SnapStream Blog

There’s been a groundswell of interest in the Hauppauge HD PVR device, ever since Hauppauge announced it at CES in early January. I first heard about the device from Hauppauge on a visit to their offices in Hauppauge, NY back in November 2007. Since then, I’ve learned quite a bit more about the device. We’re taking a lot of interest in this new device, but until we actual get a test unit, we can’t say whether or not we’ll support it.

For those of you who haven’t heard about the new device, I’ll briefly recap its capabilities: it’ll take in component video (you know, the red, green, and blue cables on the back of your cable or satellite set-top box — the ones that can carry an HD signal) and encode it to H.264 at up to 25 Mbit/s. And it includes Hauppauge’s standard IR blaster with code library.

Anyways, here is some of what I know about it:

• Hauppauge’s calling it the HD PVR — for now. The name may change before it’s released.
• It can accept component video in (see a picture) up to 1080p
• It can encode that component video to H.264 transport streams (in hardware)
• The hardware itself is basically done — Hauppauge’s just waiting on the final case design (and Chinese New Year has slowed this down)
• It includes the same Hauppauge IR blaster & code library included with other Hauppauge products
• It’s based on a chip from a company called Ambarella (http://www.ambarella.com/)
• It’s an all-in-one chip that has a digitizer and H.264 encoder
• A similar chip from Ambarella happens to be used in popular HD camcorders
• The compression data rates works between 1 Mbit/s and 25 Mbit/s
• The H.264 encoder outputs H.264 transport streams
• The Ambarella chip also has an H.264 decoder and the Hauppauge HD PVR will ship with a video out, but…
• The video out function will more than likely NOT be activated when the HD PVR ships (and possibly never, for reasons relating to the Ambarella driver)
• You’ll need a relatively powerful PC to playback these recordings
• Hauppauge is still making some tweaks to the HD PVR’s drivers as well
• Hauppauge expects for the product to be shipping before the end of this quarter (ie before March 31, 2008)

(Note: the image above is NOT the device — it’s just a set-top box with some component video cables. I’ve requested some photographs and will hopefully have some soon.)

(Note #2: All of the information above was posted *with* permission from Hauppauge — specifically, Ken Plotkin reviewed a draft and gave me the green light to post it.)

Scott, at Techory.com, writes a post on Entertainment PC Software (Feb 2, 2008):

“…BeyondTV is just a cleaner interface, and has a few more bells and whistles built in…”

“…the DVR area is a space where there are a lot of contenders making products, but so far BeyondTV has topped the list of products I’ve tried.”

(A few days ago, Scott also wrote about his experiences Adding HDTV to his HTPC with Beyond TV and the HDHomeRun)

…And on chron.com’s TechBlog, Jim Thompson writes about how technology makes the superbowl more enjoyable and in the comments writes:

“For re-living a game, a PVR is a big plus. I have several of my alma mater’s big games from the past two seasons stored on my homebrew BeyondTV system.”

J.D. Biersdorfer mentions Beyond TV in tomorrow’s New York Times technology Q&A column:

Some cards include their own recording software, but programs like SnapStream’s Beyond TV (www.snapstream.com) give TiVo-like powers to your Windows PC. You can also buy the Beyond TV software bundled with a compatible TV tuner card if you haven’t made the hardware purchase yet.

Link

I was disappointed rto read yesterday that AOL made the decision to shutdown the PVRWire blog. PVRWire, we’ll miss you! A few of PVRWire’s recent posts that linked to the SnapStream blog:

Beyond TV Skins – Customize the look of Beyond TV with themes

Hauppauge adding IR blasters to USB TV tuners

Fun with multiple TV Tuners

Getting a Slingbox to work with BeyondTV

PVR Wire Podcast 12 — 11/16/06

Two more ways to transfer video to an iPod

Expect a new version of Beyond TV this week

Custom search engine for building a PC-based PVR

BeyondTV looking for beta testers

How you can help BeyondTV

Using BeyondTV with Hauppauge’s MediaMVP

Hauppauge announced a few new TV tuner cards last week and during a brief meeting I had with Ken Plotkin, Hauppauge’s CEO, in Las Vegas at CES, I got the inside track on their new cards.

First and foremost (at least for those of us in the United States), Hauppauge announced the HVR-1600 at CES. The HVR-1600 is Hauppauge’s second recent TV tuner card to support over-the-air HDTV. Their first TV tuner card with over-the-air HDTV support was the HVR-950 (which we wrote about here in October 2006).

The retail box for Hauppauge’s new HVR-1600

Like many cards, the new HVR-1600 supports both over-the-air HDTV and analog TV. But, there are a few very cool things that set the HVR-1600 apart from any other TV tuner card on the market in the United States:

1. First of all, the HVR-1600 has an IR blaster and code library — the same one that Hauppauge includes with all of their PVR-150 TV tuner cards. Hauppauge’s PC TV tuners are the only ones in the United States to include IR blasters and code libraries, making them the only TV tuners that you can use if you want to record TV on your non-media center edition PC from your satellite or digital cable set-top box without any additional cost add-on products.

Hauppauge’s new HVR-1600 with IR blaster and code library

The connector plate for Hauppauge’s new HVR-1600 (note all-important IR emitter port)

2. Second of all, the HVR-1600 has a hardware MPEG-2 encoder for analog TV — this means that, like the ATI Theater 650, you can not only record analog TV, but you can record it in consistently high quality without putting much load on your PC’s CPU. We’ve always recommended analog TV tuner cards with hardware encoding. This makes the HVR-1600 one of the few over-the-air HDTV cards that we can recommend you use to also record analog TV.

