Re: Hauppauge HD-PVR

["Jarod Wilson" <user=74@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Fri, 2008-05-09 at 14:46 -0400, Tom Metro wrote: 
> Jarod Wilson wrote: 
> > Personally, I'm targeting the Hauppauge HD-PVR for my next purchase: 
> > 
> > http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html
> > 
> > Very cool device, integration work in mythtv already underway... 
> 
> It sounds like it is basically a self contained PVR, with some ability 
> to interact with a connected PC. 

Nope, its designed 100% to interact with a PC. 

> Though I'm confused. Does it have an internal hard drive? 

No. 

> The 
> description sounds like it can record internally, but there's no mention 
> of disk size or recording capacity. Maybe I'm just being thrown off by 
> the packaging and the marketing. Is it just an HD USB tuner? 

And again no. :) 

> I also find it confusing that it is presented like a set top box (with 
> remote), though the computer interface is apparently USB, not Ethernet. 
> That seems to assume that the PC and TV are quite close to each other. 

The IR functionality of the device winds up being the same as a Media 
Center Edition receiver -- a usb-connected IR receiver and blaster that 
your media center box talks to. 

> The specs say it has a "H.264 AVCHD video encoder." Does that mean it is 
> re-encoding the already encoded HD streams, or is that just for the NTSC 
> recordings? 

THAT is the kick-ass part. (more in a sec) 

> What do you see as the advantage to this device over other HD tuners for 
> use with MythTV? 

Very very very different target market/use case. This is basically the 
sort of thing satellite and those with premium cable but everything 
scrambled w/o a cable box have been hoping and waiting for. 

So what this device takes in is high definition (or whatever def) 
component video (ypbpr), and in hardware, encodes that analog signal 
into an h264 stream, which is fed over usb2 to your pvr machine. Where 
this is *awesome* is for people with satellite, who previously had no 
way to record anything better than 720x480 w/o being locked into their 
sat provider's dvr, and similar for those with cable boxes. For example, 
I have no way to record Universal HD at better than 720x480i with my 
current setup, but I could hook this thing to my cable box and get the 
analog 1080i output and have this device encode it into h264. 


-- 
Jarod Wilson 
[hidden email] 


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