Hauppauge Computer Works

Hauppauge Computer Works, or just Hauppauge (IPA2|ˈˈhɔːpɒɡ) for short, is a United States manufacturer and marketer of electronic video hardware for personal computers. Although it is most widely known for its WinTV line of TV tuner cards for PCs, Hauppauge also produces personal video recorders, digital video editors, digital media players, hybrid video recorders and digital television products for both PC and Apple Macintosh. The company is named after the hamlet of Hauppauge, New York, in which it is based. On the Internet web or groups it is often misspelled as Happage, Happauge, Hauppage.

In addition to its headquarters in New York, Hauppauge also has sales and technical support offices in the UK, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Poland, Singapore and Spain.

Company history

Hauppauge was co-founded by Kenneth Plotkin and Kenneth Aupperle, and became incorporated in 1992.

Motherboards

During the late 1980s and early '90s Hauppauge produced motherboards for Intel 486 processors. A number of these motherboards were standard ISA built to fairly competitive pricepoints. Some, however, were workstation and server-oriented, including EISA support, optional cache memory modules, and support for the Weitek 4167 FPU.

Happauge also sold a unique motherboard, the Happauge 4860. This was the only standard PC/AT motherboard ever made with both an Intel_80486 and an Intel_i860 processor (optional). While boot required the 80486, the i860 could either run an independent lightweight operating system or serve as a more conventional coprocessor.

Happauge no longer produces motherboards, focusing instead on the TV card market.

Product lines

Digital Terrestrial/Satellite

Hauppauge digital terrestrial and satellite products capture DVB-T and DVB-S broadcasts respectively without the need to re-encode the streams. There are several benefits from this approach:
* the cost of the TV card can be lower because there is no need to supply an MPEG-2 encoder
* the quality of captures can be higher because there is no need to re-encode streams
* ratio of file size to quality is higher due to the broadcasters' high-efficiency encodersUp until August 2004 all of Hauppauge's DVB products were badge-engineered TechnoTrend products. The first of the new Hauppauge-designed cards was the Nova-t PCI 90002 and the silent replacement of the TechnoTrend model caused confusion and anger among Hauppauge's customers who found that the new card didn't support TechnoTrend's proprietary interfaces. This rendered any existing 3rd party software unusable with the new cards. The new cards also came with a software packaged called WinTV2000 which lacked features that TechnoTrend's software had including 7-day EPG, Digital Teletext and LCN-based channel ordering. The new cards supported Microsoft's BDA standard but at the time this was at its infancy and very few 3rd party applications included support for it.

By 2005 all of the TechnoTrend products had been removed from the Hauppauge lineup, with the exception of the DEC2000-t and DEC3000-s which haven't seen a replacement.

Hybrid Video Recorders

The Hybrid Video Recorder (HVR) range capture a combination of different broadcast types. The majority of Hauppauge HVR models capture Analogue PAL and DVB-T but there have been some more recent models which capture Analogue NTSC and ATSC as well as a tri-mode card which supports Analogue PAL, DVB-S and DVB-T.

HVR-9xx devices are bus-powered USB 2.0 sticks, not much larger than a USB flash drive. They have support for analogue and digital terrestrial TV. The HVR-9xx sticks are produced in Taiwan by Deltron, and are also sold for Apple computers by Elgato under the EyeTV brand.

HVR-1xxx devices are PCI based products that receive analogue and digital terrestrial TV. They are similar to the HVR-9xx but have support for NICAM or dbx Stereo for analogue terrestrial on all models.

HVR-3xxx and 4xxx devices are tri-mode and quad-mode devices respectively. Tri-mode means support for Analogue Terrestrial/Cable, Digital Terrestrial and DVB-S Digital Satellite. Quad-mode devices additionally support DVB-S2 HD digital satellite. The HVR-4000 marks a change in bundled applications in that instead of using Hauppauge's WinTV2000 package, it ships with Cyberlink PowerCinema.

Personal Video Recorders

The Personal Video Recorder (PVR) range utilise an onboard MPEG/MPEG-2 encoder to compress the incoming analogue TV signals. The benefits of using a hardware encoder include lower CPU usage when encoding live TV.

The first WinTV-PVR product was the WinTV PVR-PCI, launched in late 2000 and not receiving any driver updates since February 2002. It was joined by the WinTV PVR-USB, which has two variants. The first variant supported MPEG2 streams up to 6 Mbit/s and supported Half-D1 resolutions (320x480). This was replaced by an updated model supporting up to 12 Mbit/s streams and Full-D1 resolution (720x480).

The first WinTV-PVR to gain popularity was the PVR-250. The original version of the PVR-250 was a variant of the Sag Harbor (PVR-350) which used the ivac15 chipset. Although the chipset was able to hardware decoding the video out components were not included on the card. In later versions of the PVR-250 the ivac15 was replaced with the ivac16 to reduce cost and to relieve heat issues. The PVR-250 and PVR-350 were joined by the USB 2.0 PVR-USB2 to complete their generation of devices.

