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Hauppauge puts a fresh coat of paint on its newly-acquired PCTV tuners

Pinnacle PCTV sold to Hauppauge
It looks like it took a little longer than expected, but the sale of Avid's Pinnacle PCTV line of TV tuners to Hauppauge has finally gone through. The handoff certainly seems to be getting started on the right foot -- Hauppauge has already fired up the PCTV Systems brand as a separate entity to keep things moving nice and smoothly. The new company's webpage offers a cornucopia of tuners in USB, PCI and PCMCIA flavors, all brandishing a revamped but strangely familiar logo. The PCTV products certainly are right in line with Hauppauge's other offerings, but from the looks of things, the PCTV brand will get treated to a little more colorful and polished marketing.

Avid sells PCTV product line to Hauppauge Digital


Announced today, the Pinnacle PCTV line will soon be property of Hauppauge Digital, not Avid Technology. After laying off 410 employees and divesting its Softimage 3-D game animation software business last Friday, the company has announced yet another major move in its restructuring efforts. According to Avid CEO Gary Greenfield, he's hoping to transform Avid's business into one that "focuses on software applications that not only meet consumer demand, but also complement our broader portfolio of video and audio solutions." Even he confessed that "PCTV [was] a compelling standalone hardware product and a better fit for Hauppauge, a recognized leader in the TV-viewing hardware market." While financial terms weren't disclosed, the deal is slated to close before the end of 2008, and the happy new owner has already announced its intentions to continue supporting and developing both the hardware and software components of the PCTV line.

Avid's DNxHD codec approved for VC-3 standard

Avid has been working with the SMPTE organization for two years, and can finally announce that its DNxHD codec, intended for use in HD postproduction, has been approved as compliant with the newly created VC-3 standard. The upshot of this is a standard that can be used to work with and transfer high quality HD media at lower bitrates and file sizes, without being locked into just one hardware manufacturer. We'll have to wait and see who else adopts this standard, and what cost/time savings are to be had, but things are looking up for our art house production of Format War: The Tale of Two Brothers, Blue and Red.

Pinnacle reveals ShowCenter 250HD media receiver


As the flood of media receivers continue to pour out, we've noticed a new one from Pinnacle Systems that comes with 802.11b/g WiFi built-in, hearts Macs and PCs alike (according to the PR, at least) and handles HD streaming like it's its job. The ShowCenter 250HD is a self-proclaimed "plug-and-play digital media adapter" that includes an Ethernet jack, UPnP support and the ability to play nice with HD WMV, DivX HD or MPEG2 video formats. Additionally, this unit understands AVI, XviD, MP3, WMA and PCM WAV files (among others), and includes a myriad ports including USB 2.0, composite / S-Video / component video outputs, a pair of stereo audio outs and coaxial / optical digital audio jacks. If you just noticed a hint of drool rolling down the left side of your mouth, casually wipe it up and bust out your credit card, as this one will only run you $199.99 at a number of fine e-tailers.

[Via Uber-Review]

DIRECTV installs $1 million Avid MediaStream system

DIRECTV might not have all the HD options that viewers want now, but they are sure looking towards the future by spending some fat cash. One million dollars went to install an Avid MediaStream system that should in the end give viewers more high-def services but is currently being used for SD operations. Said system includes a massive amount of 64 decoder channels and more then 25TB of dedicated storage on a RAID array. Hopefully this is part of a bigger picture that includes at least trying to catch up to Dish Network's high-def offerings.




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