Having a PC in your living room may seem like a good idea but the wife may have other ideas, but what do you do when more and more of your audio and video collection is digital, if this a new form of persecution for blokes?

Perhaps the solution is the Hauppauge MVP that we’ve had on test this week, similar to the Linksys device we tried before its job is to offer your digital media collection on the technology you have managed to sneak past the wife, like the TV and HiFi.

The first part of installing the Hauppauge MVP is to load the server software on your host PC, this was nice and simple which is good as most of us hate reading manuals, the server software searches your PC for audio / video files supported by the MVP and adds these to a small database. The process can be a little slow if you have a lot of files on the machine, of course the main lordpercy.com shuttle PC with all our MP3 files on took over an hour, once this was complete it was time to set-up the MVP unit itself.

After powering up the Hauppauge MVP unit and attaching it to the Television we were presented with the somewhat basic user interface, perhaps this is a little harsh as Hauppauge have tried to keep thing easy to use and despite the rudimentary graphics its all very self explanatory. Connecting the MVP to our network wasn’t too bad as Hauppauge use DHCP to get an IP address and join the LAN, the 100-baseT connections is more than adequate for the data rates of music and most encoded video.

And so it was time to test the AV capabilities of the MVP, first some music and the audio quality when connected to our HiFi was 1^st class and as good as the Netgear MP101, selecting tracks is ok you work through the directory structure on screen using the remote, although this seems a little sluggish to respond to commands. Sadly we found you can’t create play lists through the interface although you can access play lists made and stored on the PC, perhaps using windows media 10 or Winamp to create them is an option, otherwise you can only select a directory (like an album) and play it all the way through.

The Linux based unit handles video with aplomb, we used the MVP paired with a Hauppauge Dec2000T which had recorded direct from Freeview, an episode of the Simpson’s streamed without issues across the network and there was a very short delay for buffering at the start of replay. While you can access pre recorded files you can’t currently access live streams so its not possible to watch Freeview or other channels decoded live on your PC, or for that matter watch a DVD from your PC’s drive.

Video formats are very limited to MPEG 1 and 2 only so no joy for those who have encoded everything in Divx and other emerging video formats, perhaps this will change with future software upgrades as the Linux platform could easily support more standards.

The MVP streams video seamlessly but it would have been more useful to have the live stream ability, perhaps we are expecting a bit much from a £65 box but it would make the MVP a central device in a home network.

Viewing images works well, the MVP supports JPEG and Gif files which can be viewed full screen or as a slideshow of all files within a directory, the large files can take a while to load and this results in a wipe effect from top to bottom as the image loads it reminded us of the days of dial up connections! 

Overall the Hauppauge MVP shows much promise and at £65 its value for money, but we can’t help but feel that a speedier menu system and support for live streaming would make this an excellent product and warrant a higher selling price.

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