Hauppauge Mytv.pvr PVR/DVR/TV Capture for Macintosh

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Review of Hauppauge MyTv.PVR

PVR/DVR/TV Capture for Macintosh

 

I received my Hauppauge MyTv,PVR several days ago. It is a video capture and digital video recorder unit for the Macintosh. It is the rough equivalent of the WinTV.PVR units for Windows.

 

For the impatient: the hardware is wonderful, the software is barely adequate.

 

My setup consists of a dish-network satellite system and an 800 mhz Mac Powerbook running OS X 10.4.7. This is the minimum required hardware for the unit, so I do not expect blazing performance. I also have a VCR which I want to use for playing (and converting) old tapes but do not need to record to.

 

Hardware installation was easy. I hooked the unit to an available USB port, plugged it in, and attached my satellite receiver using composite video. If I need to, I can use an S-video cable for the satellite receiver and run composite video from the VCR. I verified using System Profiler that the box was detected.

 

Software installation was even easier. I popped in the disk, went to the 10.3-10.4 directory, and copied an application to my Applications folder. That's it.

 

The first time the app is run, it starts a wizard. This asks for your country and your video input type. This is where things start to go south. The labels in the wizard do not match the labels on the hardware nor anything in the Quick Start guide. So, I guessed "Cable". This turned out to be wrong. The next screen wants to autoscan for available channels. I clicked on the button before I realized that the only channel the PVR could see is "3": the channel the satellite receiver transmits on. The satellite box handles everything else. So, I had to wait for fifteen minutes while the thing scanned 125 blank channels. The Cancel button did nothing.

 

When I finally got through this to the main screen, I got a bunch of snow. I selected channel 3 and got slightly different snow. Finally, I relaized that the "Cable" slection corresponds to "TV" on the hardware. I clicked on "Composite Video" and, after a moment, got video. Basic features of the system work quite well. It receives TV signal, you can resize the display, go full screen, pause, fast forward or rewind, or record. It has a simple scheduler and a button which goes to online TV listings.

 

Switching to different input devices, full screen mode, etc., is easy both from the app and the remote (as long as you can remember which colored button is which).

 

There are problems, however. The system was quite unstable until I rebooted my Mac (it never said anywhere to reboot, and most Mac apps do not require a reboot or restart of any kind to work...). The app crashed when quitting, when opening the Recorded Movies dialog, when trying to open the app in two accounts at once, when trying to close the video window while keeping the app open, etc. After reboot, stability improved immensely.

 

After playing for a little bit, I found an application update on the Hauppauge website. This is the only bit of information on this product on the Hauppauge website *at all*. Anyway, they had an update to 4.0.1 from the included 3.6.2. I installed the update and ran it. As far as I can tell, there are no differences at all, whatsoever.

 

Well, as to recording: the PVR software lets you record in more than half a dozen different formats, including various MPEG formats with different levels of compression and VCD formats. Recorded videos are dumped by default in your Movies directory. Some of these do not play in Quicktime, but do play in the PVR and in the free VLC application.

 

Limitations: No way to edit or trim your recordings. You cannot cut commercials (except manually, while recording). You cannot trim the beginning or end of your recording. The "Music", "Pictures", "Movies" buttons, etc., on the remote do nothing. The buttons cannot be programmed to control iTunes or iPhoto, for instance. Apparently, the Windows version *does* use these buttons.

 

It takes finding a Preferences setting to be able to close the video window while leaving the app open. The PVR does not use the built in Mac scheduler and has to be on for pre-scheduled recordings. If I leave the video running, my system gets much too hot, so I close the video window and leave the app open. This means, effectively, you can only really use the PVR software with one account.

 

Performance is decent, as long as nothing else is done on the system. The fact that I have USB 1.0 means that I am limited in the resolution I can use. The G4 800 processor is nearly pegged while running the PVR. Doing anything like starting Firefox will cause the sound to stutter. None of this is unexpected, however; presumably on a Core Duo 2.1 Ghz, performace is markedly better.

 

Overall, I like the hardware and basic functions. The software needs serious work, both in terms of installation/stability and more than bare-bones features. The Mac has rich multimedia libraries and tools, so I can only suppose the Mac edition of the PVR is low priority for Hauppauge.