Hauppauge MediaMVP Review
(Page 1 of 5 )
How many pictures do you have stored on your PC? How many music files? Do you have any videos? If you are like me, you have a ton of media files on your PC. Today we are going to look at the Hauppauge MediaMVP, which lets you watch and listen to all of these files on your television, across a home network.
The Hauppauge MediaMVP is a rather cool innovation, designed to let your media files escape from your computer to be shown on your TV set. No longer do your party guests need to gather around your computer desk to see pictures of your latest trip to Aspen; now you can show your skiing prowess in all its glory on your television.
According to Hauppauge's website, here are the features of the MediaMVP:
| Access digital music, videos or pictures from your TV set, over your home network. |
| Uses 10Mbit or 100Mbit Ethernet, for the best network performance with any type of digital media. Plays DVD quality videos on your TV set over an Ethernet LAN! |
| Composite and S-Video outputs for the best video quality on TV sets, plus stereo audio output to TV sets or home theater systems. |
| Watch digital camera pictures (JPEG or GIF) on your TV set. Play slide shows with music, too! |
| Plays MP3 music, either individual titles, all the music titles in a directory or M3U, B4S, PLS and ASX playlists. |
| Plays MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 recordings made with the Hauppauge WinTV-PVRs. Will also play most other MPEG-1/2 standard video files. With MediaMVP's remote control, you can pause, rewind and fast forward through your recorded videos. |
| Remote control for easy access to your PC media from your TV set. MediaMVP's remote control allows you to navigate through your PCs disk drives, and displays media names, directories and other information on the TV set. MediaMVP's remote also can control the audio volume and mute of videos and music being played. |
And what I think is one of the coolest things about this little box is the following quote:
"MediaMVP is a Linux based digital media receiver. MediaMVP includes a hardware MPEG decoder. Music and digital pictures are software decoded by MediaMVP's processor. It receives the digital media from the PC via the Ethernet LAN, decodes the media and outputs video through composite and S-Video connections, and audio through stereo audio output connectors. MediaMVP provides an on-TV-screen display of media directory listings. It receives commands from the supplied remote control, and sends these commands to the PC server. The TV menus are created on the PC server, sent over the LAN and displayed by MediaMVP's browser."
So a small box, running Linux, that enables you to play your PC media on your TV? Sounds cool so far, let's take a look in the box...
Next: Inside the package >>
More Peripherals Articles
More By Rich Smith
/ 4 
