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A grand slam for some, a foul ball for others
We like free. We also like doing things ourselves, which is why building our own DVRs to capture OTA broadcasts has been a habit for years. And we’re fans of devices that give us wide flexibility and range in their use. Given all these preferences, Silicon Dust’s HDHomeRun Plus—a networkbased external TV tuner—fulfills all our wants, on paper. In practice, it very nearly does likewise.
Initial setup for the HDHomeRun Plus is super easy: plug in the power connector, an Ethernet cable, and your antenna’s coaxial cable, then download Silicon Dust’s software from the company’s website and install it. Running the setup—to scan for channels and to set the default programs for watching live TV and recording TV—takes 10 minutes. You can then watch broadcasts immediately through the Silicon Dust’s HDHomeRun Live TV software or Windows Media Player. You can also use VLC, but setting it up is far trickier.
The experience begins to diverge, however, when you move on to setting up PVR software. When we tried the HDHomeRun Plus with Windows Media Center as our recording program, getting our home brew DVR off the ground was as easy as opening WMC and tweaking its settings to scan channels and input the correct location info for the channel guide. Trying Next-PVR—the other officially supported piece of Windows PVR software—was far more frustrating. On our Windows 7 machine, running the installer caused our system to lock up and required either force-closing the installer or a soft reset; on our Windows 8 machine, we installed the program, but it couldn’t detect any channels through the tuners, despite repeated tries.
Equally split is the quality of the device’s streaming functionality. When accessed from computers or DLNA devices, audio-video syncing is excellent and the feed has the same crispness as a direct connection from the OTA antenna to a TV. But on mobile devices, audio was consistently ahead of video—an annoying fail given the app to watch live TV costs an additional $2.
Using the HDHomeRun Plus can go one of two ways, depending on which path you take. If you’re a Windows 7 user, comfortable with Windows Media Center, and plan to watch TV through your HTPC or a media extender (such as an Xbox 360), the Plus will work perfectly and offers good flexibility for viewing options. If you’re running Windows 8, want to use NextPVR because it’s free and also not WMC, or plan to do a lot of your live TV viewing through a mobile device, the HDHomeRun Plus becomes less of a surefire hit. But regardless of the scenario, you’ll have to contend with one inescapable fact: its fan is annoyingly loud when the device is transcoding. If you can handle the noise, or you’re able to stash it somewhere remote, this downside might be tolerable. For us, it was a bit of a dealbreaker when combined with the mobile device performance--and that’s despite how much we liked using it with a Windows 7/WMC configuration.
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We like free. We also like doing things ourselves, which is why building our own DVRs to capture OTA broadcasts has been a habit for years. And we’re fans of devices that give us wide flexibility and range in their use. Given all these preferences, Silicon Dust’s HDHomeRun Plus—a networkbased external TV tuner—fulfills all our wants, on paper. In practice, it very nearly does likewise.
The experience begins to diverge, however, when you move on to setting up PVR software. When we tried the HDHomeRun Plus with Windows Media Center as our recording program, getting our home brew DVR off the ground was as easy as opening WMC and tweaking its settings to scan channels and input the correct location info for the channel guide. Trying Next-PVR—the other officially supported piece of Windows PVR software—was far more frustrating. On our Windows 7 machine, running the installer caused our system to lock up and required either force-closing the installer or a soft reset; on our Windows 8 machine, we installed the program, but it couldn’t detect any channels through the tuners, despite repeated tries.
Equally split is the quality of the device’s streaming functionality. When accessed from computers or DLNA devices, audio-video syncing is excellent and the feed has the same crispness as a direct connection from the OTA antenna to a TV. But on mobile devices, audio was consistently ahead of video—an annoying fail given the app to watch live TV costs an additional $2.
Using the HDHomeRun Plus can go one of two ways, depending on which path you take. If you’re a Windows 7 user, comfortable with Windows Media Center, and plan to watch TV through your HTPC or a media extender (such as an Xbox 360), the Plus will work perfectly and offers good flexibility for viewing options. If you’re running Windows 8, want to use NextPVR because it’s free and also not WMC, or plan to do a lot of your live TV viewing through a mobile device, the HDHomeRun Plus becomes less of a surefire hit. But regardless of the scenario, you’ll have to contend with one inescapable fact: its fan is annoyingly loud when the device is transcoding. If you can handle the noise, or you’re able to stash it somewhere remote, this downside might be tolerable. For us, it was a bit of a dealbreaker when combined with the mobile device performance--and that’s despite how much we liked using it with a Windows 7/WMC configuration.
More...