Jim Baskin is personally responsible for my buying a Have Platinum HD. So far, I’m glad I did.
Gaelen helped me set up the place shifter on my basement DVR. I have AT&T’s U-Verse service and was hoping that I could use it to watch recorded video and current shows on my laptops while travelling. Set up wasn’t perfect: it turns out that one of the cables in the installation box was defective so that resulting in my having to buy a S-Video cable and an audio cable to replace them. Once the cables were working we had the box working perfectly for local connections – for instance, to Heidi’s and Gaelen’s laptops.
But that disguised a larger problem: it wasn’t possible to use the machine remotely. The Hava box tries to connect to a master server (presumably to keep contact with the master server and exchange information about the external facing address for the residential gateway. On first installation, this simply didn’t work using the Hava setup. I tried a second time and couldn’t even ping the Hava servers from inside my our residential network.
Gaelen convinced me to call for help (even going so far as putting the phone in my hand). The technical support person (what time was it in Bangalore??) was friendly but forced me to register prior to doing any technical support at all. Then after registering he asked me to do a factory reset of the box and start from the beginning. I hate this approach from technical support – usually. But in this case the device came to life immediately and was visible from remote networks. I was impressed with Hava’s technical support.
Gaelen also spent some time experimenting with the Hava box and our downstairs television. He thinks it is capable of HDTV and that he has things set up so that the Hava box is ready to provide an HDTV stream to the TV. Unfortunately, I haven’t subscribed to any HD channels on U-Verse, so it’s hard to say if it works. I’m suspicious, but maybe it will work.
The quality of the video on the local connections has been pretty good – I’m looking forward to seeing what it is like at Purdue or in my Atwood Office. More about that later.
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