Like a lot of people I'm trying to cut costs and have decided to get rid of my cable and go back to rabbit ears. Well there are cheap tuners out there but none are better then the HDHomeRun. This is the cheapest I've seen it so I bought two for $239.58, saved on shipping a little. ANTOnline has it for 122.51 shipped.
Good find, OP. This is a great little device, and about the lowest price I've seen. Trying to decide if I would ever need a second one.
figgi
Member
posted: Jul. 9, 2009 @ 5:21p
I have wifi at home, which has limited bandwidth. So I'd like to run an ethernet cable from it directly to my desktop's ethernet port without going through a router. Does any one know if this will work?
These also work great with SageTV. Been using one of these for a while for my QAM channels with SageTV and have had great results. I use it to record all the regular network shows (CSI, Law & Order, etc).
Awesome product and a great price! Like others have said, you can't go wrong with this.
tadr
Senior Member
posted: Jul. 9, 2009 @ 6:36p
figgi said: I have wifi at home, which has limited bandwidth. So I'd like to run an ethernet cable from it directly to my desktop's ethernet port without going through a router. Does any one know if this will work? it most certainly will. see page 4 of install doc: http://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/hdhomerun_install.pdf "Alternatively the HDHomeRun can be connected directly to a PC or laptop network interface using the supplied network cable; there is no need for a cross-over cable."
This is really an awesome product by the way. I've had one for 2 years and only had to reboot it once. Incredibly solid piece of hardware.
figgi
Member
posted: Jul. 9, 2009 @ 11:47p
do i need separately buy an antenna for OTA?
icecow
Thrifty Member
posted: Jul. 10, 2009 @ 12:36a
Yesh, you need an antenna to get OTA of course, a uhf one. Find out how many miles you are from the tower that sends the singal. Coarsely speaking, if you are 60+ miles away you will need a large one. If you are 20 miles away, a small one. Google for more info.
i'd recommend dual ethernet. it works best. 100 meg in for two 1080 streams and 100 meg out for sending to other pc's.
gigabit is a little bit more tricky unless all parties on the network are gigabit you might run into issues.
flow control gets tricky its usually enabled (??) on vista by default. disable it!
say you are copying a massive file (smb2) to a pc and watching hdtv from the media center software to another pc. if your switch/pc has flow control on; it is possible that the pc receiving the file will be 100mbit and apply flow control pressure to the media center/nas machine. well great now it stops sending to both machines.
icecow said: Yesh, you need an antenna to get OTA of course, a uhf one.Outdated information. After the digital transition, many channels switch back to VHF so you'll need a VHF/UHF antenna.
Correct, this uses only unencrypted QAM. But does it really well! Works great with Windows 7 Media Center as it supports QAM nativly, no driver spoofing like on Vista & Xp MCE. I paid $170 for this over 18 months ago and, that is a good price. 100Mbps if fine for 2 tuners and saturates about 65% of that while recording 2 HD shows. If your recording device is gigabit, you will have no performance problems while doing other file transfers at the same time as recording 2 shows, as CPU is low while recording HD.
This is the most reliable piece of hardware in my whole media center setup. I have it for QAM through Comcast basic cable hooked up to a gigabit switch where the media center is connected. There is a Buffalo NAS in there too and they all share a 802.11G. I would sometimes use the ethernet to move large files from the laptop too. But even if I have large files flying within the ethernet, I never see any issues with the HD recordings. Using wireless, I would see capacity issues. If I am playing an HD recording on MCE from a laptop, no other laptop can use HDHomerun for live HD. If one of the laptops is using this for live TV or playing an HD recording from MCE, the other laptops can stream ABC.com HD or other demanding streams and I won't see a problem. My next home upgrade is getting everything to 802.11N, but I'm not in a hurry.
I also have 2 dual tuners in the media PC, so I can handle prime time conflicts mixing QAM and ATSC. This one is always ON for almost a year now and I have only restarted it once when I bought the switch. I can see it as a tuner and watch or record live TV on my Windows 7 laptop without a problem. The main machine is on Vista, and the other laptops are on Vista. They all have HDHomerun installed as a tuner and if one of the two tuners is not busy recording from the media center, I can use it on the laptop to watch live TV.
