HDHomeRun - Dual ATSC or QAM to Ethernet Box

That product looks really cool. I hope they add support for SageTV, MP, and/or MCE soon.

Great find. I'll be following this thread as I'm particularly interested in third party support.

And of course I find out about a product like this just a couple weeks after I buy my VBox 150.

That would be a very nice all-n-one for laptop use, assuming you didn't run the client form of Sage or Beyond for the laptop.

-Suntan

I wonder when they're going to get MCE support (it says they're working on it). This would be freaking perfect if it worked with MCE.

That looks awesome...and very affordable.

I paid about that much for my POS FusionHDTV5

Already built in support for Myth .20

I'm using it with OTA signals right now. It is definitely on-par with the VBOX for multipath rejection. Works great for streaming shows to my laptop although trying it with wireless (802.11g) only worked if I was close to the router but I didn't expect 802.11g to work well.

One thing I love is the very fast tuning. For some reason the Fusion, A180 and VBOX all had varying degrees of slow and cpu hogging tuning making channel changes quite ugly. This is as close to instant as I've seen although obviously the viewer can take a few seconds to sync with the new stream data.

VLC works fine but it is using overlay and can't take advantage of some of the acceleration in other drivers (like NVidia) from what I can see. I had to switch VLC to use wave out for AC3 (using DirectSound caused the sound to loop).

Once they have a Windows BDA driver out for it, it should work with quite a few software packages.

Btw, there is a new firmware release out for it now.

So is there currently a way to record with this critter aside from MythTV?

Thanks,

-john

As was mentioned above, you can use VLC in Linux or Windows as well. There is also a SageTV beta coming up soon. In the forums, they mentioned that they plan on having MCE support before the end of the year.

Is QAM supported?

Since this device seems to be a network device, does ATSC or QAM become irrelevant and it's just a matter of receiving the network-based HD stream and sending commands to control channel changing, etc?

Is multicast supported for use by multiple PCs?

This sounds like a very cool device.

Kevin

Yes.


This is unknown at the moment for Windows-based apps. The question has been asked in the HDHomerun forums, but has not been answered to date.


If you mean can it stream to any pc on the network, yes. If you mean can 2 computers access the same stream at the same time, I doubt it.


Agreed.

So that means VLC records as well as plays?

Thanks,

-john

That's affirmative.

When they do get support for MCE, will you have to use its built-in IR receiver, or will an MCE remote be able to control its tuning? I guess maybe it would be best to ask the people who are using this with MythTV how that works, since MCE isn't yet supported.

Can it also tune analog, or only ATSC? I'll tell you what though, if they get the drivers for MCE or Vista MCE finished soon, there will be a huge market for this. Thats the only way I would buy it at at least, thats for sure.

One little thing I don't get though is why not gigabit ethernet support?

Also, how would this work if one was to use it with a network media server? I assume that it would send the video over the network to the PC, which would then directly send the data to the networked server. However, would this overload the PC's network connection if two 1080i recordings were being made at the same time?

Don't get confused between the bandwidth of the device and the banwidth of the overall network. Even 2 QAM streams should fit fine on a single 100 Mbit connection from the tuner.

Your scenario would require that the PC be on gig-E, but the tuner would not need to be. 100Mbit and Gig can co-exist on every gigabit switch that I have seen.

Kevin

Does VLC have the ability to change channels? How does virtual channel mapping work?

Thanks,
Kevin

It only does ATSC (QAM/VSB); It has no encoder/decoder and thus is unable to record analog stations -- it can only pass unaltered digital data (although it can filter the data).

The signal from the hdhomerun is an MPEG transport stream sent via UDP -- in other words simply the demodulated signal, encapsulated in UDP -- QAM and VSB look almost identical. The requirements to record from an hdhomerun is pretty modest -- any machine that can dump data from the network to disk. Playback and transcoding of HD will require signifigantly more resources.

The hdhomerun has only a 100Mbps connection since that's all it needs. The maximum bandwidth for each tuner is a 40Mbps (unfiltered QAM), which means that fully loaded, the hdhomerun would only send out 80Mbps. Obviously you can buy as many of the hdhomerun devices as you can afford, and connect them to a gigabit switch and server, but the hdhomerun itself doesn't need to be gigabit.

Note: A station normally consists of several channels, broadcasting as 5-1, 5-2, 5-3 .. etc. The total for a VSB station is 20Mbps and the total for QAM is 40Mbps. A HD (1920x1080) channel might only take 15Mbps of that, while watching only that channel the throughput would be 15Mbps (the hdhomerun filters the excess data). If you had a PCI card, your CPU would be doing the filtering instead.

It is possible to stream from the hdhomerun to multiple computers through the use of broadcast addresses -- the hdhomerun does not understand multicast addresses and cannot handle addresses outside of the local subnet. Any attempt to do otherwise would require a computer as a proxy/distribution server.

The IR is completely optional and is just a passthrough -- if configured the hdhomerun will notify the host of every IR packet recieved, allowing it to be used as an IR reciever. The hdhomerun does not come with a remote nor will the device itself make use of the remote; everything is controlled via the network.

That answered all of my questions, but I just thought of one more. Until theres MCE support, theres absolutely no scheduling possible with this in Windows, right? It looks a little too complicated for me as of now, but hopefully when MCE is supported, it'll just work. Looks like this is the first possibility for me to replace my MDP-130 (I realize that this is a software decoder, but thats what I want in my next tuner anyway, so that I can completely use MCE, and nothing else supports QAM in that.)

I've used an HDHomeRun for about a week. I don't feel I can make definitive statements about too many things. Here's some early observations and take them as non-definitive. I'm using a Dell Inspiron E1505 with integrated graphics and 802.11G. Screen is 1680x1050. I'm using their Win32 client, VLC, VIsta RC2. Router is a Paradyne 6218-A1-200 which combines ADSL modem + WiFi + 4 port switch. It seems to have a strong signal everywhere in the house.

