HDHomeRun - Because HDTV isn’t just for TV’s

Watch HDTV on your computers, not just on your TV

How many devices do you have in your house that are capable of displaying high-definition content but have no way of getting high-definition content? If you have an HD television you can use your TV’s tuner (or external cable/satellite box) to tune the HD signal. But what if you also have a computer? Or two? Or three? Those devices are probably also capable of displaying HD content but have no easy way of actually receiving HD content. So how do you get that HD content to each of them without having to buy a separate HDTV tuner card for each PC?

Perhaps the easiest way to get HD content to multiple display devices is to use the HDHomeRun network-enabled tuner from Silicon Dust. This tiny little device (about the size of a VCR tape) contains not one but two HD tuners. The HDHR can accept input from two different sources (cable and an antenna, for instance) . It doesn’t connect to any display device directly — rather, it connects to your home network via an ethernet jack and streams the HD content to your display devices. As long as a display device can connect to your network and knows how to handle HD content you can watch HDTV on that device.

Here are just a few ways to do that:

VLC Player

One of the most popular (and powerful) pieces of software for displaying video in just about any format is the open-source VLC player from VideoLAN. The VLC software is available for Windows, Mac’s, and Linux and can handle just about any type of video you can throw at it (check out the compatibility matrix here). In fact, the software that Silicon Dust provides for use with the HDHomeRun assumes that you’ll be using the VLC player and will automatically call VLC to display the content when you want to watch a particular channel.

TSReader

Another popular piece of software is TSReader. This software is more specific in its focus than the VLC player in that it deals only with MPEG-2 Transport Streams. Fortunately, that’s exactly what the HDHR sends across the network. TSReader comes in a few different versions but the free “Lite” version will work just fine to display HD content from the HDHR.

MythTV, SageTV, BeyondTV, Windows Media Center

These are DVR applications that give you the TiVo-like capability of recording television shows, including those in HDTV (these applications provide many more features beyond that — weather, news, web browsing, picture viewing, music libraries, internet radio — you get the idea). Another thing they all have in common is that they all support (or soon will support) the HDHomeRun as an input source.

At the moment MythTV and SageTV are both officially supported. Support for Microsoft’s Windows Media Center is supposed to be available before the end of the year, and Beyond TV has unofficial support now with official support coming soon.

TVPlay

I have a network-enabled Roku HD1000 connected to my HDTV. One of the developers of software for the Roku has released the TVPlay application (still an alpha release) which allows me to watch live HDTV using the HDHR tuners just like I can using the tuner in my HD cable box. That’s very handy when the two tuners in my cable box are both busy recording.

Almost Endless Possibilities

Because the HDHR is on the network and not attached to a specific computer you can do things that would be otherwise impossible. Imagine being able to watch an HDTV program using VLC on your Windows PC using the HDHR’s first tuner while your Linux-based MythTV server in the basement is recording a different show on the HDHR’s second tuner. Two tuners not enough? No problem — you can add a second HDHR and have access to four HD tuners on your network. Add a third HDHR and you have 6 tuners.

In many respects having your HD tuners on your network is no different than having storage on your network. Using some sort of NAS makes disk storage a commodity which can be consumed by all of the devices on the network. The HDHR makes its HD tuners a commodity available to all of the devices on your network. The tuners, like the NAS disk space, are a consumable resource available to any device with the ability to use them.

Future Capabilities

The developers at Silicon Dust have released a set of API’s which can be used to interact with the HDHR. Any hardware which is capable of sending commands using TCP and receiving video as an MPEG-2 transport stream using UDP should be able run an application which can use the HDHR as a tuner. As more and more home theater component become network-enabled the list of devices capable of using the HDHR as an HD tuner should continue to grow.

The HDHR development community is quite active and rapidly growing. The response from the Silicon Dust developers is nothing short of amazing. The turn-around time between the first request for a new feature and the time it becomes available isn’t measured in years or months but in weeks or even days.

Reality Check

Don’t throw your cable box out yet! The HDHomeRun does not have a CableCard slot (and I’m assuming that it never will). That means that it can’t tune content that your cable or satellite company has encrypted, such as premium channels or HD versions of non-network channels (DiscoveryHD, for instance). I don’t think it’s going too far out onto a limb to predict that these companies aren’t interested in ever allowing their HD content from those non-network channels to be available to any device that has the means to record them without enforcing any type of copyright protection. (In fact I’m sure that they’d also encrypt the HD network channels if the FCC didn’t prevent them from doing so.)

The HDHR doesn’t have any analog tuners so it can handle only ATSC/QAM (digital) channels from OTA and unencrypted cable sources. For cable TV subscribers that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re limited to the HD network channels that are broadcast without encryption. My cable system, like many others, is simulcasting all of its analog content as digital channels. In fact, new subscribers in my cable system’s area get cable boxes that only contain digital tuners, just like the HDHR, and I’m sure that as we near the transition to all-digital broadcasts this will become more and more common. Because my cable provider simulcasts all of its programming the HDHR can tune many more channels than just the network HD offerings.

Final Thoughts

When I first heard about the HDHomeRun I thought it was a great concept and now that I’ve used it for a little while I can also say that it has been well-implemented. The idea of moving the HD tuners onto the network opens up many new configuration possibilities and gives you flexibility you couldn’t get otherwise. The price is right ($170 from 9thTee), especially considering that you get two HD tuners and you can use the HDHR to watch TV on any computer on your network without having to purchase HD tuners for each of those computers.

Do yourself a favor and check out the HDHomeRun. If you already receive HD programming it’s an easy way to make that programming available to more display devices than just your TV. If you don’t receive HD programming this might be the opportunity you’ve been waiting for — just pick up an HDHR and an antenna and see what you’ve been missing.

Next Up

I’m working on an article that uses the flexibility of the HDHR and the power of virtual machines. Have you ever wanted to run MythTV on your Windows PC?

Stay tuned.

Edit: I’ve posted the article about how to run MythTV on a Windows PC.

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