Wednesday was a *crazy* day for my Amex card. Bought the TV, a stand, a receiver, speakers, a DVD player, and a Slingbox Solo. Oh yeah, and a refrigerator from Home Depot, since all I have in the house right now is a mini-fridge. I think the sudden flurry of activity tripped Amex's suspicious activity monitoring, because Home Depot had to call into Amex at Home Depot to authorize the transaction for the fridge.

For the stand, I ended up going with this stand from Best Buy. The width is almost exactly that of the 60" Sony TV, and I like the simple but modern glossy black look. It was on a one-day sale at Best Buy for $199.

Instead of buying the Onkyo TX-SR605 and separate speakers as I had planned, I went with the HT-SP908 "Home Theater in a Box" package. It has the TX-SR605, a solid set of speakers (model # SKS-HT750) an up-converting DVD player, and an iPod dock just for good measure. I hadn't actually planned on buying a DVD player, but since mine is old and doesn't do any up-conversion, it's definitely a nice-to-have. Total cost for the package was $820 shipped, which I think ended up being cheaper than if I had to find all those components (or comparable ones) and have them shipped from multiple stores.

Finally, picked up a Slingbox Solo from buy.com for $132.99 - 5% coupon, since there will be times I want my TV on the road.

I just want to update the status of the HR20-700. In the current beta (which should roll out to all receivers soon), there have been 2 major developments.

30-second skip is now available via secret code. Set it once, and your preference will survive a reboot. 30-second slip is still the default.

Video streaming is now available. This is not multi-room viewing (DVR to DVR), but streaming of files stored on your PC. The HR20 will only play back MPEG2 with MPEG stereo at this time, but I am watching AVIs of The X-Files right now that are being transcoded on the fly by TVersity. The HR20 shows 4:3 content pilar-boxed and 16:9 content fills the screen. It's all pretty lovely.

The UI has been polished for this release as well.

Rob, do you know if TVersity can trasncode MKV files? I have a bunch that I wanted to give to my dad (he didn't watch Journeyman and I think he'd like it). The problem is that I can't find any way to get it onto his home theater. He has an AppleTV, but any time I try to convert one of the files, the audio slowly gets out of sync with the video as the episode progresses. Someone on the VideoHelp forums said it was due to the video having a variable frame rate. Perhaps transcoding on the fly would actually do better, but I don't know if TVersity has that much power...