Wireless Hauppauge MVP

[Striker77s]

I just wanted to give my experience with the wireless Hauppauge MVP extender and SageTV. I have always wanted to setup a HTPC but didn't necessarily want to build a dedicated HTPC. I read about the MVP extender and thought it was time to jump.

I purchased extra space (Two 750GB drives with RAID 0) for a large dedicated fast storage area on my PC. I have a Hauppauge HVR 1800 capture card and 4 GB of memory on a Windows Vista box. I thought I was all set and purchased the wireless Hauppauge MVP to get it going.

I spent hours troubleshooting the MVP trying to get it to work wirelessly. Finally in frustration I came to the forums and did some research. Someone mentioned that the MVP sometimes wouldn't work with any wireless security features turned on. So I turned off my MAC filter and it started to work. I tried many different options but as soon as I turned on my filter the MVP would dis-connect. (Yes I checked the MAC address many many times). I gave up on security and started watching TV. My MVP is about 20 feet straight line of site from the Linksys wireless router. Despite have very good signal strength the MVP would constantly hang up, stutter or just freeze. When I ran a CAT5 cable to the MVP it would work fine. After many hours of trying to tweak the different wireless settings I gave up and bought a wireless bridge (Linksys WAP54G). Now it works without any problems and hasn't froze up once. So I wasted $50 on buying the MVP with the wireless feature built in.

I just wanted to give my experience with the wireless MVP.

Mark

[davephan]

You're not alone, I also wasted $50 on a wireless MVP. I was shocked when I found out the wireless MVP did not have WPA encryption. The wireless MVP only has WEP. The WEP encryption can be broken in one minute with free downloadable software, so it is worthless.

I do run WPA on part of my network, and it is secure as long as you use a very long 63 character password that contains random characters.

Dave