Will the SiliconDust HDHomerun Prime slow down the home network?

According to their website it is gigabit. You should not have a problem at all,wired. Wireless, now that's a whole different animal.

BTW the HDHR Prime is on a one-day sale today at woot.com for $135 shipped.

Anyone running one with a separate network card? Would that work?

xnappo

Plug it into your router.

The SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime is auto-MDIX, so it can be directly connected to the PC without a cross-over cable. However, as others have mentioned you can barely get gigabit to go over 1% network utilization with a 6-tuner HDHR-6CC-3X2. Typical, HD broadcast streams max out at 20Mbps. Therefore, a 3-tuner will reliably work on a 100base-TX network.

Yeah, but that uses bandwidth on the router. What I was getting at is that if you put a second network card into your primary HTPC you would then not impact your primary router/network bandwidth. But the question is then can you still share the tuners wit the main network? Maybe have to setup a bridge....

xnappo

Plug it into your router.

x2 (well, x3 since this is the second time you said it, lol). This tuner will not impact your router.

Watching a Dodger game in HD on my HD HomeRun Prime. Task Manager reports a link utilization of 1.35% of my Gig NIC.

Don't overthink/overdesign here. Connect it to your router and be done with it.

That assumes running gige. I am using MoCA which would definitely struggle if recording three shows and streaming a bluray.. So - can you use a 2nd NIC and bridge them to still share the tuners or not?

xnappo
Edited by xnappo - 6/6/12 at 11:23pm

I was in the same predicament and purchased a small gigabit switch which has my main htpc, hdhr, hdhr prime, movie server, and MoCA uplink. This way if I'm ripping a movie or recording several channels at once my MoCA network isn't saturated with that traffic still allowing for my other devices to access content without issue.

That makes sense.
Thanks,
xnappo

My internet is Modem to router to pc. Where would I plug my HD homerun prime in my router?

Any open ethernet port.

Ok thanks . I get the cablecard this week looking forward to using this. Thank You

are you referring to the bandwidth used by the device.
Is this a major consern?
I noticed the new ones will convert to H264 for better utilization of bandwidth so it must be of some consern.

does anyone have the bandwith usage for each channel with HD feed over the network?
Edited by etrin - 1/28/13 at 10:22am

HD channels typically average about 15mbps per channel. Network bandwidth is never a concern unless you put Prime on a really shady network links. The advantage of Prime is you can put it anywhere on your network. You don't connect Prime through some non-gigabit networking to your PC. Put it next to your PC with a gigabit switch and shouldn't have any problem on network traffic.

The main reason the new HDHR comes with the H.264 transcoding is primary to support DLNA streaming on various tablets and devices. None of the tablet on the market today support MPEG2 decoding due to licensing issues ($$). And iPad doesn't even include any MPEG2 hardware at all.

My Prime is right at the cable drop, next to my modem, router and switch.

yes but with a 3 tuner card thats 45mb to your computer I guess that is what he is saying.
Gigabit is 1000mbps (not counting overhead) so that is minscule so no way that is going to bog down your network.
now you throw in a streaming blu ray at 40-50MB and yea it could cause you some problems.
most blu ray are 20-30 MB but I have read of some doing 50+, like the bird seen used by some that will hit 70MB

Short version: don't worry about the network traffic from the HDHR with a Gbe switch

Detailed Version:

3 HD broadcast streams @19.2mbps: 57.6mbps
Bluray max a/v bitrate: 48mbps

Combined traffic of 3 HD broadcasts + 1 BD stream: 105.6mbps

Gbe max transfer rate: 1000mbps

Let's use a conservative estimate for actual throughput of half Gbe speeds: 500mbps

105.6 / 500 = 21.12% of network bandwidth.

You still have enough bandwidth to stream 8 more blurays at max bitrate even if you are only getting half your rated Gbe network transfer speeds.

Edit: Also, all these values are mbps (lower case) meaning bits, not MBps (upper case) meaning bytes.
Edited by vladd - 1/28/13 at 12:26pm

thanks vladd I was saying MB not mb.
my bad.

No worries. Happens frequently.

For the record, I have two of the HDHomeRun Duals (the non CableCard version) and I've recorded up to 6 HD shows* at once (about 12mbps each) while streaming Blurays to two devices.

* Before someone thinks my math is wrong about recording 6 shows on 4 tuners, cable supports up to 38.4mbps per frequency but each digital channel will have a max rate of 19.2mbps. Depending on your recording software (NextPVR in my case), it's possible to record all digital channels that are on the same frequency with a single tuner. This is not possible with CableCard tuners, you can only tune a single digital channel at a time per tuner.

When you use a gigabit switch, it is a point-to-point link between the switch and the device. Your switch doesn't have a maximum bandwidth of 1Gb/s spread out or shared to all the ports... it's a point-to-point connection at the advertised speed. Each port on the switch has a maximum speed of 1Gb/s... so if you have 8 ports, then the aggregate speed of the switch would be 8Gb/s. The only way bandwidth is ever shared across all the ports is if you have an ethernet "hub" and not a switch. I don't think they even make hubs anymore.

If your PC has a 1Gb/s NIC, then again... it's a point-to-point link with the switch, and the maximum bandwidth is available to it, even if you have massive amounts of traffic going over the other switch ports. Now, if you have a really cheap switch then you may not enjoy the full aggregate speed over all the switch ports, but even cheapo $25 gigabit switches can easily provide the aggregate speed. I've had data transferred from one PC to a server at gigabit speeds, iSCSI transfers at gigabit speeds, recording 6! cablecard streams, and watching netflix and torrenting all at the same time, without any loss of speed... all on a cheapo $25 gigabit switch.

I never said anything about the speed being shared across ports. The reason I used a conservative estimate were for other reasons. Less than ideal drivers, tcp overhead, rss, network throttling index, etc.

Sorry, vladd, it wasn't a reply to your last post... it was just a general post mostly for the OP.

Ah, gotcha.

Some folks might call that a bit extreme. Nothing like a little multitasking to save time!

Actually, it is M. M = Mega, m = milli

An 8 port Gigabit switch actually has 16Gbps forwarding capacity, not 8. Unless you are working at half-duplex...