I don't frequent this section often, but I thought the topic might be of interest.
I had an analog Theater-550 based tuner card in my box for a few years and used it with Beyond-TV to watch the bottom 70 channels from Comcast. Worked great for the most part. When Comcast started making the digital switch in our area the channel count dropped to 23, and it started to be less attractive. When I recently rebuilt the machine I considered the future of analog TV and tossed the tuner into the trash.
For my birthday this past Monday my wife bought me a Silicondust HDHomerun. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the HDHomerun is a self-contained unit about the size of a four-port switch. It has two atsc/QAM tuners, two coax connections, an ethernet port, a power connection, a couple of LEDs, and that's it. Its purpose is to capture and decode digital cable/OTA-HD signals and stream them out over your home network.
Installation took about ten minutes, and it would have been five if I didn't have to go to the basement to fetch a splitter so that I could connect both tuners. The package includes two lengths of coax and an ethernet patch cable. In my case the cable modem and router are behind the TV in the family room, so I stuck the HDHR there as well.
Back in my office I downloaded the latest software from Silicondust's website and ran it. My first pleasant surprise came when I realized they have native Win7 64-bit software. Everything installed in under a minute and then setup ran, found the unit on the network, upgraded the firmware, and then showed me a setup dialog with both tuners detected. I set the sources for both to digital cable, hit scan, and in about five minutes or so the HDHR detected 110 clear QAM channels. I had set the preview application to Windows Media Player, and when I clicked the View button next to a channel it popped up very quickly with a nice, clear image and excellent sound.
The list of detected channels (Comcast Northwest Port Murray Digital, for those of you in New Jersey), included all the network broadcast SD and HD channels, as well as the SD feeds from all the cable-preemy channels like Discovery, SciFi (now SyFy? wtf), History, TLC, etc. Not a lot of HD, but that wasn't a surprise.
Next step was to set it up with Media Center, and that's where the pain came in, through no fault of the HDHR. If you haven't seen it yet, Media Center in Windows 7 has some nice improvements. One of them is that it gives you a complete UI-driven way to add/edit QAM channels and fix up the guide listings for them. That's necessary because the automatic mapping of clear QAM channels leaves a lot to be desired.
Media Center located both HDHR tuners without problems, and when it scanned it found 40 of the 110 channels. This is because it only maps channels for which it can find program information, and that left out something like 2/3 of what was available. Restoring the full lineup and getting the guide fixed up was a process that took a number of additional hours.
The process had two steps: first I went into Tasks | Settings| TV | Guide | Edit Channels and compared what was there to the list of raw channels in the HDHR setup GUI. Using the Add QAM Channels feature I manually added each missing channel at the appropriate frequency, set it to QAM-256 modulation, and gave it the same name as the one in the HDHR setup window. That process took at least 90 minutes, maybe more.
The channel lineup was now complete, but the guide showed no data for all but the main network feeds. Fortunately Media Center makes this pretty easy to fix. Unfortunately it still took a long time. What you do is bring up the guide, and when you see a channel with "No Data" you click the channel name, then Edit Channel, then Edit Listings. This brings up a screen where you can scroll through the available channels in the Zap2It Guide and choose the one that should map to this channel. For many of them it is a no-brainer, but for others the name in the guide isn't what you expect, so you have to search around a bit. This step took the most time out of the whole process, but once it was done I had good guide data for everything but CN8 and the three CSPAN channels. I am still not sure what I messed up there and will look at it again tonight.
Having done that I made one last pass through the guide setting the channel names to something short and memorable, i.e. 'History' instead of 'THE HISTORY CHANNEL', and I was done.
So how does it perform? So far I would give it an A+ rating for usability and ease of installation. An A+ for speed of stream acquisition and channel changes (I really thought this was going to be the downside). Maybe an A for sound, and a B+ for image quality. The quality of SD streams is at least as good, and probably somewhat better, than with the old analog tuner, and of course with this unit you get the benefit of stations transmitting in 480p for example, so some of the non-HD streams look a _lot_ better. Full HD content isn't as crystal clear as on my LCD panel in the family room, but it is pretty damn good. Watching Craig Ferguson in 1920 x 1080 last night, from the couch about ten feet from the monitor, I was hard-pressed to tell the difference.
All in all I am very impressed by the quality of the unit, and most of all the quality of the software. If there is one thing I would like to see improved, by someone, it's the process of getting the lineup straightened out. But that is hardly Silicondust's fault. Having used the HDHR now I find it difficult to justify the idea of an internal QAM tuner card, which is where my thoughts had been headed. With the HDHR the power consumption and heat generation are outside my box, and two users on the network can watch HD streams simultaneously. That's pretty damned cool.
Now if I can only figure out how to back up the channel setup, so I never have to go through that again... and here's hoping Comcast doesn't effing change it every three weeks... which they probably will.
