Hauppauge MediaMVP Review - The testing
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When you first power on the MediaMVP, it searches for available servers and has you choose a default server. Since I only installed this on one machine, that was a no brainer. Now, for the record, in the manual it warns you about firewall software such as ZoneAlarm and Windows XP firewall. It gives instructions for fixing ZoneAlarm so it works, and tells you to disable Windows XP firewall, if you have it activated.
Well, I don't have Windows XP firewall running, but I do run ZoneAlarm. I can tell you that I did what the instructions said, but I could not get the MediaMVP to connect to my server until I disabled ZoneAlarm.
Once I disabled ZoneAlarm, I got the following screen:
Pardon the crumby pictures. I actually used my camera to take photos of the TV to show the output. The first thing I did was check out the settings menu. Here's a shot of it:
There are a ton more options that are not listed. Once of the things I like is the Aspect Ratio. You are able to change this from standard to letterbox, which is helpful if you have video in letterbox format, or are running on an HDTV.
I'm not going to bore you with an explanation of how to access each section, but I will drop a few screenshots so you can see each of them.
All of this worked really well. It was kind of cool to be able to view all my media on my TV upstairs in my bedroom, while the computer that housed it is downstairs in my office.
Now, I do need to say that this thing seems to be a little tricky when it comes to videos. If you have videos that were not produced professionally, or were downloaded from the Internet, it's possible that they have some weirdness encoded in them. In my testing, I found if I watched these, they were fine so long as I didn't try to fast-forward or rewind through them. When I did this, the services on the Windows machine seemed to lock up, and the only way I could get the MediaMVP to respond again, was to walk downstairs and stop and restart the services on the PC. THAT was a pain. At the very least, maybe Hauppauge could write a monitoring program to automatically stop and restart the troubled service if it becomes unresponsive? I'd have preferred to reboot to the root menu, than to have to get up and walk downstairs just to restart a service.
Next: Conclusion >>
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