HDHomerun Prime Owners Thread - Page 26

I got a PS3 and now I'll have a reason to use it! . I wonder if it'll record too.

Of course unplugging the prime will effect your recordings.

You need to block the mac / ip address of their computers from connecting to the router at the pre-determined times. If you have a dd-wrt router this should be easy to do (I don' t know about Tomato f/w routers but it should be the same).

One way to only have access on a single computer is to have that computer access the Internet and your network over wi-fi and then have the HDHR connect to it via Ethernet. That won't allow them to access the device at all though, so I'm not sure that suits what you want to do.

Back in the old days, when our kids had their own land lines, I installed a relay with a timer. 9PM and the timer pulls the relay and that would disconnect the connection going to the kids phones. No calls in. No calls out. They never really knew how I did it. Our daughter would come running downstairs and loudly say "Daddy, I was in the middle of an important phone call, PLEASE turn it back on". And I would say "You have a clock in your room and you know when 9 o'clock is, too late". And if there were any discipline issues, I could adjust the timer for a weekend or a week.

Good luck.

Oh yea, one time our son was watching TV past time. I told him to turn it off. He turned down the sound. I went back and cut the plug off the AC cord. Problem solved.

Do I need to have my HTPC on all the time to record shows with HDHomePrime?

Will HDHomePrime be able to wake up my HTPC when the recording time come? How do I set that up?

Also, will HDHomePrime work with a harddrive connected to a router w/o the htpc on?

Thanks

Yes.

WMC does that automatically, nothing to set up as long as your PC sleeps/wakes normally.

No.

Do you need to leave the HTPC on all the time to record shows?

While slowbiscuit said yes, (s)he really meant that every time it is recording it has to be on. After a scheduled recording, it will resume sleep.

You cannot put your computer to S5 state and have it resume on a timer. It's technologically impossible without a second electronic "wake-up" device

Most people (like myself) don't use S5 at all anymore. I typically use S3 since all my systems use solid-state drives now, and with SSDs most modern OS will disable S4 when booting from SSD. WMC can wake your system from S3 to record and resume S3 afterwards

Excellent. That sounds great. I was worried I need to leave the htpc on all the time, which would be quite inefficient.

Thanks slowbiscuit and dark_slayer!

I have mine set to S3 sleep mode I think and when it's sleeping everything stops running and it's dead quiet like it's off. It only draws a watt or less when sleeping and the power light blinks to let you know it's still on. I did have to play around with some settings to make it sleep and wake up reliably without crashing but now it just does it's thing and I don't miss any shows. I just check my recorded TV folder every so often and edit the captures and watch them later.
I even added a 2TB drive just for holding shows internally and I have a couple of big externals as well tied into my media player with programs saved on them. Everything plays nice over the network too.

I leave my HT computer on all the time, otherwise I get problems with HDMI and/or returning from sleep mode. I'll turn on the TV, which is connected to the computer via HDMI, and I'll get a completely black screen. Sometimes, I can get the computer to wake up by pressing random buttons on the remote I use to control WMC, but sometimes I have to power down the computer and power back up. This problem was much worse when I put the computer in sleep mode.

By chance are you using an SSD drive? I had tons of problems with my computer returning from sleep with a generic SSD drive. Replacing it with a quality SSD fixed all my sleep problems.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

Another thing you might try is to disconnect the HTMI cable from the computer, and then reconnect it. This occasionally happens on mine, and I used to reboot too, until I tried this. Works every time for me.

I'm not sure if it's not recommended to do this with the computer running, but I haven't experienced any issues doing it.

Sent from my Nexus 7

Thank you. I'm not using a SSD. I've tried everything I can think of, including an HDMI detective tool that sits between the HT computer and the TV. That helped but did not eliminate the problem. Unfortunately, I can barely turn on and off the computer, and the button for that is on the front top of the computer; it would be extremely difficult to plug and unplug the HDMI cable (not to mention having my wife do this while watching two kids who are screaming for their one show per day isn't going to be easy). This is on a Dell Zino, which is getting close to its end of life. I'll give your suggestions a try on my next machine.

Take a look here. The information is for Denon AVR's but may help you anyhow.

Interesting night....


So My prime arrived today at my door. Yesterday I went to the cable company and got the cablecard and the tuner (motorola) for the switched channels. Anyways I get all the cables ran and plug in the the power to both. I arrange some cables why I wait for stuff to boot up and I smell a burning smell. I hurry and locate the smell that is coming from the prime box. I unplug the power and notice that I accidentally plugged in the tuner dc adapter into the prime . I hope to god it still works and let it sit there for a bit to cool off. I plug it in to the correct adapter 5v 3a vs the tuner 12v 750ma and it actually turns on. I couldn't believe it, so I try the tuner and it wont turn on.

