About 6 months ago a friend of mine purchased a new Samsung HDTV. He got it for a pretty good price and I’m pretty impressed with the picture quality. We don’t really watch BluRay movies on it, but his Phillips DVD player (model DVP-5990) with 1080p upconversion via HDMI cable and USB video playback looks very nice on it. We compared playing DVDs with the standard RCA cables and the HDMI cables and there is a very noticeable difference when watching a movie with upconversion. I didn’t really think it would really play movies back much clearer with the HDMI cable, but I love it. I would definitely recommend the Phillips DVP-5990 to anyone who is looking for a great DVD player that has 1080p upconversion and also plays DivX/XviD video formats. We hooked up a few different USB devices, such as a standard USB flash drive, an external Western Digital 1TB MyBook, a 16gb SDHC card with a USB card reader, and a 500gb Western Digital Passport drive, and everything played flawlessly. The only thing you have to do is be sure your USB device is formatted to FAT32 instead of NTFS file system. Videos also loaded quite a bit faster from USB, compared to load times from CD and DVD media. I own the same Phillips DVD player. You can even download custom firmware to load on the Phillips DVP-5990 to change how the menus look, add your own splash screen while the player is loading and add more functionality to the player, such as skipping to a specific time while watching DivX videos. The Phillips DVP-5992 is the same DVD player, but it is silver instead of black.

Another video player I would recommend is the Western Digital WDTV Live HD player with network support. You can find it for about $99 and it plays nearly every video format you can think of. It even plays HD .mkv x264 videos, which I have been using for my home videos, to save space and video quality.

Right now on the Howard Stern show they’re playing “The History of Howard Stern”. It’s a five-part audio documentary that chronicles Howard Stern’s life and career. The History of Howard Stern includes interviews with friends and family as well as old Howard Stern radio show clips and more. So far it’s been pretty interesting and entertaining.

If you don’t have Sirius, or if you just havent been able to listen for some reason, you can check out the current MP3s on this RapidShare page: The History of Howard Stern MP3s (the password for the page is sternrules) or you can check out the audio trailer for it here: audio trailer.

The schedule for The History of Howard Stern is as follows:

December 17th at 6 am ET - “The Early Years”
December 18th at 6 am ET - “Howard’s Radio Journey Begins”
December 19th at 6 am ET - “Mr. Stern Goes To Washington”
December 20th at 6 am ET - “Welcome To The Big Apple”
December 21st at 6 am ET - “End Of The WNBC Era”

Read more about The History of Howard Stern (opens in new window).

*I didn’t create the MP3s on RapidShare. I am simply sharing the link I found.

December 21st, 2007 - I just noticed that Act 4 “Welcome To The Big Apple” has been added to the RapidShare page. So far Acts 1 through 4 have been added, leaving only one more to go. Lovely.

December 22nd, 2007 - Act 5 “End Of The WNBC Era” has been added to the RapidShare page, making The History of Howard Stern complete. It says Act 5 is the complete recording from the replay, not the original air that was cut off at the start.