Little by little, the TV and the PC are merging.
Hava v1.7.4 has been released and, although it isn't listed as a feature of this firmware/software release, the picture quality coming from the composite, component and S-Video inputs from the Hava seem to have better picture quality when streaming on the local network. I don't publish the Hava device, which is much like a Slingbox without the one PC limitation, to the Internet, so I am not sure if the external video quality has improved at all.
Overall a very good update that seems to work perfectly fine on my rebadged Pinnacle box I bought off of Woot on a whim, which I wrote about
here.
The device has been used so much that it now has a dedicated DVD player so that we can stream movies other than what is being shown out in the living room. The DVD player, Dish Network "TV1", Dish Network "TV2", the Wii, and the Xbox are all connected into a switchbox that leads into the Hava in case we want to stream any of those to the computer systems in the house. The Dish's HD content and the over-the-air HD channels I can pull in transcode amazingly well over the component input. Some people might consider that overkill, but we have found it to be an invaluable piece of hardware in our home audio/video system.
Today, my kids watched the
Spiderwick Chronicles movie in their own rooms on their own computer LCDs while I watched something else on the PVR in the living room. Previously, we would have needed two DVD players, two copies of the movie, and two TVs to accomplish the same thing. Even better, they can pause the movie independent of each other if they need to go the bathroom because the software has the same kind of 'pause/rewind/fast forward' feature found in most PVRs, even though it technically isn't a PVR unit. I was a happy camper because movie time with both of the kids in the same room can sometimes result in shouting matches between them and fights over the remote control. Needless to say, they are very competitive with each other.
You can read the forum post announcing the release
here and you can download the updated code
here.
One other item of note: The setup/installation code seems to have improved vastly and I've been able to get the client software installed on some previously incompatible Windows OS versions of the 32-bit and 64-bit variety. I have even been able to get it to play decently under VMWare Workstation 6.5 using XP SP3 and the experimental 3D support enabled.
True geek moment: My Dish Network dish had been misaligned in the middle of the night at some point during my vacation last week and the only available client OS I could use at the time on my laptop with the older version of the Hava software was a VMWare XP SP3 instance. Not wanting to wake anyone up to watch the signal strength meter on the TV in the living room, I fired up the VM with the Hava transcoding the Dish output to my laptop over our wireless network. No walkie-talkie, cell phone or second person required.