I bought this device because I hoped it would help to deliver HDTV wireless anywhere in the house. I've been using a Fusion Gold USB HDTV tuner but hoped the HDHomeRun would eliminate the need for an attached device.

Their product is clearly a work in progress. If you have a need for this product and don't expect a robust offering, you might just have a satisfactory experience. SlingBox software quaility it most definitely is not. I'd say it's more like the early days of HDTV tuner cards. Even now, I find HDTV tuner cards to be quirky.

1. When it works reliably, it works really well. I'm very pleased at those moments. At the best moments, I get a beautiful HDTV display on my notebook computer. CPU utilization on my Core Duo 2 1.6GHz is around 30% (one CPU).

2. Sometimes I get lots of pixelization. This is clearly due to a marginal WiFi signal. Simply tilting the notebook's LCD screen one inch can make the difference between a solid video image and a mess of dropouts. I'm really suprised my notebook's wireless is so sensitive. Weirdly, distance doesn't seem to be much of a problem. I can go to the far corners of the house and watch a beautiful solid HDTV image on my bed. At other momements, I have to find the wireless sweet spot and not budge at all lest the display pixelize. I think I'm finding that once the display pixelizes, the wireless gets into a bad image mood that requires notebook repositioning and restarting to get out of.

3. During fast pans, the pixels display in waves. While I really don't think the source material is the problem, I can't imagine what would be causing panning waves. CPU utilization is only 30%. I wonder if this is some kind of MPEG decoding issue.

4. There seems to be many ways of hanging VLC. I frequently have to close VLC and restart it. This is particularly true with QAM. Some QAM channels are guaranteed killers. This is also true with the Fusion USB device and their latest software.

5. I'd be generous to say their software client is minimalistic. With availability of MythTV, SageTV and WMC, their client may become irrelevant. It is possible that one of these media center softwares will provide a shortcut to a reliable, fully featured experience.

6. Seems like QAM tuner sensitivity is not so good. This could be entirely because my QAM signal isn't adequate.

7. The screen display is so sensitive to wireless vageries that I plan to use it to test wireless connections. It's better than pinging a router.

8. Using Win32 client and VLC requires channel tuning in the client and subchannel selection in VLC->Navigation. This setup lacks integration.

9. Using Win32 client and VLC, the device continues to pump out packets after I shut the software down. This causes my wireless connection to be choked with unused packets. I'm working with tech support on this issue.

Edit: 15 Nov 2006 - Added 8 and 9.

Bob, I agree with your review. The current Windows experiance is awkward. Although I've not had problems with VLC crashing.

I'm using mine with a new Roku HD1000 client written by TheEndless. Of course this is a wired setup but it works beautifully. This allows direct streaming from the HDHR to the Roku with no computer or other software.

Concerning your wireless experiance, I suspect that the 19 MBS of OTA HDTV and up to 39 MBS of 256 QAM is at the limit or exceeds the throughput of 801.11g. WiFi typically runs a maximum usable data rate that is half, or less, of the theoretical maximum.

Wow - this thing sounds fantastic. Thanks for posting this.

I was wondering which card I should get next since my Fusion tuner died. I used it for QAM tuning and it worked OK. This looks to solve a lot of problems! Thank goodness it has QAM support!

Sage TV support is currently in an open beta and works for both ATSC and QAM though right now only ATSC major channels are supported (this is being addressed)

We have a working plug-in/hack for the HDHomeRun and BTV, using a plug-in called BTVNegotiator.....basically, we use BTV's EPG, assign channels and mapping in BTVNegotiator, and BTVNego sets up the HDHR and starts/stops VLC recording.
I've been using it successfully to record QAM, both HD and SD, for over a week now with no problems.

Current limitations:

1. only 1 of the 2 tuners is supported so far (need to control 2 separate VLC instances---any experts out there?)
2. the PID filtered TS files have, as expected, corupt PMT (basically lookup tables) so they will not play back in some applications and on network media players (zensonic, iodata) without being fixed by a program such as mpeg2repair or HDTVtoMPEG2, after which they are fine. automatic postprocessing with these programs is not yet implemented.

A true integration with BTV is planned for after Sage integration is complete, but we couldn't wait

If you're interested, head over to the BTV forum for details

Two major discoveries.

Attached the HDHomeRun to my cables home run. I am able to reliably get most clear QAM channels. That is a major improvement. I suspect the devices QAM sensitivity is subpar but we need other experiences to confirm. I will compare sensitivity against my Divico HDTV USB device.

I attached the notebook to the device using Ethernet. This also made a major improvement. The digital sparkles went away.

With these two changes, the experience is much better.

There is still one non-HDHomeRun performance mystery to solve. Using wireless, sometimes I get a solid image, other times I get lots of breakup. I thought I solved the problem by reverting to a better wireless router, a Linksys WRT54GL. I immediately got a solid 5 bar signal everywhere. Now however, like my previous router, I can put my notebook on top of the router and only get 3 of 5 bars. I cannot figure out the drop in performance. I have used NetStumbler to confirm there is no channel or nearby interference. I can duplicate the results on identical notebooks and seemingly on identical routers. I have also tried high gain antennas. Maybe it is time to buy a WiSpy.

Commodore 64 or AVS mods,

Can we get a title change. The title suggests ATSC support only. That is not fair to the manufacturer. The device supports any combination of ATSC and clear QAM on either of the two cable ports.

I suggest something like "HDHomeRun - Dual ATSC or QAM to Ethernet Box"

Just ordered, so thanks for all y'alls input so far.

P