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HAVA Titanium HD from Monsoon Multimedia $249.99
Our first place-shifting review happened way back in October of 2005 on
Episode 40 when we first looked at the Sling Media Slingbox. It's been two years, and we're now looking at a device that bills itself as the Slingbox Killer - the HAVA. Place shifting isn't exactly the revolution that it might have been 2 years ago, but it's still cool, and the HAVA adds some unique twist to the application that are really nice. In a nutshell the HAVA allows you to watch TV on virtually any PC on your home network, or on any Internet connected PC anywhere in the world.
The HAVA itself comes in four flavors.
- The basic model is the HAVA Gold which runs for $129. It provides the basics of place shifting, allowing you to stream video from any home theater device to your PCs. It supports full DVD quality streaming, and outputs both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 up to 8 Mbps.
- The next step up is the HAVA Platinum HD for $159. It adds support for HD resolution video and DVR functionality. The DVR functionality is really cool. Any PC on the local network can record what the HAVA is streaming out, with full support for guide based scheduled recordings, series recordings, pausing and timeshifting of live television, you name it. The HAVA becomes a virtual TV tuner for any PC on the network.
- You can then step up to the HAVA Titanium HD for $249. This is the one we looked at. It adds support for 802.11g wireless streaming and has a couple USB ports so you can connect a hard drive directly to it and record content locally, allowing any PC player to access the recorded content.
- The last model, the HAVA Wireless HD which also costs $249, includes built in wireless support (the platinum requires a wireless USB dongle) and has an integrated PAL/NTSC tuner. But it drops the local hard drive recording option.
Getting the Titanium unit installed and setup is fairly simple. The device allows you to connect a component video input, an s-video input and an A/V (composite video and stereo audio) input. The A/V input is used as the audio input for all three. To stream out HD video, you need to connect the component video and A/V inputs to the outputs of your digital set top box. The HAVA has equivalent audio and video outputs on the back, so you can pass the content through to your TV if you want to simply insert it inline in your existing home theater. Then you connect the IR transmitters so you can control the STB and either plug in the wireless dongle or the hard wired Ethernet connection to get the content out over the network, and the device is in place.
Once all the physical connections have been made, you head over to your PC (sorry no Mac or Linux support yet) and install the HAVA setup wizard and the HAVA PC player. The setup wizard walks you through the steps required to get the content streaming both locally and remote. For the most part you just click the 'Next' button a bunch of times, but occasionally you have to provide some input. The whole setup process takes about 15-20 minutes. Setting up the IR control is just like the Slingbox or a Harmony remote. You tell it the manufacturer and model of your set top box, and it already has the IR codes for you. One of the cool setup features is the ability to set your own ID for the remote player. You can either stick with the huge, random string of letters and numbers it comes up with, or setup your own ID that's easier to remember. That's pretty cool.
Here's where it gets interesting. The Titanium unit actually transmits MPEG-2 video over your local network and MPEG-4 out over the Internet. Of course the local MPEG-2 stream is going to be higher quality than the remote MPEG-4, so they've optimized the viewing experience for both playback methods. Instead of using 1 codec for all applications, they attempt to give you the best possible experience no matter where you are. The local playback was excellent quality. Of course local hardwired looked better than local wireless, but both did a great job. In side by side comparisons with the Slingbox, the HAVA tended to provide a more consistent video experience with less digitization and blocky-ness. We only had the classic Slingbox on hand for comparison, so a Slingbox Pro might have stood up better. Overall the two were very close in the qaulity of the video streams. The main difference is that the HAVA officially supports simultaneous streaming to local and remote clients and allows simultaneous connection to as many local WiFi devices as you want using their proprietary vBooster multicasting technology.
The next big difference is the DVR functionality. This is really cool - you can turn any connected PC into a DVR. To record to a local PC, you just hit the record button and it saves the stream it to your hard drive so you can watch it later. The recording can't be scheduled, so it's somewhat limited, but a user on their forums did put together a script you can use to schedule recordings at some point in the future, so there are creative ways around that limitation. We were looking forward to the ability to record directly to a USB hard drive, but couldn't get it to work and couldn't find any documentation on it. It's possible that the functionality isn't there yet and we need to wait for a firmware upgrade, but if it is there, it sure is well hidden. To use the guide based or scheduled recording functionality, you have to configure the HAVA as a virtual tuner for XP Media Center or Vista. Once it's in there, you just use the standard Media Center interface to schedule recordings. The cool part about that is that you don't need CableCard to get all your Cable content, the HAVA grabs it from your set top box.
Overall the HAVA does a great job as a place shifter and adds some interesting new twists. Some of the features may not be fully baked, but they promise to be really cool when they get there. For $249 it's certainly an option to consider if your looking to pick up a place shifter.