I call the cable company and they say it can be swapped if im there in 15 minutes. Drive over there and they are closed. Call them and they are like oh sorry he must have told you the wrong time. They give me a $10 credit on my account and then i drive to radio shack to find another dc adapter. No luck at radio shack and meijer. So i head back home and just for the hell of it install everything. The firmware updates, it finds 3 tuners. I go into media center, call the cable company, pair the card, and boom I am watching tv. I only get the local channels, until I pick up the tuner tomorrow. It records 3 shows at once just fine.

I can not believe it still works after almost burning up in smoke. I still feel so stupid, but that was an easy mix up since the dc adapters are the same exact type of plug. I hope I get all the channels tomorrow when I pick up the tuner replacement.

5v x 3amp = 15VA whereas 12V x 0.75amp = 9VA so that is probably why you didn't fry the Prime..

It would be nice if each different voltage/amperage adapter had a different size plug though.

Glad it isn't fried!

I can't believe a $200 wall-wart powered piece of electronics isn't protected against over voltage...

3V is a lot. You'd have to add quite a bit of protection for that, in terms of cost. Plus, who makes this mistake? I have tons of electronics with wall worts and have never made this mistake. It's rare mistake (though reasonable), but something probably few if any manufacturers consider.

a 50 cent voltage regulator? a 2 cent zener diode? a fuse?

I doubt that the ability to withstand attachment of incorrect power supplies was part of the the development spec. It would be nice, but you start including all the would be nice stuff and it adds up. I imagine they would love to find ways to reduce the cost instead.

It works great, all channels come in and I can record 3 at once. It doesn't smell like burning electronics anymore too!

I found that I needed cooling for these units as well. I bought laptop cooling pads for each of my primes and for my cable modem and the majority of my television/internet problems have stopped.

Hmm. I haven't had any cooling issues with the prime or my modem. Do you have them in a confined space?

This sounds like a HDMI handshake issue. I have encountered the same problem before, and I install a little program called hdmion. I have it programmed to my "F2" key. So, whenever this happens, I just click on my "F2" key and it would wake up the screen. I don't think keep rebooting your PC is a good idea. I hope your issue will be resolved soon.

I just tried my new HDHomeRun Prime yesterday. I don't have my cablecard yet, so i just tried it w/o the card and hook up to my timewarner cable. I followed the instructions, and the HDHomeRun configuration found a whole bunch of channles. I can view all the channels in HDHomerun Quickview. Then, I went into WMC to configure. The WMC was trying to scan channels too. At around 60% of channel scanning, I saw it had found over 60 channels. However, then it reached around 94%, all of a sudden all the channels are gone. At the end (100%), it only retained 1 channel.

Has anyone encounter this problem before? Is this a issue with the HDHomeRun Prime or WMC?

I've had them in several places and always had problems. Now I have them in a semi-confined space but the fans are keeping them very cool. Certainly cooler than when they were out in the open. My basement is always cool but my primes and my modem were never cool. I was constantly resetting them but I haven't had to since I started using fans months ago.

Installed my HDHR Prime yesterday with my FIOS Cable Card, Win 8 pro with Media Center. It's a quite smooth process, the activation of the cablecard was very easy. And video quality is great, I can't see any difference between this and my FIOS DVR.

One thing that really bothers me, is just how long it take for my xbox 360s to power up and get ready for watching TV. I have xbox 360s in my basement and my HTPC in my living room. I counted, it took 2.5 minutes!!! for xbox to power up and launch MC extender. That's so painful. .

How do you guys deal with that? I don't think I can bear that.

I guess one way of dealing with it is to keep xbox on, it seems it will consume ~70W power in idle state. Not most green approach.

I am also considering getting another HTPC, but then I can't share the recording between living room & basement.

Would love to hear your experience.

I just have my 360 boot right to WMC. By the time I'm ready to sit down, it's ready to go. I don't find the wait too bad. Better than the $30 a month for the Whole Home DVR and an HD reciever.

Do you have the xbox setup to boot into WMC automatically? Ram on the host computer is factor in speed of boot. When I doubled the ram from 2 to 4GB on my old main HTPC it made a great difference in opening and channel changing speed for the xbox. My new HTPC allows my xbox to boot in 54 seconds including time to a tuned channel [3.4 GHz processor and 8 GB 1600 DDR3 ram and an SSD for OS and programs]. Maybe Sammy2, shortcut3D or foxbat121 can comment on xbox vs echo boot speed.

With fios [and comcast] you can share all recordings except those made on copyonce channels or in their case the premium channels so another PC may not be out of the question. Also consider the boot time of a computer to having a channel tuned.

