at $99 for about five hours of video storage, or you can take a step up to the 8 GB model for $149. Both products are available for purchase directly from the SanDisk website.

There’s nothing quite like watching movies at home, free of chair-kicking patrons and $9 ticket fees (plus the popcorn is a fair sight cheaper/better), and now bringing your movies to full glorious frame at home is becoming more accessible. If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times, you haven’t truly seen Jaws til you’ve seen it jumping off your living room wall. Epson gets it, and is doing their best to bring great in-home projection to bear.

The Epson EMP-TW680 HD Ready Projector is part of the company’s low-to-mid priced home cinema systems, sitting at the higher end of the spectrum with 3LCD technology for great picture quality. Featuring a native 16:9 resolution for movies, the image quality is one of the best in class with a contrast ratio of 10,000:1 and brightness and color modes for perfect projection in any light condition. The unit arrives ready to play with easy hookups to connect to DVD, TV, your cable box, gaming console, PC or digital camera — if it makes an image, the Epson can pick it up and throw it on your wall. Coupled with that surround sound system you spent an arm and a leg on, you’re now armed to completely rile your neighbors — the other night while walking the dogs I saw that a neighbor had set his up in the backyard and was broadcasting the football game on an enormous taut sheet anchored between trees. Oh, the places you and your movies/games/sports will go! The Epson is available over at ProjectorPoint (and a ton of other retailers) for £659.

Time to get your spy on with this palm-sized stainless steel digital camcorder that doubles as a standard digicam with built-in flash. Able to shoot up to 2 hours of DVD quality video (720×480 30fps) and capture hundreds of 5.4 megapixel photos on a 2 GB SD card, here’s the go-anywhere camera solution that slips into your pocket and can easily be concealed for stealth use (in case you have any high designs for espionage).

Equipped with a hi-res 2.5 inch LCD display, the camcorder comes packed with 8x digital zoom, optional image stabilization, a rechargeable LI battery, RCA cables to connect to your TV, docking base, USB cable, soft case, lanyard strap for easy carrying and earbuds for audio monitoring. Also included: Blaze Video Magic Software so that you can convert videos for playback on your iPod, PSP, or cell phone (sorry, Mac users, but the software is Windows based). Still, you can easily download the files from the camera via USB on any OS without any extra drivers, just plug in and drag-and-drop your files.

Available for $199 from ThinkGeek, this is a great add to your travel (or spy) kit.

Leaders in digital burning software with their application Toast, Roxio have launched yet another product called Crunch, which is designed to make converting and exporting video into various formats a simple task.

Crunch is specifically designed to export videos for the Apple TV, iPod, and iPhone, while supporting many different movie filetypes including DV, AVI, MOV, divX, MPEG2, and DVD Video. This sounds perfect for anyone encoding stacks of video for their portable media player, especially if they are not too sure exactly what settings they need to be using with more advanced and less straight-forward software.

Crunch will retail for $50 and is a perfect contender to Quicktime Pro for your video encoding needs.

Via [AppleInsider]

Today Slashdot linked to an article which has confirmed by law that the ripping of DVDs to a local hard-drive is perfectly legal.

This comes to a relief to many, including me. Especially since I’ve recently been encoding my entire DVD collection into a digital format stored in iTunes for quick access via an Apple TV in the future.

Manufacturers have been wary of building a device to allow this type of usage because they’ve been afraid of a lawsuit up until now. The DVD Copy Control Association had claimed this was contractually forbidden, but now a judge says otherwise stating, ‘nothing in the agreement prevents you from making copies of DVDs.’

The old Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, which does not allow consumers to rip DVDs will be heading out the window very soon.

This is pretty big news and I’m surprised it hasn’t been covered more widespread over the past few days. Now, I can get back to digitizing these movies.

Enjoy some visual delight all while people secretly giggle at you. The AV230 from Icuiti is a specially designed personal big-screen display that will transform your small portable DVD player’s screen into a large, private, virtual 44″ home theater. All you have to do is plug into your portable DVD player and throw on the gear like a pair of modern day sunglasses while an in-line rechargeable battery built into the cable gives you 4-5 hours of enjoyment. For all you Robocop wannabees, the AV230 is going to set you back $269 and is said to start shipping December 1st.