HDHomeRun Review

The HDHomeRun is a HDTV tuner unlike any other I have seen before.  It's an external dual HDTV tuner about the size of a VHS tape. 

What makes the HDHomeRun special is how it works. Instead of connecting by USB, the HDHomeRun streams two high definition (HDTV) MPEG2 streams over ethernet. Essentially it's a network attached HDTV tuner.  The HDHomeRun is certainly an interesting little device.

The business end of things has coax connections attached to two HDTV tuners, a 100Mbit Ethernet port, and power plug.  That's it. 

The HDHomeRun is highly regarded on the MythTV Mailing list, and DVRUpgrade.com was nice enough to send me a unit to review. 

I'm not expert on HDTV to say the least, but I know a thing or two about MythTV and digital video in general.  The HDHomeRun is my first step into the world of HDTV, and I'm learning a lot along the way.

My goal with the HDHomeRun section of MythPVR.com is to help you decide if the HDHomeRun is right for you, and help you get up and going if you decide it is.

SiliconDust makes the HDHomerun and, as you'll see if you keep reading, it's targeted at the PC enthusiast market.  More specifically, if you don't consider yourself a geek at least at some level, it's probably not for you.  However, if you are the slightest bit geeky, this is not only an excellent, but also a fascinating little product.  To top it all off, SiliconDust is not only Linux friendly, but their Linux drivers and tools are actually open source.  SiliconDust provides open source command line HDHomeRun tools for Linux.

As I've mentioned, the HDHomeRun has two HDTV tuners, and attaches to a network.  The TV tuners are controlled over the network, and the HDHomeRun streams MPEG2 from each tuner over the network using UDP.

Instead of writing their own proprietary MPEG2 player, the HDHomeRun tools utilizes VLC as the video player, or integrates into other media center software such as MythTV, SageTV, and Windows Media Center.  SiliconDust has been very active in development of the plug-ins for each media center package.  

The stand alone client tools that SiliconDust provides are not really end user quality, which indicates to me that SiliconDust is really expecting and targeting the HDHomeRun to be used by a media center application.

I'm creating a section of MythPVR.com focused on the HDHomeRun.  This is the first page in a series of reviews and HOWTO's that I will be publishing over the next few weeks.  If you have any questions you'd like me to cover in this series, please post a comment below.  I'll answer what I can as I go along.

Learn more about the HDHomeRun

• HDHomeRun Overview
• HDHomeRun Installation
• HDHomeRun Windows Client
• HDHomeRun with MythTV