Hauppauge HD PVR Hits Retail Shelves for Under $250 (Yay!)

More details emerges from Hauppauge on HD PVR, aptly named for the world's first consumer-grade USB component video capture. It appears that the company is going ahead with retail release in May with a MSRP of $249. First images now show up on Hauppauge's website, revealing the most importantly the component video in as well as video loop out. Optical audio in and out are also available, which ironically is the only digital input for the HD PVR. RCA audio in and out are spotted too along with S-video in and composite video in.

As a bridge for TiVO and DirecTV set top box, the HD PVR comes bundled with IR blaster to automatically change TV channels for scheduled recordings. Its onboard H.264 hardware accelerator that can encode up to 1080i signals into AVCHD from 1 to 13.5Mbps (constant or VBR) and that can record audio in either AAC or Dolby Digital. If you go with 5Mbps, you can actually put 2 hours of AVCHD video onto a standard DVD for playback on PS3 or other players alike.

Hauppauge HD PVR has rather steep requirement for video capture with onboard video encoder. It asks for a dual core CPU and a video card with 256MB memory. Ouch...