No joke, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is our favourite animated comedy of all time. Frankly, there’s a good chance it’s the best film ever made in the history of cinema. It’s got everything: giant flying food, an adorable geek with an awesome haircut and a monkey thought translator. The jokes are laugh-out-loud funny …

Happy days, news lovers: from spring 2010 you’ll be able to watch every disaster, crime spree and corrupt politician in fabulous high definition when Sky launches Sky News HD. Hopefully there will be Dolby Digital surround sound too, so we can hear the boos from backbenchers in Parliament as if we were Gordon Brown himself. Sky News has a respectable …

HD channels from the BBC, ITV and others should be freely available to most of the country by the time the World Cup kicks off, so you can enjoy seeing England predictably and pathetically fail in glorious high definition. You’ll need some new kit though, because existing Freeview TVs don’t support HD signals. You can plug a Freeview HD tuner …

Taiwanese company AVerMedia is not about to set a new trend in simple, clear product names, but it will help you watch TV on your computer. The name AVerTV Volar HD A835M may look like the result of several very long meetings fuelled by gallons of coffee, but the product itself is delightfully simple. The A835M is pitched at both …

Like the destruction of life on Earth by a supervolcano, the World Cup is inevitable. Unlike the supervolcano, there’s a chance some of civilisation might remain standing when the tournament is over, although it might be a bit more urine- and vomit-soaked afterwards. With such a momentous tournament nearly upon us, we’re terrified we might miss some of the action. …

We know you love AV receivers and amazing speaker systems almost as much as we do, but we can’t help but suspect most of you will shy away from spending £3,000 on audio equipment. That doesn’t mean, however, you won’t relish the opportunity to enjoy tasty surround sound from your Blu-ray movies. Roll out the red carpet and strike up …

If you hate football, then you’re almost certainly dreading the World Cup in June. If you love football, then you’re probably more excited than a dog with a large stick and delicious bone to go home to. Love it or hate it, the World Cup will be watched by more than 700m people worldwide, and it’s likely to be a showcase …

In no time at all we’ve gone from having no 3D at all in home cinema, to more 3D than you can shake a stick at. This is because it’s actually not hard to make a Blu-ray player that can handle 3D. The machine needs to be able to send the HDMI 1.4 switching signal to your 3D-ready TV, and …

When LED backlighting first kicked off a couple of years back the technology was deployed in the same way as a cold cathode backlight — the LEDs went behind the panel and illuminated the LCD. This had some advantages, such as locally dimming areas that were showing black or dark colours, improving contrast. Recently though, many manufacturers have gone after …

You’ve probably seen a 3D movie in the cinema, heard about the spangly new 3D TVs arriving this year, and may have even decided if you think the whole thing is worthwhile or not. But far from being new-fangled, 3D is as old as the hills. Well, as old as creatures with two eyes. So what makes the latest technology …