In any case, this is one terrific piece of hardware. If you are going to mess with building DVR solution at home, you are not going to regret this one.
+1 awesome product. Had mine one year. Hardware and drivers so much better and more stable than anything else I have tried. Using one of the tuners for QAM, the other for OTA.
this is just a nice piece of equipment...basically turns every computer on the home network into a basic tv...with the ability to make them dvr's...though my old laptop won't be able to handle that.
If you just need a HD tuner, the best out there for the money is an old VOOM HD satellite receiver. Just plug your antenna into this and scan and you've got a $200 box for $20. VOOM was a satellite company that went out of business years ago but the boxes still make good HD tuners.
This is for your tv, not your computer. Are you all hooking your computers to the tv or what? Isn't that more of a hassle than a normal tuner?
scottfmcleod said: How do people think these compare to a PCI / PCIEx1 dual tuner card? i think the hdhomerun has more flexibility, because all of your computers will be able to access the tv tuner features over the network. getting a pci/pcie card will only be usable on the one computer that it is installed on.
zxx7x
Member
posted: Jul. 10, 2009 @ 11:13a
Is it possible to connect this to my directv receiver to watch directv channels on my pc or save shows from my directv dvr to my pc hard drive?
Mulox said: I am on Comcast now... about how many total channels do you think I can get on QAM? What about OTA... how many total channels?
Go to silicondust's website and there is a channel list that is kept fairly current. Just punch in your zipcode and it will show what you should be able to get.
jochoki said: scottfmcleod said: How do people think these compare to a PCI / PCIEx1 dual tuner card? i think the hdhomerun has more flexibility, because all of your computers will be able to access the tv tuner features over the network. getting a pci/pcie card will only be usable on the one computer that it is installed on.
yes.. and as the name suggests, it is "HD Home run". It is useful when you have multiple computers connected in a network. For a single computer, I would suggest getting a TV tuner card for less.
Even for a single computer I would recommend this one if you want QAM in Vista Media Center. I tried to get it going on the internal cards (beta drivers, TV Pack etc) and always something else breaks. This thing is reliable and works out of the box for QAM.
kittunni said: jochoki said: scottfmcleod said: How do people think these compare to a PCI / PCIEx1 dual tuner card? i think the hdhomerun has more flexibility, because all of your computers will be able to access the tv tuner features over the network. getting a pci/pcie card will only be usable on the one computer that it is installed on.
yes.. and as the name suggests, it is "HD Home run". It is useful when you have multiple computers connected in a network. For a single computer, I would suggest getting a TV tuner card for less.
ranger203 said: Does anyone know if anybody makes a DIY Cablecard device for Windows? Unfortunately, no. Cablecard is, by design, a closed device, and Cablecard-compatible hardware can only be sold as part of a complete system.
modal
Senior Member
posted: Jul. 10, 2009 @ 3:44p
If you have more than one of these units and watch on multiple computers, how do you keep tuners locked to a particular channel and prevent other computers from changing it?
wishbone
Senior Member
posted: Jul. 10, 2009 @ 5:15p
zxx7x said: Is it possible to connect this to my directv receiver to watch directv channels on my pc or save shows from my directv dvr to my pc hard drive? I would like to know this answer as well but with dish network! TIA
wishbone said: zxx7x said: Is it possible to connect this to my directv receiver to watch directv channels on my pc or save shows from my directv dvr to my pc hard drive? I would like to know this answer as well but with dish network! TIA
For you satellite guys, you need something like the Slingbox. This particular device is only used for Over-the-air and cable clear QAM signals.
DirtCheap - $114.59 is the ANTOnline price. Looks like Amazon has raised its price to $149.99 + FS.
Does anyone know if a new version of this is coming out? Would be great if it has an internal HD, so it can record shows without needing a computer to be on.
I never even heard of this product until this thread. If I used this, is that mean I don't need an individual on each computer? Since this has 2 tuners built-in, am I limited to channel surf on two computers?
No it has a fifo option so many computers can access it however only 2 can only use it at one time. so if you can schedule well with vista media center you could have a dozen machines pulling qam in at various times. and you can have a 4 or 5 hdhomeruns on your network to.
problem is that most of those internal pcie cards run so damn hot and i've never had the stability with them that i get from having hdhomerun.
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