As a fan of home networking, I tend to have many little devices hooked up to my LAN. Along with the standard switches, routers and access points, I have a couple of networked printers, an embarrassing number of computers, a collection of network attached storage (NAS) devices and several network multimedia players. My NAS devices are heavily used for storage of videos, pictures and music that I can play back on the multimedia boxes.

In this review, I'll take a look at another low-cost network multimedia device that I could use to play my content, the Hauppauge MediaMVP.

Features

Hooking up the MediaMVP was straightforward. The back panel, shown in Figure 1, had connectors for a 10/100 Ethernet network, composite video, S-Video, analogue audio as well as an undocumented and unlabeled connector.

Figure 1: MediaMVP Back Panel

I have a network switch in my entertainment center, so the Ethernet connection was simple. If you don't have a drop handy, you'll have to rely on a wireless bridge or other means to get your box on-line.

The basic idea of these types of devices is that you run a server on your network that feeds multimedia content to the device, which then feeds it into your entertainment center. So to get the device going, the next step was to install the included server software on my PC.

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