If you don't have Sky+ or a Freeview PVR, you might not know what an awesome advantage they offer. Everyone who's ever bought one will tell you, it'll change your life. Unless you already download all your TV from the Interwebs, in which case it will still seem frustratingly 1998.

The Sony RDR-HXD range is designed to offer as many features as it's possible to squeeze into one small case. They can, obviously, play back your DVD collection, as well as upscaling it to 1080p -- we should point out that this isn't real 1080p, but it should make your DVDs look better nonetheless.  Click here for more

Yesterday we got our hands on the Sony BDP-S500, the company's step-up Blu-ray player. It boasts a host of cool features, not least a truly magnificent motorised front panel. The question is though, is the £600 S500 as good as the £300 PlayStation 3?

What does the PS3 offer that the BDP-S500 doesn't? Games aside, there's the thorny issue of Blu-ray profiles. Basically, the PS3 is a profile 2.0 player. This means it can take full advantage of interactive features as well as connect to the Internet to add additional content to the discs you've already bought. The S500, meanwhile, is a profile 1.0 player, which means no picture-in-picture or other interactivity, and defiantly no online access.  Click here for more

One of the problems with traditional all-in-one-box home cinema systems is that you're stuck with the speaker setup the manufacturer decides on. The Jamo DMR 70 lets you customise your system by offering a number of different options, for a wide range of prices -- but keeping the convenience of the all-in-one.

At the heart of the system is a DVD player with a built-in 5.1 channel surround decoder and amplifier. You then choose which -- if any -- speakers you want with it. The base unit costs £450, which is a more reasonable deal for people who already have a set of speakers and don't need new ones. Click here for more

If Blu-ray is to justify the effort of winning a format war, it has to get better at persuading customers to part with their cash. The best way to do that is to show them how much they're missing when they watch movies on DVD, and interactivity is a key part of that. Enter the Sony BDP-S350 and BDP-S550, players with profile 2.0 support, and the interactivity of BD Live.

Until this year, if you wanted a profile 2.0 player, with Internet access and BD Live capability, your choice was limited to the PlayStation 3. Now, Panasonic is bringing the DMP-BD50 to the UK and the Sony DBP-S350 and S550 are going to be hitting shops in the US soon, so it's at least looking like online content and interactivity are on the way.  Click here for more

The Panasonic DMP-BD30 Blu-ray player we checked out recently was terribly exciting, but we're even keener on the company's DMP-BD50, which adds one important feature to the Blu-ray arsenal -- BD Live. This means that the BD50 -- or 'Fiddy' as we've decided to call it -- is basically a profile 2.0 player, making it one of the few announced players to support what is probably the final Blu-ray profile.

BD Live is essentially the Blu-ray equivalent of the functionality found on some HD DVDs. Films such as Blood Diamond, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Transfomers all feature Web interactivity on the now defunct format. Hopefully BD Live will bring these features to Blu-ray eventually. It's worth pointing out that there aren't many BD Live discs at the moment -- Saw IV does boast some interactivity, but we aren't entirely sure what.  Click here for more

Imagine (pun intended) there's a race. In one lane is the late, great John Lennon. In the other, James Blunt. The starting gun fires, and somehow Lennon, who has been dead for 27 years now, beats Blunt to the finish line. Well, that's exactly what's happened with HD DVD. The dead format has managed to rise from the grave and muster enough energy to raise a pair of rotting fingers to Blu-ray.

No one is going to claim that HD DVD is anything other than finished. But it still warmed the cockles of our hearts when we saw the Nielsen VideoScan results for the week of 24 February . For that week, the HD DVD release of American Gangster was the number one selling high-definition release. Of course, it would be negligent of us not to point out that all the other discs in the top ten were Blu-ray. So it's not exactly a massive victory, and we can't somehow see all the studios switching to HD DVD now. Click here for more

Unless HD DVD manages to conjure up a biblical-scale miracle, we're all going to be buying Blu-ray players from now on for our high-definition movie pleasure. Of course, with Blu-ray having a number of profile specifications it can be a confusing process choosing one. Luckily, the Panasonic DMP-BD30, which has been available for some time in the US, is coming to the UK.

We're excited about it because the DMP-BD30 has a number of features that make it a pretty good all-round HD player. Let's start with the profile 1.1 aspects of the player. The BD30 has a second video and audio decoder, so you can watch picture-in-picture video, which adds some cool potential features to Blu-ray discs. There's no requirement for 1.1 players to have Ethernet, and the BD30 doesn't. You'll need to fork out again for a profile 2.0 player for that. Hurrah for the Blu-ray Disc Association.  Click here for more

Psychic powers weren't required to have seen this coming -- although it was rather sooner than expected -- but today Toshiba announced that it would no longer be supporting its own format, HD DVD. Blu-ray is officially triumphant and tech journalists worldwide now have one less thing to write about.

Although the format war is over and we can all buy into hi-def content with an easy mind, the death of a rival to Blu-ray should be mourned, for several reasons. There's now no incentive for Blu-ray player makers to reduce their hardware prices. There's no competition now, and that means there will be no massive price battles at strategic holiday periods any more. Say goodbye to those increasingly ridiculous 'seven free disc' offers that were all over the place before Christmas. Click here for more

There's got to be someone left with some VHS tapes. While most of the world has upgraded to DVD, there's someone out there who is refusing to pay for another copy of Star Wars. If that's you, then Panasonic has a product it thinks you might be interested in -- if it can prise you away from your money.

The DMR-EX98V is essentially a VHS deck, DVD writer and HDD-based Freeivew receiver. It's the electronic equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. The EX98V promises to upscale both DVDs and VHS, which gave us a shock because attempting to upscale low-quality analogue recordings is a fool's errand. Click here for more

By now, everyone understands that Apple TV is a disappointment. Not only is the original hardware not up to much, but the new firmware update is also delayed, and probably still won't bring much of any real use to the UK. So we're always keen to see what the competition is up to. In this case, the Archos TV+ is the bit of kit trying to earn your cash.

We initially heard about the machine during CES 2008, but now we've managed to get our hands on a review sample, which means we can be more specific about what it offers.

The TV+ is best described as a cross between Apple TV and a PVR. It can stream media around your home, either over a wireless or wired network. It can handle MPEG-4, which should mean it's happy playing most of the stuff you can get off the Interwebs.  Click here for more