HDHomeRun - Dual ATSC or QAM to Ethernet Box - Page 65

The way I have it set up it 2 PCs can use the 2 tuners as if it's a true network device. As I mentioned earlier, I don't know the technical details, but I believe there's something about the software/firmware that allows it to operate this way.

Have you checked over at the Silicon Dust forum about your problem?

Allen, I have one HDHR plugged directly into a PC's second NIC (actually an ethernet to USB adapter in one of the PC's USB ports). I did that to make sure that the PC could make recordings from the HDHR even when my LAN is offline (which is the case every night after I go to bed). As you suggested, this effectively turns the HDHR into a USB tuner and it works very well that way. (I think that Keenan must have his PC's NIC configured to bridge his two networks, unlike my setup)

I have another HDHR and PC connected to a gigabit switch and it turns out that this also works for recordings when the rest of the network is powered down, as long as the switch stays powered up continuously (even though the HDHR is only powered when the PC is awake, because it's plugged into a smart power strip).

I've never noticed the problem that you describe, but from the other posts I'm guessing that's perhaps because none of my HDHR traffic goes through my router's switch. However, the explanation is suspect since each HDHR recording is at most causing only about 20 Mbps of traffic and that leaves lots of holes between those "boxcars" on a gigabit LAN!

My theory is that you don't want a large continuous stream of traffic which is known to be headed for another device on the LAN to hit the smart router that is connected to the WAN. Because every packet that hits that router has to be inspected by the router.

Now, if you have a big, expensive, enterprise-grade router with a really powerful chip in it, then it's probably not an issue. But if you have a typical, cheap, under-powered consumer-grade router that's a lot of worthless effort being expended by the router.

Isolating the HDHRs behind a dumb switch leaves the router free to spend it's time dealing with traffic coming in from the WAN and with traffic from the LAN that might actually be headed out to the WAN instead of wasting it's time dealing with all the HDHR traffic that will never leave the LAN.

+1 don't assume consumer-grade wireless router will do a good job routing traffics. A gigabit switch is a great solution.

I've been recommended the same thing from the silicondust forums as well. I've been looking to get a gs108t to help manage my flow of traffic.

Hi Terry. Like i said I put in a new Netgear N750 (WNDR4000) when I first noticed this problem. Its suppose to stream HD and my recordings are fine. But they were also fine on the older Netgear box. Its sooo confusing. I don't understand why there is not enough power to handle the HD stream and wireless operations too. Going to play around till I hopefully sort it out.

Allen

This raises some interesting thoughts, back in ye-olden days of where all the devices connected directly to the same coax cable or hub, the situation was a lot simpler. But in the these days of switches and smart routers the situation is a lot more complicated.

[ed: deleted wrong stuff to avoid confusing people]

Ports other than the ones where the HDHR and the HTPC are connected should be completely unaffected by the traffic from the HDHR to the HTPC.

[ed: deleted wrong stuff to avoid confusing people]


But it's even more complicated since switches guarantee full duplex communications. So the traffic from the HDHR only matters in the case of devices trying to send data TO the HTPC. For devices getting data FROM the HTPC, the traffic from the HDHR doesn't matter at all (well, there are some control packets that go from the HTPC to the HDHR but it's a trivially small amount compared to the data from the HDHR to the HTPC).

This is probably also how enterprise-grade smart routers work, too. But, I'm guessing that consumer grade routers don't have the extra ASIC chip that they would need to act as a full-fledged switch and that everything is handled by the CPU. So how they work will be highly dependant on their firmware and how powerful their CPU is and they could vary a lot from model to model.

[The issue I'm unclear on is do dumb switches buffer and retransit data at the highest possible rate? For example, does the traffic from the HDHR to the switch happen at 100Mbps, because that's all the HDHR can do. And then does the dumb switch buffer that data and then retransmit it to the HTPC at 1Gbps. I serious doubt that this happens in dumb switches, but it might happen in smart routers.]


[Follow-up: I ran an experiment last night and in fact dumb switches do retransmit the data from 100Mbps device at higher speeds to 1Gbps devices. Color me surprised. Dumb switches are smarter than I was giving them credit for.]

Hi,


EDIT: I have found perhaps the needed information.

Please see:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...postcount=3578

I have two old style HDHR boxes with two tuners each.

Three of the tuners are connected to my main antenna (Sutro).

The fourth is connected to an antenna in my attic which has a metallic roof. It is my old four bay bow-tie UHF antenna on a rotor. The best I can do for KTNC which is in a different direction (On the Devil Mountain).

