HD Homerun streaming OTA TV to HTPC

[marcplante]

I picked up an HD Homerun from Newegg to prepare to cut the cable and set it up last night. It is attached to a Leaf amplified antenna feeding into a FIOS router. I live 9 miles from downtown DC, so get a very strong HD signal.

I have tested streaming from the Leaf antenna directly into a TV, the signal is strong. When I access via HD Homerun and an HTPC over my LAN, the video is "Jumpy" not pixelated, but it skips frames every few seconds, even on the stronger stations. I have tried using the FIOS Wireless G router, a Belkin Wireless N router and direct ethernet connection (albeit through a
couple router hops).

Netflix streams fine OTA, though I realize that is a compressed signal.

Is the OTA broadcast signal just that heavy that a LAN can't move it very well? Is there anything I can do to improve the video quality?




Thanks,

[notposting]

Sounds more like a problem with the PC/codecs/drivers.

If I recall the HDHR pushes less than the "full" bandwidth the channels nominally use, as some of it is overhead of some kind. So around ~20mbps for a full HD stream IIRC.

Edit: It's definitely not the hardware since the specs in your sig (shoot, even the notebook) dwarf everything in this household. Probably even combined

Edit 2: their support forums are pretty good, try checking in there and see what they say.

[ViRGE]

As notposting noted, a full HD stream is just shy of 20Mbps. In my experience with my own HDHR, most G routers will choke on this, but a good N router (with channel bonding) shouldn't have a problem. But since you're seeing issues even with wired Ethernet, then it's likely not a networking issue.

[marcplante]

So should I try updating MCE? I'm running this on the notebook in my sig. New and up to date. I've updated Win7 at the general level, and didn't know whether I need to specifically go and look for Video codecs on the MSFT site to address this.

Thanks

[ViRGE]

You shouldn't need any software updates. The built-in MPEG-2 codec is just fine for the task, and it uses DXVA so all the heavy lifting is being offloaded to your GPU anyhow.

[SMOGZINN]

Originally Posted by marcplante

I have tested streaming from the Leaf antenna directly into a TV, the signal is strong. When I access via HD Homerun and an HTPC over my LAN, the video is "Jumpy" not pixelated, but it skips frames every few seconds, even on the stronger stations.

Could be signal attenuation, is the cable run from your antenna to your HD Homerun significantly longer then the cable run from your antenna to your TV?

EDIT: Also, I have a leaf antenna as well, and they are VERY finicky. I have to adjust mine every time I want to change channels. Could you be having your leaf in a different configuration when hooked up to the HD Homerun?

[marcplante]

The leaf antenna is on the side of an entertainment cabinet that contains the hdhr and the TV, so i am using the leaf coax with no extension. I assumed the leaf with a Compass at the cluster if Dc stations. As i said, we are only 9 mi from DC and on a hill. I'm going to direct connect to the living room router with an ethernet cable, though that won't help me in the basement home theater. I'll also see if i can tweak the leaf location, though signals looked very strong in the configuration software.

[tw1164]

Email techsupport, they're really good at helping to troubleshoot. You'll get an answer pretty quickly too, I was impressed.

[radioouman]

I suspect network bandwidth. It would be interesting if you could connect both the PC and the HDHomerun directly to ports on the router.
Are you using Windows Media Center? Media Center writes to the hard drive (records) and then plays that file back. That can be a bottleneck with slow drives (although it doesn't look like that is a problem with the systems in you sig.)

[marcplante]

I'll email Silicon Dust. Almost hoping its a PC read write problem as I could simply buffer and play back recorded shows (which is what we do most of the time anyhow).

I'll report back my findings.