3. Finally, and this a subtlety, the HVR-1600 is supposed to be a true dual tuner card, which means you can use both the digital tuner and the analog tuner at the same time. You can record an over-the-air HDTV show while you simultaneously record an analog TV show. This sets the HVR-1600 apart from the only other over-the-air HDTV card with hardware-encoding analog TV support, the ATI Theater 650.

From what Ken told me, the HVR-1600 should already be on the shelves at CompUSAs around the country. And, while we haven’t tested these new Hauppauge cards yet, the HVR-1600 should work just fine in Beyond TV. Look for another blog posting confirming HVR-1600 support in Beyond TV and announcing availability in the SnapStream Store.

The second important piece of news that I picked up during my meeting with Hauppauge at CES (that wasn’t in their press release) is that Hauppauge will soon quietly begin shipping all of their PVR-USB2s with the same IR blaster and code library that the Hauppauge PVR-150 cards have always shipped with.

The retail box for the PVR-USB2 — they’ve added an IR blaster, but the retail box hasn’t changed.

This is great news for digital cable and satellite users who either have a laptop and aren’t technical enough to open up their PCs and install a PCI TV tuner card. We used to have to direct these folks to over to the expensive ($49.99) USB-UIRT cable pack, but once these new Hauppauge PVR-USB2 devices are in circulation, the Hauppauge PVR-USB2 will be a one-stop USB TV tuner solution for not only regular cable and antenna users, but for digital cable and satellite users as well. The new Hauppauge PVR-USB2s with IR blaster should be widely available shortly. Look for another blog posting when we start shipping these new TV cards in the SnapStream Store.

The new Hauppauge PVR-USB2 with IR blaster and code library — note the newly added IR emitter port.

UPDATE: It seems that the Hauppauge HVR-1600 is NOT a true dual tuner card. It’s a hybrid card just like the ATI Theater 650, which you can use either the analog tuner or the digital tuner but not both at the same time. We’re verifying our tests and checking with Hauppauge, but meanwhile we’ve gone ahead and updated this post to reflect what we saw in our tests (1/22/2007).

UPDATE 2: The Hauppauge HVR-1600 IS a true dual tuner card after all. Beyond TV 4.5 treats it like a hybrid card but Beyond TV 4.6 will fix this. (1/24/2007).

Since nVidia released their DualTV MCE earlier this year, we’ve wished they had drivers to support putting more than one of these cards in a single PC. After all, who doesn’t want to build their very own Godzilla DVR?

Well, just in time for Christmas, after lots of testing and with nVidia’s permission, we’ve released a pre-release version of nVidia’s DualTV MCE drivers (version 5.9.5.23) that make this possible. Note these drivers are only validated to work with Beyond TV.

Here’s an 8 tuner box that we built with the new drivers and nVidia’s DualTV MCEs:

So you can confidently buy the newly added Beyond TV – nVidia DualTV MCE bundle from the SnapStream Store with the knowledge that you can now expand well beyond two tuners.

UPDATED (12/7/2006): I updated the post to clarify that the drivers were not written by SnapStream, but by nVidia. We’ve simply been testing them and got permission from nVidia to release them before their public release.

Richard over at FreshArrival.com send me an e-mail to mention a review that he recently did of the new SlingBox AV where he walks through how you can use SlingBox and Beyond TV together to “place shift” recordings made in Beyond TV.

I’m going to print out copies of this article and hand it to every person who says “Oh, is that like SlingBox?”, after I explain to them what SnapStream does. Annoying as this is, I have to hand it to SlingBox for the awareness they’ve generated in a short amount of time.

(Richard at FreshArrival also reviewed Beyond TV 4 a couple of months ago where he concluded: “BeyondTV does everything I’ve asked it to do and more. I highly recommend it.”)

I consider myself an authority on PC DVR — the hardware and software required to turn your PC into a TV recording machine. So this weekend, as an experiment, I spent some time creating a search engine for everything related to “PC DVR” using Google’s Custom Search Engine tool. I included websites for every TV tuner card manufacturer, every software product, and every community site that I could think of.

The final product was the PC DVR Search Engine, my first custom search engine. Screenshot below…

Try it out and let me know what you think, here in the comments or over on the forums.

Hopefully, for those of you on a mission to build your own PVR, it proves to be a useful tool.

(In case you are wondering, I don’t make any money off of the ads delivered here nor does SnapStream — it’s purely something I created for fun, something that I hope is useful to… someone. If you consider yourself a PC DVR expert and have some sites you’d like to contribute, volunteer to improve this search engine.)

Chris Tew over at PVRWire posted a story about how to build your own Windows PVR with Beyond TV. It covers the basics so if you’re planning to build your own PVR with Beyond TV, check it out.

Hauppauge’s latest TV tuner, the HVR-950, is a little USB stick that supports recording over-the-air HDTV. We’re happy to say that we’ve tested it with Beyond TV 4.4 and it works like a charm. So if you have an HVR-950, go ahead and download the 21-day trial of Beyond TV. And if you are new to using your PC for HDTV, check out our HDTV Setup Center.

The HVR-950 is Hauppauge’s first ATSC TV tuner in a very long time and their very first to include BDA drivers (BDA stands for “broadcast driver architecture” and it’s the way you have to write your TV tuner drivers for it to work with Beyond TV or any other PVR software out there). We’re glad to see Hauppauge getting into the game on HDTV tuners!

UPDATE: I had missed it before, but there’s a thread on our forums where people have been discussing their experiences with HVR-950.