I had an analog Theater-550 based tuner card in my box for a few years and used it with Beyond-TV to watch the bottom 70 channels from Comcast. Worked great for the most part. When Comcast started making the digital switch in our area the channel count dropped to 23, and it started to be less attractive. When I recently rebuilt the machine I considered the future of analog TV and tossed the tuner into the trash.
For my birthday this past Monday my wife bought me a Silicondust HDHomerun. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the HDHomerun is a self-contained unit about the size of a four-port switch. It has two atsc/QAM tuners, two coax connections, an ethernet port, a power connection, a couple of LEDs, and that's it. Its purpose is to capture and decode digital cable/OTA-HD signals and stream them out over your home network.
Installation took about ten minutes, and it would have been five if I didn't have to go to the basement to fetch a splitter so that I could connect both tuners. The package includes two lengths of coax and an ethernet patch cable. In my case the cable modem and router are behind the TV in the family room, so I stuck the HDHR there as well.
Back in my office I downloaded the latest software from Silicondust's website and ran it. My first pleasant surprise came when I realized they have native Win7 64-bit software. Everything installed in under a minute and then setup ran, found the unit on the network, upgraded the firmware, and then showed me a setup dialog with both tuners detected. I set the sources for both to digital cable, hit scan, and in about five minutes or so the HDHR detected 110 clear QAM channels. I had set the preview application to Windows Media Player, and when I clicked the View button next to a channel it popped up very quickly with a nice, clear image and excellent sound.
The list of detected channels (Comcast Northwest Port Murray Digital, for those of you in New Jersey), included all the network broadcast SD and HD channels, as well as the SD feeds from all the cable-preemy channels like Discovery, SciFi (now SyFy? wtf), History, TLC, etc. Not a lot of HD, but that wasn't a surprise.
Next step was to set it up with Media Center, and that's where the pain came in, through no fault of the HDHR. If you haven't seen it yet, Media Center in Windows 7 has some nice improvements. One of them is that it gives you a complete UI-driven way to add/edit QAM channels and fix up the guide listings for them. That's necessary because the automatic mapping of clear QAM channels leaves a lot to be desired.
Media Center located both HDHR tuners without problems, and when it scanned it found 40 of the 110 channels. This is because it only maps channels for which it can find program information, and that left out something like 2/3 of what was available. Restoring the full lineup and getting the guide fixed up was a process that took a number of additional hours.
The process had two steps: first I went into Tasks | Settings| TV | Guide | Edit Channels and compared what was there to the list of raw channels in the HDHR setup GUI. Using the Add QAM Channels feature I manually added each missing channel at the appropriate frequency, set it to QAM-256 modulation, and gave it the same name as the one in the HDHR setup window. That process took at least 90 minutes, maybe more.
The channel lineup was now complete, but the guide showed no data for all but the main network feeds. Fortunately Media Center makes this pretty easy to fix. Unfortunately it still took a long time. What you do is bring up the guide, and when you see a channel with "No Data" you click the channel name, then Edit Channel, then Edit Listings. This brings up a screen where you can scroll through the available channels in the Zap2It Guide and choose the one that should map to this channel. For many of them it is a no-brainer, but for others the name in the guide isn't what you expect, so you have to search around a bit. This step took the most time out of the whole process, but once it was done I had good guide data for everything but CN8 and the three CSPAN channels. I am still not sure what I messed up there and will look at it again tonight.
Having done that I made one last pass through the guide setting the channel names to something short and memorable, i.e. 'History' instead of 'THE HISTORY CHANNEL', and I was done.
So how does it perform? So far I would give it an A+ rating for usability and ease of installation. An A+ for speed of stream acquisition and channel changes (I really thought this was going to be the downside). Maybe an A for sound, and a B+ for image quality. The quality of SD streams is at least as good, and probably somewhat better, than with the old analog tuner, and of course with this unit you get the benefit of stations transmitting in 480p for example, so some of the non-HD streams look a _lot_ better. Full HD content isn't as crystal clear as on my LCD panel in the family room, but it is pretty damn good. Watching Craig Ferguson in 1920 x 1080 last night, from the couch about ten feet from the monitor, I was hard-pressed to tell the difference.
All in all I am very impressed by the quality of the unit, and most of all the quality of the software. If there is one thing I would like to see improved, by someone, it's the process of getting the lineup straightened out. But that is hardly Silicondust's fault. Having used the HDHR now I find it difficult to justify the idea of an internal QAM tuner card, which is where my thoughts had been headed. With the HDHR the power consumption and heat generation are outside my box, and two users on the network can watch HD streams simultaneously. That's pretty damned cool.
Now if I can only figure out how to back up the channel setup, so I never have to go through that again... and here's hoping Comcast doesn't effing change it every three weeks... which they probably will.
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