I have been working a lot with the HDHomeRun over the past few days. The device includes two tuners and a network interface, basically placing high definition television on the network. The key to the device is the software, which is intelligent enough to make multiple tuners highly feasible. You start with two out of the box. After installing the software, it finds them as two separate tuners (one box of course). You can then enable or disable each one. I then select over the air antenna. There is a checkbox to dynamically allocate tuners and this is critically important. Each tuner creates a physical device on your computer (*tuner*-0, *tuner*-1, etc.) This allows for the computer to use all the available tuners.
When Computer A requests a channel on the default tuner (0), it gets it from tuner 0. If Computer B requests a channel from the default tuner (0), it will dynamically select tuner 1 instead. This allows one computer to steal all the tuners by using each one's virtual hardware device--so multiple tuner recording can be used.
The device is small, neat, and clean. It is also cool to the touch! I have never had a networking device that was this small that didn't feel like it was on fire. From our antenna, we have an 8-way splitter block. 7 of these go throughout the house with the 8th going to a 4-way splitter. I am using two of these for the tuner box. I will likely add a second box and use the other two ports for these.
My favorite advantages of this product are:
1. Not overly expensive ($170 or less) for two tuners! Plus, you share them among computers so you don't need 1:1 tuner:computer ... and you are sort of getting dual tuner ability on each computer.
2. Watch TV from any computer in the house! No more worrying about network AND coax connections.
3. Very stable and reliable. I have yet to experience a crash. Hardware tuner cards are lucky if they start up properly it seems.
4. The best part is that if properly configured, the MC theater view will contain TV too! All your media and television in one unified interface. Who wouldn't want the power of MC here?
5. Software installation on a PC is very fast and convenient. On the Mac I had to wait several minutes for a few external files to be downloaded.
No to a few bad things.
I ran around to different HTPCs and computers, starting and stopping to see how well the auto allocation of tuners feature works. It does work splendidly. You can start your TV and stop in any order, simply receiving the available tuner. If a third user tries to watch TV, the first two do not get interrupted.
Unfortunately, this third user sees a PLAIN black screen. It would be nicer to receive an error: "A television tuner is currently unavailable." If I can be of any help to add a message like this, please let me know.
Probably the worst problem of all is that pretty much no computer we own can play HD flawlessly. They are all borderline good. It does play, but at about 10 - 15 frames per second. The systems are obviously not able to keep up fully. This is of course horrible news because:
1. I could replace the processors, assuming they're the bottleneck (probably true) -- some mobos might be limited.
2. I could find a new system that works well and build or buy several to replace the systems. Then I have all these unused computers, though. I see no reason to keep a machine that cannot play HD at this point...but upgrading will be a large endeavor. It's interesting that the machines meet the minimum system requirements but still can't quite keep up.
My printers, security cameras, file server, internet, etc. are all network resources so why not TV? This device is exactly what I had been looking for and actually does exactly what I asked for recently:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=50181.0<- SOLVED!