To let you know I have essentially both situations going at the same time for over a year now. My livingroom TV has an xbox and my old HTPC which serves as a storage device for music primarily. The only annoying thing for me with the PC is it is only on about once a week and the guide always seems to need to be updated on start up. In the past I would transfer recordings I wanted to save from my older HTPC to this unit. My new HTPC has 2TB drive and is dedicated to TV only for now, will not worry about archiving for a while.

Anyone else using InstaTV? I ponied up for the InstaTV Pro version. My experience is that it seems to hold a lot of promise but feels buggy right now. I have a Windows 7 Media Center computer with the HDHomeRun Prime w/cablecard and a Comcast subscription. Tuning in the copy-protected channels is important to me right now (though I keep thinking about dropping my cable subscription all the way down to just tuning in the major networks), so I can't make use of the InstaTV server component. The server component would do on-the-fly transcoding of video to an MP4 format, but only works with ClearQAM stations. Since I can't/haven't tried the server component out, I can't speak to that. Without that, what I can do is still tune into every channel I subscribe to.

Because there's no server component doing the heavy lifting, you have to rely on your iPhone/iPad's CPU to display the MPEG2 HD streams, which I honestly didn't think it would be up to, but it *seems* to be up to the task. I say "seems" because I will get occasional (sometimes frequent) pixelization/macroblocking/freezes. But I suspect that this is more of a bug with the program that can be worked out and not indicative that my iPhone 5's CPU can't handle the decoding task, as it will other times play the video perfectly fine for an extended period of time.

The other, more minor, bug is that scrolling through the channel listing is slow/choppy when you are scrolling past the first page-full of channels. Because it wants to show me a thousand different possible channels, this becomes a problem when I need to scroll all the way up to the channel numbers that are past channel 1000, which is where Comcast now keeps all of their HD channels. A solution to this seems to be to add all of your favorite channels to the "Favorites" list and then just use that list exclusively.

If you don't need cablecard-encrypted channels (i.e., you can be happy with just ClearQAM), I'd be interested to know how well the server component works, and if it eliminates the pixelization/macroblocking/freezes that I've experienced without it. Also, using the server component apparently allows you to tie into the Windows Media Center program guide to see what's actually *on* the various channels. Without it, all I get is a list of channel names.

Of course, my ideal situation would be to not only be able to see the WMC guide, but also be able to pull up the Recorded TV section, as well as pause, rewind, and fast-forward. I didn't mention it before, but this app only allows you to watch live TV. There is no on-board storage buffer, so you can't pause or rewind. Still, if the PQ issues I mentioned previously can be nailed down, I'm hoping that this can be a workable solution for my loft which I'm setting up as a craft room for my wife and an exercise area (for all of us). I don't have a spare flat-screen TV for the loft, and was going to hook up an old 20" 4:3 TV with a Comcast tuner, which will give us live TV, but with fairly crappy PQ. Plus the old CRT TV is bulky. I'd much rather be able to use one of our iPads as a portable TV for that area. If I can jury-rig some sort of mount for our elliptical, it would look like a larger TV compared to the 20" TV which would be situated farther from the elliptical, and when my wife is seated at her craft table, she could have her iPad next to her on the table, so it would also look larger than the 20" TV several feet away. On the elliptical, we could also easily plug headphones into it. Plus, we actually have two iPads, so we could both be up there (maybe I need to buy a 2nd elliptical ) and working out at the same time while each watching two different TV shows.

On a separate topic...I posted about this a while ago but no one seemed to comment on it, but I figured I'd bring it up again...

I'm using Plex and AirVideo to allow for playing back my previously recorded .wtv shows. Plex is my preferred solution, but requires an additional app/script to be scheduled to move/rename your TV shows periodically, before Plex can successfully get the metadata for the shows. Even then, it sometimes can't find a match for the show (I believe it uses TVDB online to get that info). But, when that works, you're rewarded with being able to open up the Plex app on your iPhone/iPad and have your TV shows categorized by season, complete with the episode summaries, etc. The downside is that when Plex can't find the metadata for the show, you won't even see the show at all in the Plex app. That's when you have to resort to using the AirVideo app.

The AirVideo app won't give you any metadata at all, but it will let you view your recordings by file directory on your server, so you'll see everything that's out there and, thankfully, WMC names the files such that you'll know the show name and original air date. Both apps' server apps do a great job of on-the-fly transcoding of the MPEG2 video to MP4 format. This all assumes that you don't mind having a competent server running 24/7. Mine has an Intel i7 chip, but even an i5 (maybe even an i3?) could probably be up to the task.
Edited by srauly - 1/6/13 at 6:51am