Alternate Player Software
I’ve always had problems with the Hava Player. It’s audio has a bad tendency to get out of sync with the video. The video often gets jerky too. Until now I’ve followed their recommendation and rebooted the Hava. It sometimes helps and sometimes it doesn’t.
It’s been acting up particularly bad today and rebooting hasn’t helped. I was using the free VLC Media Player to play some video files and remembered that it also plays streaming video. I decided to try it with the Hava. I selected open network stream, picked RTSP protocol, and typed in the IP address of the Hava. The window opened and both the video and audio were flawless. I watched through VLC for about 15 minutes and then closed it and switched back to the Hava Player. Within about 5 minutes the video got jerky again. I opened the stream in VLC again and once again it was perfect. I continued to watch using VLC for the rest of the day, switching back to the Hava Player only when I needed to change channels.
If I could find a standalone remote control app for the Hava I could get rid of the buggy Hava Player altogether.
Oh, for the record, the Hava Video stream is a 320 x 240 mp4v stream at 29.97 frames per second. The audio stream is encoded mp4a at a sample rate of 32,000.
I suspect that the jerkiness has to do with the poor way the Hava was implemented. It has a mandatory buffer on disk that’s at least 5 minutes long. It has no way to disable it. So it’s always writing and reading the hard disk. Anything else accessing the hard drive can make the Hava Player video jerky.
There was at some point a feature whereby you could specify the channel to tune in the HTTP or RTSP URL. like …/523 to tune channel 523.
I haven’t gotten it to work with Quicktime player thus far, but it was documented at one point.
Interesting, I hadn’t heard that. My Hava isn’t hooked up to a video source currently so I can’t test that. I did try adding /500 to the rtsp url in vlc and there wasn’t an error so maybe it still works. Someone who has a Hava hooked up will have to try it.
One other thing I think you might find interesting.. Monsoon seems to have pretty much dropped the Hava in favor of their new product the Vulkano.
On a lark, and hoping for a Mac client, I downloaded their Mac client for the new device and pointed it at my Titanium HD. Interestingly enough it both streamed and changed channels. The Vulkano software is far more feature-laden than the Hava client was, and I’m not sure what the side effects might be of running it, as it clearly tries to do more than the vanilla streaming client, but it basically works.
Now if you have any idea as to how to get one of these Titaniums to stop serving DHCP addresses, I’m all ears. Cheers.
I’ll have to try the Vulkano client for windows and see what it does.
The default config for the Titanium only serves DHCP on the wifi interface, the wired interface isn’t supposed to serve DHCP. If you had serial console access I could tell you how to turn it off, there’s a setting in /config/ifcfg-eth and /config/ifcfg-wifi that controls all the settings for the network. You can even assign a static IP to it.
Hank you ever get that root passwd cracked? is it straight up des? also do you know how to change the p2p port so it works with the new vulkano software which no longer works with the hava. i suspect the hava platinum is the same as the vulkano but rebadged to sell. nice unit but the vulkano software is light years ahead. There is a free and not-free(if you buy the low end vulkano) on the app store. Perhaps on the JB iphone you could change the binary to work with the old p2p network/ports for the hava and breathe new life.
I moved into my small (class B) RV and started traveling around. There’s no room or need for the Hava in the RV so I stopped working on it. If I ever get a bigger RV or move back into a house I’ll probably dig out the Hava and take a look at it again but don’t hold your breath, I like living in the RV. :^)
When I finally stopped the password cracking program it still hadn’t found the password. I left the blog up so others would have access to what I had learned. The hash looks like a standard Linux password hash. I couldn’t find anything in the source code that would indicate that they had changed anything to do with the passwords so any program that cracks Linux passwords should crack it.
Having just got FIOS, I’m now on a quest to get all my streaming gear up and working. I know someone who runs a password cracker for security analysts built on Amazon EC2 instances. Is the hash somewhere on this site? His service might make quick work of it.
Failing that, we won’t have to wait long. The current news with GPU-based cracking is that anything under 7 characters only takes seconds.
The Internet provides…
Some folks wrote a set of tools for autodiscovery, channel changing, and recording from the Hava for linux. Interestingly enough, they built without complaint on my Intel Mac running OSX.
Here’s the big scoop – the record tool allows the user to specify the quality of the stream (there is a feature for the Hava’s autonegotiation, but I gather it’s suboptimal), and allows you to send to stdout. They’re using MPlayer in particular. The quality parameter runs from 0×00 to 0×50 but at 0×30 it’s doing 8 Mb/s. I’m thinking that’s about as HD as you’re going to get.
Anyway I thought you folks might like to know.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/havafun/