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.