HDHomeRun
on 04.10.07, 07:17am in home theater • comments (7)
A few weeks back, I mentioned the HDHomeRun digital network tuner. I finally caved and picked one up last week.
Holy crap! this thing is freaking awesome - I plugged in two cable lines to it and after setting up the channel guides, I was easily able to stream HD content from the network to both my Macbook Pro (via VLC) and to the media center. The only bummer was that the video on the 360 the home theater was a bit jerky, but I’m betting it’s because I use a super-old PC as the MCE server (it gets like a 1.9 perf rating), so I’m now planning on replacing that as well.
Since my Vista Media Center Server basically sits in the closet and serves up photos, videos and music to the TiVo and XBox 360, I’m planning on switching that machine over to a Mac Mini running Bootcamp and Vista.
Why? Since I’ve moved all of my storage to a 2TB Infrant ReadyNAS NV and I now can tune HD channels over QAM without an internal card, the ’server’ can really turn into a small, quiet “brain” that powers a few media devices around the house. I can finally get rid of that loud, old beige case and get a nice small enclosure that doesn’t take much room and has a better perf rating that my old setup.
Josh (April 10, 2007 @ 9:57 am)
I’m still a Media Center newbie, so please excuse my ignorance. When this product says that it will work with unencrypted digital cable HDTV, does that just mean that I run a coax cable from my HD digital cable tuner set-top box to this device?
Steve (April 10, 2007 @ 8:23 pm)
Nope - coax from the line coming into the house. It wont ‘unencrypt’, but it will decode QAM channels (ie local channels).
Josh (April 11, 2007 @ 4:31 pm)
Thanks for the insight Steve
John (April 13, 2007 @ 1:34 pm)
Steve,
In Josh’s scenario, it appears he is asking if the box will play signals that have been unencrypted by his cable box as opposed to the question I think you answered which is will the HDHomeRun box actually decrypt the signals. I would be interested to know if it would work with signals that have already been decrypted from a cable box.
Thanks,
John
Steve (April 13, 2007 @ 8:27 pm)
Nope, it is the tuner. I dont think you can use it in the way you describe.. Sorry I dont have a cable box to even test that.
JohnNull (April 14, 2007 @ 5:12 pm)
I am also running the HD Home Run to feed my MCE box. I was getting some stuttering on the 360 also. Although my MCE box is not that fast, I found that the problem, in my case, was that I was trying to stream via Wifi. Some shows, like Lost, just use too much bandwidth to stream without a hard wired connection.
JRElliott (April 20, 2007 @ 4:12 pm)
Thanks sharing your experience with the HDHomeRun. Do you happen to know whether, when used with MCE, it results in a full-resolution .dvr-ms file? What I mean is if you record something that’s broadcast at 1050i, e.g., do you get a file that is truly HD? With my Fusion HDTV tuner (the USB model, not that it matters), HD programming creates a file that is 1920×1088? The reason I ask is because another network-attached tuner, the Pinnacle PCTV to Go, reportedly supports only up to 720×480.