KTNC just added a fourth stream and changed the previous names.

Now:

KTNC-SF
KTNC-SA
KTNC-Th
KNTC-Br (new)

KTNC-Th is "This Bay Area" which runs many old movies I wish to watch.

The "HDHomeRun Setup" appears to have just one list for all tuners (Attached) and some entries in the list are old and bad.

You can scan for each tuner but how this single list is affected is a puzzle. I would like to start completely over with an empty table.

And some data appears to come from a SD server which may be the source of the bad data.

Can someone please explain how to properly setup for multiple antennas and if I should NOT exchange data with the silicondust server.

A separate program "CW_EPG" is reading the data for the tuners and it appears to be getting confused.

SHF

Greetings,

I have 2 of the grey dual tuner HDHomeRuns. One of my channels, Fox, will occasionally pixelate, due to it being the weakest of my channels. My 2 HDHomeRuns are attached to a gigabit switch. They are fed by an antenna, which is split by an 8 port signal amplifier/splitter.

I am debating about replacing my 2 old grey HDHomeRuns with 2 of the new black models. On Amazon's listing for it, http://www.amazon.com/SiliconDust-HD...0708546&sr=1-1 someone uploaded a graph (3rd picture from the left), showing that the new black model handles weaker signals better. It has less high and low spikes for signal strength. It's more consistent.

I'm just wondering how accurate that graph is. Do any of you guys have experience upgrading from the original grey dual tuner to the new black dual tuner? And did you see an improvement on your marginal signal strength channels?

I have both an HDHR2 and HDHR3. IMHO, the performance of the HDHR3 is almost identical to the HDHR2. They both seem to dropout at the same time on the same signals as far as I can tell.

It should be noted that since I'm in Phoenix, I don't suffer from a lot of the static multipath and back-end problems that others face, so perhaps the HDHR3 would help in those situations. I do suffer from dynamic mutlipath (due to aircraft) and dynamic fade problems (due to a tree) which both tuners seem to have about equal difficulty handling.

AFA, reported signal strength is concerned, IMHO, my HDHR2 with really old firmware gives the more accurate readings, whereas the HDHR3 gives inflated numbers that aren't consistant from channel to channel. I base this on comparing them to the signal strengths reported by my LG-3510 STB and an old Panasonic DVR (which has since died). The HDHR2 gives readings that are consistent with those other two tuners whereas the HDHR3 gives higher readings on some channels, but doesn't seem to actually perform any better or worse than the HDHR2. When the HDHR2 glitches, so does the HDHR3.

YMMV.

> On Amazon's listing for it, [ ... ] someone uploaded a graph
> (3rd picture from the left), showing that the new black model
> handles weaker signals better. It has less high and low spikes
> for signal strength. It's more consistent.

The Amazon listing looks reasonable, but the graph isn't showing up for me.
Could someone post the URL for the graph?

http://tiny url.com/7skpurp

Re-enter the above URL with out the space between "tiny" and "url" and it should load the Amazon page with that graph image. I posted the image below, but there's some mouse-over notes you might want to read.

I've been rather disappointed in the HDHR3. Stations I receive are only 3-13 miles from me and I can do fairly well with a $10 Radio Shack rabbit ear connected to my TiVo. As I said, fairly well but I wanted to improve the signal, especially on a couple of VHF stations plus I wanted more tuners than the 2 in the TiVo so I got the HDHomeRun and put up an outside antenna.

The signal readings on WMC were mostly 4 bars with 5 on some channels so I was OK though I was getting some pixeling from time to time. Just playing around one day, I pulled out of my junk drawer a Pinnacle mini USB tuner I bought on a lark from Woot a few years ago. I connected it to the $10 Radio Shack rabbit ears and did a channel scan on WMC. Amazing, I was getting 5 stars on all but two channels (the two VHF channels).

So how come my indoor antenna on the USB tuner was outperfoming the HDHomeRun on an outdoor antenna (CM 4228HD)? I ran the outside antenna to the TiVo and got great signal strength (90+) on all channels. I then connected it to the USB tuner and got 5 bars on all channels, including the VHF stations.

Puzzled, I connected the HDHomeRun directly to the Ethernet port of the computer and tested the signal strength. The results were the same as when the HDHomeRun was on the network, 4 stars most channels, 2 on some. Just for grins, I connected the $10 Radio Shack rabbit ear to the HDHomeRun with it connected directly to the PC's Ethernet port. That got me no more than 3 bars on any channel!

What a shame. I've now made the USB tuner my primary tuner in WMC and the HDHomeRun as 2nd and 3rd tuners except for the 2 stations it consistently receives well.

