Philips have just launched their new 21:9 Home Cinema screen. What’s 21:9? To paraphrase Nigel Tufnel, it’s 5 more than 16:9. It’s a super-wide cinema-home-scope Ambilight screen. And let me save you the trouble: you’ll want one.

To celebrate and demonstrate the new product, Philips hired Adam Berg to film an amazing ultra-super-slick timeslice loop called Carousel. Looking at it with my compositor’s eye, all I could think was, “WOW!” Philips have a nice behind-the-scenes microsite with the director, DOP and VFX supervisor chatting about the project.

Enjoy!

I tried, I really did. Then I gave up and called Apple to take their underpowered, overprotected media box back. This is the first Apple product I absolutely and unreservedly hated. It made iTunes look bad, and that is one of my favorite applications.

Okay, so it’s hackable. But it turns absolutely buggy and crashes a lot. Plus, I don’t want to spend another night trying to coax it to do what it should do in the first place: play whatever media I throw at it, and iTunes syncing isn’t the way to do it.

Enter WD TV. It should arrive tomorrow along with a 320GB pocket drive. It costs £100 less than the 160GB Apple TV and it should play movies with popular codecs without complaining or transcoding. As a bonus, it plays 1080p instead of just 720p.

I really hope this is the answer otherwise it’s back to the Apple Store to buy another Mac Mini and install Plex.

I just noticed that the new series of Lost is on iTunes in 720p! At £2.49 per episode compared to £1.89 for SD it’s not a bad deal. The whole season pass costs a bit more, £41.99 for HD or £31.99 for SD. Bring on 1080 now!