Their successors, the PVR-150 and PVR-500, were released alongside the PVR-250/350/USB2 and while popular with both OEMs and the general public, there have been numerous driver issues as well as video quality complaints. The PVR-500 was released as a Media Center card and wasn't supplied with Hauppauge's WinTV2000 software. It was effectively two PVR-150s on a single board, connected via a PCI-PCI bridge chip. The PVR-USB2 was silently replaced with the PVR-USB2+ which is identical both visually and terms of features, but uses a Conexant chipset rather than the Philips chipset in the old model.

From its name and time of release, the PVR-160 appears to be newer than the PVR-150 but it is not. The PVR-160 is a repackaging of the WinTV Roslyn. The Roslyn is based on the Conexant Blackbird design and uses the CX2388x video decoder. This board was originally available only to OEMs and third-party software vendors such as Frey Technologies (SageTV) and Snapstream (BeyondTV). The board was sold under many names including the PVR-250BTV (Snapstream). This card is known to have color and brightness issues that can be corrected somewhat using registry hacks. Hauppauge received a large surplus amount of these cards from OEM and third party vendors. The cards were repackaged with an MCE remote and receiver and rebranded the PVR-160. The PVR-160 was often mistakenly referred to as the PVR-250MCE but is not related to the PVR-250.

WinTV Analogue

The standard analogue range of products use software encoding for recording analogue TV. The more recent Hauppauge cards use SoftPVR, which allows MPEG and MPEG-2 encoding in software provided that a sufficiently fast CPU is installed in the system.

MediaMVP

The MediaMVP is a thin client device that displays music, video and pictures (hence "MVP") on a television. It is based on an IBM PowerPC RISC processor specialised for multimedia decoding. The operating system is a form of Linux, and everything (including the menus) is served to the device via ethernet from the server PC.

Hauppauge announced a Wireless MediaMVP which connects to the PC via 802.11g wireless LAN.

Various open source software products can use the device as a frontend. An example is MVPMC [http://www.mvpmc.org/] , which allows the MediaMVP to be used as a frontend for MythTV or ReplayTV.

Table of products

WinTV2000 and related software

Hauppauge's principal software offering is a TV tuning and recording application called WinTV2000. It is also distributed with a non-skinned interface under the name WinTV32.

WinTV2000/WinTV32 has other companion applications, including WinTV Scheduler, which performs timed recordings, and WinTV Radio, which receives FM Radio. A recent change of direction has seen the move towards a service-based software package. Card management and recordings is taken care of by the "TV Server" service and EPG data collection by the "EPG Service". These changes allow WinTV2000 to work with multiple Hauppauge cards in the same PC.

In 2007, Hauppauge launched WinTV Version 6 which featured a redesign skin. The new version is skinnable.

wing

"wing", a recent supplemental software application from Hauppauge, allows the company's PVR products to convert MPEG recordings into formats suitable for playback on the Apple Video iPod and Sony PSP. The software also includes several DivX profiles that can be used for conversion as well.

Third Party Software

There are many 3rd-party programs which work with Hauppauge tuners as well. These include; GB-PVR, InterVideo WinDVR, Snapstream's Beyond TV, SageTV, and the Linux-based Myth TV.

Linux

Hauppauge offers limited support for Linux [http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/faq/support_faq_linux.html] , and doesn't offer Linux drivers on its web site. There are drivers available from non-Hauppauge sources for most of the company's cards (in IVTV and LinuxTV). It appears that some of these drivers (Nova and HVR) are written by a Hauppauge engineer.

The PVR-150 captures video on Linux, but there are reportedly difficulties getting the remote control and IR blaster to work. Also, a January 2007 product substitution of HVR-1600 in PVR-150 retail boxes forced many Linux users to exchange their purchases because the Linux driver has not been updated for the HVR-1600. [http://www.colar.net/pvr150/swap_notice.jpeg] [http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/Supported_hardware] [http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg05339.html]

SageTV Media Center for Linux supports PVR-150, PVR-250, PVR-350, PVR-500 and MediaMVP.

For ATSC and DVB applications, a list of Linux supported Hauppauge and other makes of TV cards can be found on the [http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page LinuxTVWiki] page (see "Supported Hardware" section).

External links

* [http://www.hauppauge.com Hauppauge Computer Works]
* [http://www.hauppauge.co.uk Hauppauge Computer Works UK]
* [http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/board Hauppauge UK Support Forum]
* [http://sagetv.com/ SageTV] (a vendor of products based on Hauppauge hardware)
* [http://www.shspvr.com/ SHS-PVR Unofficial WinTV-PVR & MediaMVP forums]
* [http://www.diy-pvr-dvr-htpc.com/index.php/Difference_Hauppauge_PVR150_PVR250_PVR350_PVR500 Difference Hauppauge PVR150 PVR250 PVR350 PVR500]
* [http://usbvision.sourceforge.net usbvision] (partially-functional Linux driver for WinTV-USB)