Blu-ray

Coming to you from a guy who owns a Porkins action figure...

If you've been putting off buying a Blu-ray player because prices were too high, 2011 may be your favorite year. Same goes for shoppers craving an Amazon Kindle e-reader, a Nintendo Wii game console, or a 42-inch LCD TV. All will get fire-sale cheap this year.

Plex announced today that LG will be incorporating Plex's media streaming technology in certain 2011 LG televisions and Blu-ray players. Who needs a set-top box when you have the same functionality built into your TV?

Bringing magnificent image quality and the best of the Internet (including the likes of Amazon, Netflix, and even Pandora) straight to your living room, Blu-ray players are falling in price. It's time to find your perfect home theater addition.

Amid the flurry of brand-new Apple products -- including new iMacs, updated MacBooks and Mac Minis, plus more -- sometimes details go unnoticed and slip through the cracks. One such detail was Apple's decision to change the display ratio on its new iMacs to 16:9 -- which would then allow Macs to play 1080p, the Blu-Ray dimensions. Was this slight modification a tease of what's to come with next year's possible reworking of Apple's line?

Want to watch Blu-ray flicks on your Sony PlayStation Portable? Okay, you can't watch them natively on the handheld--the system tops out at 480x272 lines of resolution, after all. But according to Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and Sony Computer Entertainment America, now you can pull the PSP versions straight from the Blu-ray disc itself.

You knew it would happen eventually, but to this form factor?

Connected TVs, set-top boxes, and Blu-ray Disc players aren't new, but they continue to make new connections with Web sites and services, from YouTube and Netflix to Amazon and Internet radio sites.

It may be a Father's Day special, but Wal-Mart's $128 special for a Magnavox Blu-ray player is another indication of the mainstreaming of the high-def disc format.

The Watchmen Director's Cut is coming to Blu-ray in late July and will include a feature that allows you to sync your BD-Live buddies and Facebook friends into one list. This means you can use Warner Home Video's live community screening feature (LCS) to simultaneously view the Watchmen with your Facebook friends, no matter where they are located and share comments about the movie within Facebook.

Coming soon to a TV screen near you - Flash. Adobe says it is working to bring its Flash technology to Net-connected TVs that will be able to playback videos and offer Web-like interactivity.