The Roku Netflix player was the first device to support streaming movie rentals from Netflix and ushered in an array of devices supporting the Netflix streaming service. One of the best features of the original Roku Player was the cheap $99 price tag.

Roku announced today that its Digital Video Player now supports HD streams of films from Netflix. Other HD streaming partners will reportedly be added to the Roku player as well. The additional providers are expected to debut in q1 2009.

When my four-year-old daughter was born most camcorders available still used tapes to record video. The tapes were Mini DV, not the massive VHS tapes from my youth, but tapes nonetheless. Today tapes are quickly going the way of the Dodo with most camcorders using hard drivers or flash media for storage.

Creative has announced that its Vado HD camcorder is now shipping at a price of $199. The small camcorder records in 720p HD resolution and video can be output directly to a HDTV in 1080i resolution over an included HDMI cable.

Looks like Western Digital has entered the world of HD media streaming. The WD TV HD Media Player is said to “turn your USB drive into an HD media player, allowing you to watch your favorite HD movies on your TV.” So, basically it lets you plug in a USB hard drive and play multimedia clips up to 1080p on your HDTV via HDMI/composite outputs. Comes with a remote control and browsing software. The small 1.6- x 4.9- x 3.9-inch box is pretty portable and the $129.99 price doesn’t hurt too much.

Cue 2001 theme, but think “2011: The Year Wii Makes Contact”. 2011 is three years from now. So you would expect a new Wii by then right? HD would be nice on a new console. Word is that they are showing off a Wii-HD to developers and publishers, who’ve nicknamed it “Wii HD”. Reportedly, the followup will stick with all of the motion control goodness and amp up graphics, digital distribution, local storage and even be backwards compatible.

The only hard evidence was cited by What They Play, and that is the fact that Nintendo’s R&D spending has grown greatly since the Wii’s launch. I don’t see that that makes the case for a new Wii by itself, but it’s not a stretch as they are surely looking toward the future of the Wii. Many of us would like to see some improvements now rather then later. Like storage for instance.

JVC enters the HD pocket camcorder arena with something new at CEATEC today, with the Everio HD Memory Camera. This SDHC based concept camcorder is expected to be AVCHD ready with an HDMI port. You’ll notice that most of the buttons are conveniently situated within finger distance at the top of the device. There isn’t much info otherwise, but more details will be forthcoming.

DXG USA announced its latest HD camcorder today, offering several interesting features at a not so bad price. It is called the DXG-595V and pricing is around $200.

The DXG-595V captures video at 1080p, doing up to 1920 x 1080 resolution at 30 frames per second. It sports a three-inch TFT screen for viewing and the lens includes 5x optical zoom for closer-in recordings. It can also do eight-megapixels if you desire using its digital camera function.

Hitachi’s annouced it’s tri-format Blu-ray camcorder, the DZ-BD10HA, along with a list-price. It uses a 7-megapixel CMOS sensor that’s capable of both full 1920 x 1080 High Definition images and video. It can record directly onto either 8cm Blu-ray discs, the 30GB hard-drive, or onto an SDHC memory card.

One nice feature is that footage on the hard-drive or SDHC card can be re-dubbed to the Blu-ray drive without having to hook up to a computer, if you want to split, splice, delete, merge, and transition etc. It will also convert footage into standard definition and burn to a DVD if that’s what you want. There’s a lot to like here. Including the price which is a surprisingly reasonable $999. It will be available in September 2008.

Most of us think that our 4,8 or 16GB SD card for our digital camera is large. How would you like to have 160GB of storage space for your camera? That’s huge! Well, today Digital Foci announced Photo Safe II, which is a portable photo storage device that takes some of the burden from your laptop, Mac or PC.

It’s basically a battery operated HD. It also has a built-in card reader and automated copy function which could really come in handy. The device supports all of the popular card formats, including CF (Extreme III, IV, UDMA), MMC, SD/HC Card, miniSD, Memory Stick, MS PRO, MS Duo, MS PRO Duo, and xD-Picture card. Just insert a card and hit the copy button, the entire card will be copied at a speed 3.5 minutes per GB. I comes in 80GB and 160GB versions, which cost $139 and $189.

Avocent announced a device today which lets you wirelessly distribute HD content and is targeted primarily towards digital signage systems (though it looks to have in home uses as well). It is called the Avocent MPX1500T and it prices around $995.

The Avocent MPX1500T is used to push HD content wirelessly from a source to multiple destinations. The transmitter sports a DVI connector and, supporting both digital and analog video signals, can use DVI, HDMI or VGA signals.

Hitachi has announced a new Blu-ray burner that can create discs from the latest camcorders with eSATA ports. The DZ-WR90 plugs straight into the camcorder and automatically creates discs from the footage that you select. So, you don’t need a computer. It even finalises the discs automatically, making it an easy complete one-step process.

The drive will also work with DVD-R discs, and even supports double-sided media as long as you’re willing to flip them yourself. They’re claiming that a Blu-ray disc will fit around three hours of full 1920 × 1080 footage and burn in 1.5hrs; or up to six hours in 1440 × 1080 resolution. A DVD can store up to one hour of 720 × 480 footage. This should make it easy for anyone who wants a simple way to share their video.

If you like your PC to look like retro audio gear you’ll want to check out the Onkyo APX-2 HD audio PC. Onkyo and SOTEC, the Japanese PC manufacturer partnered up on the new APX-2 HD audio PC.

It comes with a Core 2 Duo T5500 @ 1.66GHz, 1 GB of RAM, 500GB of HDD, a digital audio amplifier, an HDD that is stored in a Super Floating HDD Unit, and a noise cancellation box (22dB max) as well as Vista’s volume mixer function and installed Pure Direct Audio Path (PDAP) to prevent audio loss from poor HD audio support. Onkyo worked hard to ensure the APX-2 is as silent as possible. If it sounds as beautiful as it looks, then I’m game.

Vudu is making some moves to keep in strong competition with the yet-to-be-released second version of AppleTV, this time offering a software update and more high-def content. This software update to version 1.2 comes not much more than a week after Vudu gave their system a 25 percent price cut bringing it down to $295 and closer to AppleTV’s $229. AppleTV had recently announced the “take 2″ version will add on features that will allow users to download video content to the appliance without the need of a computer in between, which is a feature that Vudu possessed and AppleTV did not.

The recent software upgrade for the Vudu video system brings some new features to improve user experiences with choosing videos to download. A new indicator will evaluate the current broadband speed and indicate if the selected video will download and show well without any skips or extended delays. When searching for a video it can also recommend titles for instant start based on the connection speed.

Zyxel is using the Consumer Electronics Show to show off a new product it says is the first digital media adapter with built-in HomePlug AV Powerline technology. It is the DMA1100P and it prices at around $270.

The Zyxel DMA1100P works through a person’s power lines in the home to stream HD digital content to a home entertainment system from a computer or network storage devices. Zyxel says its digital media adapter will discover media files from DLNA supported devices, making them available for browsing and playback.

Looking for a handy multimedia gadget to bridge the gap between your PC and your HDTV? This multimedia device could do the trick. The Mvix Media Center is really an external hard drive enclosure with it’s own processor, a Linux OS and some tools to playback just about any multimedia file you have.

This new version of the Mvix adds support for HD video output to your TV and wireless connectivity via 802.11b/g. (You can also connect via an Ethernet cable.) You can connect to your TV like you would connect any other audio and video components with composite, component, s-video or DVI, and you connect audio out with RCA jacks or even use a FM transmitter to play the sound on your FM stereo.

Once set up you simply transfer files from your PC to the Mvix device and play …