How Hauppauge’s MediaMVP married Beyond TV
Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 at 10:47 am by Rakesh
Guest blog posting by Jack Romano (romanoj)
The MediaMVP from Hauppauge is this great little device that lets you get photos, music and videos off of your PC and onto your television. And it’s cheap – only $100. As Tom wrote about here, without any extra work, you can use it to playback recordings made with Beyond TV. All you have to do is just point to the recorded shows directory. The MediaMVP will play your MPEG2 or Divx files. But it’s a less than ideal experience for lots of reasons:
- You can only see titles of the video files and you can’t view information like show description, original airdate, etc.
- You can’t watch live TV
- You can’t delete a show that you’ve already watched
- You can’t schedule new recordings or see which recordings are scheduled
So with these limitations in mind, a team of us decided that we could create a better interface. We created the open source MediaMVP BTV interface project. With our software, you get something closer to the complete Beyond TV experience (plus some extras like weather and Music playlists!), including access to live TV, and the program guide!
In short, just download the project file. Unzip and run the setup. Re-boot the MediaMVP and voila! You have a BTV extender at no additional cost.
Screenshot of the MediaMVP Beyond TV interface
Guest blog posting by Jack Romano (romanoj)
The MediaMVP from Hauppauge is this great little device that lets you get photos, music and videos off of your PC and onto your television. And it’s cheap – only $100. As Tom wrote about here, without any extra work, you can use it to playback recordings made with Beyond TV. All you have to do is just point to the recorded shows directory. The MediaMVP will play your MPEG2 or Divx files. But it’s a less than ideal experience for lots of reasons:
- You can only see titles of the video files and you can’t view information like show description, original airdate, etc.
- You can’t watch live TV
- You can’t delete a show that you’ve already watched
- You can’t schedule new recordings or see which recordings are scheduled
So with these limitations in mind, a team of us decided that we could create a better interface. We created the open source MediaMVP BTV interface project. With our software, you get something closer to the complete Beyond TV experience (plus some extras like weather and Music playlists!), including access to live TV, and the program guide!
In short, just download the project file. Unzip and run the setup. Re-boot the MediaMVP and voila! You have a BTV extender at no additional cost.
Screenshot of the MediaMVP Beyond TV interface