Funny you should mention the Woot Pinnacle tuners, as I have two of them myself in addition to an older HDHR. With my setup, the HDHR performed better than the two USB tuners, so they were my #3 and #4 tuners.

We've moved and have gotten DirecTV, but I really miss having 4 tuners. Just talked to my landlord last week and she said that I could put up an antenna if I wanted to. I still have my two outdoor antennas, so I think I will try the smaller of the two.

I don't think the WMC signal bars are known for their accuracy. Did the USB tuner perform better than the HDHR, all other things being equal? By "perform" I mean give you less pixelation over a significant length of time and several trials. Did the Tivo? Did you check the HDHR using the SiliconDust config (signal meters) and setup (useful for selecting tuners and tuning channels) programs? Those are the programs you should be using.

I agree with this. I much prefer the TiVo meters but we work with what we have.


I'll put it this way, we were satisfied with the TiVo with the indoor antenna. I then went the HDHomeRun with an outside antenna for two more tuners and to bring in a low power VHF station on the other side of town. That is when we really began to have a few recordings that had enough break-up to make them almost unwatchable. So, I started using the USB tuner. For about two months I've been using it as my primary OTA recording source and I, and more importantly my wife, have been much happier with the results.


I did use it to get the best aim for the antenna. Of course, I can't use them to compare results between the TiVo vs. HDHomeRun vs. USB tuner.

Sounds thorough. Glad you found something that works well.

I'm nowhere near an expert on them, but from what I've read tuners and antennas interact in funny ways. A number of years back there was a lot of discussion about some tuners being too sensitive to strong signals and people were getting dropouts and breakups because of it.

At 11 miles you are quite close to those towers and the signal might be overloading the HDHR's tuner. Or put another way, it is possible that your Pinnacle tuner is not as sensitive as the HDHR's tuner and this is why it works better than the HDHR.

I don't know if the HDHR has that same problem, but you might just want to see if there is a way to attenuate (if that is the right word for lowering its signal strength) the signal going from your outdoor antenna to the HDHR. Of course, you already have a working solution, so this would just be an exercise to pinpoint the reason for the HDHR's poor behavior in your home.

Not that it helps you, but my HDHR works as well as the tuner in my Tivo with my roof antenna. I'm 40 miles away from the closest towers and 70 miles away (over ocean) from the furthest towers.

I think the explanation is that the HDHomeRun is actually 3 different tuners, so it has to split the cable/antenna input into 3 outputs, one for each tuner. Now I don't think anyone makes a 3 way splitter, to it is probably a 4 way splitter.

As we all know, you don't get something for nothing, so when a signal is split, each output only gets a fraction of the original signal. If it splits 4 ways, each tuner only gets 1/4 of the signal (a 7dB signal loss).

So here is an experiment you can try. Hook up one 4 way splitter, (or chain together two 2 way splitters), plug that into your USB tuner and see what your signal strength is then. My guess is it will more closely follow what you see with the HDHomeRun.

Greg

Possibly something to that, though as close as I am I feel my results should still be better.

I wanted to keep things simple in my original post so I didn't go into this but for a brief period, I had the original HDHR, the one with two inputs. I had two small antennas connected, each aimed at differnt stations. I was very pleased with it.

Unfortunately, we had a flood about 2 months after I installed it and the basement equipment was all caught in the water. I didn't bother getting a new HDHomeRun until the new model came out. I guess a lot of people prefer the single input but I now realize dual inputs were better for me. I should probabaly buy a used one off eBay.

But, I'm not giving up on what I now have. I'll still do some experimenting. I've tried a pre-amplifier but I really couldn't tell any real difference or it probably did slightly worse. I'm also going to try putting up a 2nd antenna and try combining the signals to see. That might serve to weaken the signal from each antenna if Hyrax's theory is correct. I'm a big believer in trial and error as long as it doesn't get too costly.

I just installed an antenna on the roof yesterday for the first time since we moved last October. We used an antenna at our old place for over 4 years, and I had an HDHR and two USB tuners and there was a few occasions when I was actually using all 4 tuners, which I thought was odd because all we got were the big stations (Fox, CBS, etc)

When we moved to the new place we went back to DirecTV but the two-tuner box we always had to pick and choose what we wanted to watch, and when new seasons started, we weren't able to just record everything like we had in the past so that we didn't miss new shows that turned out to be good. We're still obviously going to use DirecTV (2 year contract) but at least now we have the flexibility to record OTA stuff onto the HTPC if we need backup tuners. I don't know if I'll go with the two USB tuners in addition to the HDHR, but I do have that option.

