Yep, just like the title says, hauppauge has announced the Broadway, a new “set-top” aimed at iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users. The hardware streams live OTA HDTV to an Apple handheld after first compressing the video using H.264. The resulting media can be delivered locally over Wi-Fi, or to a remote place using any Internet connection. Over-The-Air ATSC signals can be captured using a built-in ATSC tuner, while cable is supported through clear QAM. Pricing is a bit steep at $199 and the box is scheduled for February release.

I just picked one of these babies up from the apple store and after testing it a bit for the past hour, I have one word for it: WOW. This little guy is no gimmick, it’s zippy as hell and it does exactly what they say it would. The details for the device are on Elgato’s Website, but this is just a mini review of the tests I ran against a couple of software encoders.

Here is my setup:

- Mac OSX 10.5.8 with latest updates running on a 2.16Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo Black MacBook w/ 2 GB 667Mhz DDR2 SDRAM.
- Test input file was a HD movie I grabbed from vimeo through BT. It’s 12.5 minutes in lenght.

- Output was done through the Elgato Turbo stick, Mpeg Streamclip encoder and ffmpegX.

- In all cases I’ve tried to produce a single pass h264/x264 file with the same dimensions and settings as the Elgato software preset for ipod best (640×360 @ 24 fps @ 1500 kbps at 80-90% quality).

The results blew my mind:

• Elgato Turbo took 8:43 min to encode the 12:29 min movie.
• Mpeg Streamclip took 50:25 min to encode the 12:29 min movie.
• ffmpegX took 49:52 min to encode the entire 12:29 min movie.

Here are a couple of full size frames (640×360 px) blown up to 1920×1200 to exaggerate imperfections (click on the pics to see them full size):
- Elgato Turbo stick

- Mpeg Streamclip

- ffmpegX

- And last but not least all three at the original size (left to right): Elgato Turbo Stick, Mpeg Streamclip, ffmpegX

Best C$179 I’ve spent in a while. It just works.

Hehehe, yeah people used to make fun of me when I mentioned how much I hate Robbers (Rogers) and Compressview (Expressview) services in Canada and that I would refuse to pay for their so called HD premium service because I KNOW what kinda abuse the content goes through before it gets to my TV. I’ve since switched to OTA (Over The Air) HD and yes I don’t get all the Discovery/Food/Bravo channels in HD, but then again what is your definition of HD I ask?

Anyways, for those of you who’re still entrusting Robbers, Compressview and/or others, have a quick peak at this article on Popular Mechanics website.

As some of you might know I’ve been setting up my OTA (Over The Air) HDTV gear for the past couple of months and learning all about Antenna design, gain, amplification, directionality and such…..Lots of fun/confusing stuff. Well today I came across this article on digitalhome.ca that describes how a bunch of guys got together and using digital modeling improved the original Gray-Hoverman Antenna design. And if that wasn’t enough, they’ve released their design completely under GPL……Bravo. They’ve truly built the Super Antenna and in true spirit of engineering have shared their results/designs. So go grab some coat hangers, set aside 30 minutes of your life and get off the bandwagon and save some money by grabing your HD over the air for FREE….Like it’s supposed to be.

I have to admit CineForm is one of my favourite companies out there. I’ve visited them once and they are the nicest bunch of engineers you’ll find on that side of the rockies :-). Aside from their famed CineForm Codec (which btw is awesome), they have just released the specs and conceptual drawings for what will probably be the coolest gadget at next years NAB ;-).

They anticipate developing multiple members in the recorder product family – each targeting different recording needs. This first device targets HDV camcorder users and offers the ability to bypass the highly-compressed MPEG format. The features specification is below. They also imagine a sister device that would support single-link and dual-link HD-SDI recording.

- OTA: http://www.remotecentral.com/hdtv/index.html
- RDC: http://www.remotecentral.com/hdtv/rogers.htm