Thursday, January 07, 2010

AverMedia Brings Competitor to Hauppauge HD-PVR – Forgets 5.1 Audio

I’ve been hearing about a new competitor to the Hauppauge HD-PVR – a device that captures HD video from cable & satellite via component output and transcodes it to H.264 on your HTPC.  I use the Hauppauge HD-PVR to do this very thing with SageTV and would welcome any competition in the area.  Unfortunately, the AverMedia device only records stereo audio – not 5.1!  Talk about leaving out the important details…

I’ll be watching to see if there are any plans for a better version of this device from AverMedia, but for now Hauppauge has “the” device for this purpose with only CableCard as a viable competitor in my opinion.  Then again, if you don’t care about 5.1 audio, this might be a good device as the price goes down from its starting $200 MSRP.

 

AverMedia Press Release

via Engadget