Hauppauge reveals 'network media receiver' product for £99

net1

Hauppauge Digital, which specialises in TV cards for PCs, has announced its first network media receiver product. The Hauppauge MediaMVP (Music, Video, Pictures) will be priced at £99.99 inc VAT and will be available in the UK from October. The device is designed to pull digital media from PCs via local area networks, and to decode and play the media onto TV sets and hifi systems.

The MediaMVP is an Ethernet-based set-top box which provides PC users greater convenience and versatility with their audio/visual entertainment systems, by allowing them to view media stored in PCs on their TV set or through their home entertainment systems.

Yehia Oweiss, Hauppauge's UK Managing Director, boasted that MediaMVP would turn "any TV set or home entertainment system into a multimedia playback device via the home network. Now, from the comfort of the living room sofa, or indeed their bed, anyone can access and enjoy videos, MP3 music, family photos or other multimedia files on a TV set, without physically going to their PC. MediaMVP will also be great for setting up music and picture slideshows for parties."

Using MediaMVP, for example, individuals can play a video on their bedroom TV that's stored on a PC in the study, or show JPEG photos of a recent holiday - accompanied by MP3 music - on the living room TV with the MP3 music played through their audio system. Any hard drive that's available on the network is eligible for access to media stored there.

rolfw

Sounds interesting Net1, heres the data sheet in PDF format. http://www.hauppauge.com/html/mediamvp_datasheet.pdf

The only thing that surprises me slightly though, is why didn't they make it wireless?

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cjgall

You can make it wireless by connecting the RJ-45 socket to a wireless access point with a crossover cable. According to Hauppage you need to disable encryption though, not an option for me as most of my network is wireless including my web & mail server. I also share my adsl connection with my neighbour so I need all the security I can get.

Another, even greater, disadvantage is that the PC storing the audio and video files needs to run a server application. This limits the whole thing to Windows as there is no Linux support. You might as well run an audio cable straight from the PC to the amp.

A pity as I have been wanting to store my whole CD collection as mp3 on my (Linux) server and transmit them to my amp for some time.

Maybe time to build a second VIA EPIA machine (see: http://www.mini-itx.com/ ).