HAVA Titanium HD in action

Thanks to my new friends at Monsoon Multimedia and following my coverage of the HAVA Internet Tablet client, I got to borrow a HAVA Titanium HD unit to experience the set-up, interface, and interoperability with the tablet and PC clients. While I did have some difficulty with the initial configuration, I couldn't help but be impressed at every turn. Here's the video of the experience:
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The device is about the size of a Harry Potter hardcover book but lighter. It comes with composite and component cables (both input and pass-through,) a wall wart style power supply, and an IR blaster.


The back of the device has an array of inputs (composite, component, S-video) and two USB ports. One port is using the included WiFi adapter (though Ethernet is included too) and the other is available for future expansion. Some beta software already uses this port. I was disappointed with the lack of HDMI but went with component cables for my test.

The wizard has a piece of cleverness to it: The unconfigured HAVA Titanium creates a WiFi hotspot and the wizard seeks out this hotspot and connects your computer to it. While this allows users to configure the device entirely without wires, they must make sure they do not have any large downloads going on while setting this up on the same computer! Once the HAVA is detected, a wizard sets up the latest firmware and software then connects to the existing wireless network.

Part of the configuration was configuring the remote control. Since I do not have a high-definition video source (I watch my TV on a Windows Media Center which, unfortunately, uses VGA to output to my TV) I decided to use my Apple TV instead. There were no defaults for the Apple IR remote, but the tech support rep gave me some good advice on where to find a remote definition file and download it.

Did I mention that? Tech support helped me the whole time! The review unit I received was shipped in haste and it happened to be the last one they could spare at the time. Software and manuals were not in the box. I really have to hand it to Rob in their tech support department. He gave me a lot of good tips and advice as well as demonstrating advanced knowledge of the product with both release software and beta software. Not more than two seconds of hold time, either.

Speaking of beta software, the HAVA player has a rare feature related to the software and firmware. Major software updates come with firmware updates to the device as well. This is done so the new hooks and features in the PC client software can be matched in the device's firmware and vice versa. Brilliant, I say. Imagine if upgrading your operating system also upgraded the code on all connected devices.


The HAVA player on the PC is rather simple. I chose a skin for my remote (the Apple Remote skin, of course) and made sure the controls matched the commands sent to the Apple TV. Clicking a button on the PC shows the result on the TV instantly but there is a 3-6 second lag in seeing the result on the tablet or PC. This is because the video is a buffered stream.

Following that, I was able to watch an Ask a Ninja podcast on three machines simultaneously. In some high action sequences, I did see some MPEG artifacts in the video especially on the lower power computers but I don't have a "clean" testing environment to see how much of that was a result of WiFi, CPU use, or HAVA ability. Even with the artifacts, I was impressed.

Final thoughts.
The plus side:

• PC, Mobile, and Internet Tablet clients
• Wide range of ports for connectivity
• Great support
• Constant development and improvement
• Multiple simultaneous viewers

The minus side:

• Initial configuration is not intuitive. While that's hard to avoid on a new class of device, I was still glad to have tech support on the other end of the phone.
  
• No HDMI support. Perhaps in a future product?
  
• Some compression artifacts and one random device reboot during configuration
  

For Internet Tablet owners, it is the only choice in hardware place-shifting from set-top boxes. For PC users, it's still a solid and flexible choice especially with the constant software development, multiple streaming options, and choice of players. Several purchasing options of different HAVA devices range from from $99 to $249.

One final caveat: Everything I write about above is with BETA SOFTWARE. The final product could be much better or wholly different. For more thoughts on active beta software (or just to interact with the HAVA community,) take a look at their official forums.