I spent an hour or two setting up the gable mast (moved it from the front of the house to the back) and hooked up the antenna, ran the cable to the basement to an 8-way powered/amplified splitter and the HDHR found every channel I expected it to. And that's even with taking a swag at aiming the antenna the direction that I thought it should be pointed.

So what do I do when I'm not 100% happy with something. I order another one.

Just grabbed one for $69.99 + $5.00 S&H on Woot.

As I said in one of my later posts, I'm still experimenting. On a whim, I jointed two antennas, the one I was already using and a scanner antenna of all things, using a splitter to my HDHomeRun and over the post two weeks, I've only seen one recording with a pixelation problem.

I guess I'll dedicate on current HDHomeRun to the stations it receives best then connect this new one to a different antenna dedicated to other stations.

Best of all, with my two TiVos, USB tuner and now, two HDHomeRun Duals, I now have 9 tuners. LOL WTH for?

Yeah believe me, I understand the mania. I have a HDHR (and a couple of MDP-130s) I no longer use, cuz I have two TiVos which record everything worth recording.

Truly there's almost nothing worth watching on commercial TV these days. At least, as Mick so eloquently said in Rocky, "it's a waste of life!"

There never was much worth watching on Network or cable stations, and now there is even more stuff that is not worth watching. But even though I only get local stations plus Turner Classic Movies, somehow those 8 stations fill my TivoXL depressingly fast.

I must admit to liking Smash, and The Good Wife (big-time).

The crime and "reality" programming are so so tiresome, and I'm too much of a codger now to enjoy the sitcoms, Zooey Deschanel notwithstanding. She's a one-of-a-kind.

I'm hoping someone here can either offer me advice on a new set up, or suggest a better place to post my question.

I'm trying to set up a HDHR in my moms house. My brother and sister would be using it. He has a digital TV/monitor connected to his XP computer, she is using an old analogue cathode ray set.

I bought a HDHR3 on Woot, thinking it would tune the same channels my sis receives on her set without a box. Discovered it only has digital tuners, so many un-encrypted stations dont show up. The HDHR3 is connected to their router.

For my sister to use the HDHR, she will have to get an Xbox 360.

I was thinking about adding another tuner to the PC that will handle her recordings (a Win7 machine). It would have to receive analogue cable signals. I assume an Xbox would stream any recording from that HDD - both recordings from the HDHR and the 2nd tuner.

Today I started to think about what to do about all the splits in the cable. The installer put a 3 way splitter under the house. The main cable is split into three paths: One to the cable modem, another to the living room, and the last to her bedroom.

Markings on the splitter indicate 7db to the rooms, and 3db to the modem. I do not understand why the difference. Can someone explain?

I connected a 2 way splitter at the modem, one going to the modem, the other to the HDHR. If I get another tuner, I guess I need to replace that splitter with a 3 way. I don't want to mess up their cable Internet though.

Is there either a better way to connect all of this, or can someone recommend a good quality 3 way splitter?

I could also get an HDHR Prime w/a cable card, in which case I wouldn't need the second tuner device. But those are going for $200.

Thanks.

A 3-way splitter is actually a pair of two way splitters daisy chained inside a single case. Each time the signal gets split in two each side suffers a 3.5 dB loss. The signal loss is as follows:

input => first split => -3.5dB to output #1
===============> -3.5dB input to second split => -7db to output #2
=======================================> -7db to output #3



A quality multiple port distribution (drop) amplifier would be my preferred way to do this. I would recommend one that supports your cable modem's bi-directional communication needs. I have used these with good success. If you choose a drop amp without bi-directional capabilities, use a single 2 way splitter with the cable modem on one side and the amp on the other.

Your best bet is to get the internet router connected as close as possible to the source signal. Thus using the first splitter to connect the router would be best. Then string the other TVs off that connection. This may mean moving the router, re-running cables, or both. Either or both of those is much better than trying to untangle signal connection problems later.

Me too. Been waiting for a big price drop. This was good enough for me. I tried to connect my mom's iPad 2, but no dice. LOL...

Can you explain to me what you mean by "joined to antennas"? Can I use a splitter in reverse, or do I just splice the wires, or what?

I am close to the city of Chicago, and found when I downgraded from a rooftop antenna to a little rectangular guy, the antenna was much less finicky, but I still have trouble where CBS, ABC and FOX never all work at once, I have to shift it slightly, and I wonder if I bought a second one and aimed in the second direction, if they would fight each other or work together.

Thanks,
Bob