[olug] OT: hauppauge hd pvr and something else weird

[Will Langford]

Yeah yeah, I'm slow at finding alot of this stuff.. gimme a break :)

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First up, PVR150 / MS MCE -- I found a hauppauge_tweak.exe that lets
ya adjust color saturation and other goodness.  Thank God.  Now to
just figure out where the noise (horizontal waves) are coming from.
Looking forward to mythbuntu next week :).

Side note: playing an online FPS game using the MCE remote is mildly
amusing.  You move like a retard, but it's cute to play with only one
thumb :) (and only able to press a single button at a time).

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Hauppauge earlier this year released a component capturing device with
hardware encoding.  USB device and it wants a beefy system (core2
1.8ghz minimum-ish).  Seems happy all the way up to 1080p.  Price
seems to run $250.

No MCE support (not MPEG2), but SageTV, gbPVR, and BeyondTV allegedly
support the thing.  Myth support is on it's way, but not quite there
yet.

Hauppauge's product info page:

http://hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html

Some reviews:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2325697,00.asp

http://www.geektonic.com/2008/06/hauppauge-hd-pvr-update-good-bad-and.html

Myth wiki:

http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Hauppauge_HD-PVR

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Now for the weird thing.

Monsoon Multimedia have a product line called "HAVA".  It's a MCE
friendly, hardware encoding, ethernet based, component capture device.
 The Titanium model has some USB ports for wifi and possibly hard disk
recording (not enabled yet tho ???).  Naturally all the product
documentation looks like butter... but reviews are hard to find.  Runs
about $120 from newegg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882087004

Amazon's review list for the thing seem... like a mixed bag:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000UJE1O2/ref=s9subs_c2_at1-rfc_p?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1S62SFF7G27ZJZPN2Q62&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=278240301&pf_rd_i=507846

In particular: "Of course Hava does not display a true HD video...HD
is converted to a wide screen 480i format, just like that on a
commercial DVD, and the resulting video has a quality close to that of
a DVD."

And possible flamebait: "The HAVA with component input produced a
visibly inferior picture compared to my STANDARD DEFINITION Hauppage
PVR-150 with s-video input!"

... which... makes me wonder what the point of the device is -- other
than just having 'any' ability to capture component... no matter what
the output is.