HDHomeRun CONNECT

Installed Comcast today. Technician said they(field technicians) don't work with cable cards much anymore, simply because they are usually installing their equipment which has cards already installed and registered. He was very helpful, however. First he set up our internet. ( Used a Arris TM822G-NA purchased on Amazon ) That was the longest part of the whole install by far. After setting up the internet and phone through the Arris TM822, he started the process for the Silicon Dust HDHomerun Prime. I ran the Silicon Dust setup program. He had written the numbers from the Cable card down. There is 1 code on it that he will give to the tech people over the phone 1st in the registration part of the set up. After that, he read them the Cable Card ID and Host ID numbers generated by the HDHomerun Setup program. This is the part where we both found you just have to be patient. It can take 1-30 minutes for the card to be validated after he gives the tech people these two sets of numbers. It took maybe 5-10 minutes tops. When you have the HDHomerun Prime install page up, just refresh it every couple minutes. You will know when it is ready. I ran the channel scan and it took about 10-15 minutes. After that, I did the set up in WMC. It was straight forward and painless. No more calls required either. Wow!!! This thing is awesome. We have a HTPC in the living room and a PC for each of my two children plus one in our bedroom. 4 displays ( TV's ) I also have the Silicon Dust HDHomerun Dual and a Hauppage 2250 dual tuner card. 7 tuners available. 4 over the air and 3 for Comcast. All accessible on any computer at anytime. I used My Channel Logos to populate the channel logos and do some adjustments of the WMC guide. Simply awesome. I recommend a set up like mine. It is as follows. Modem(Arris TM822G-NA) connected to router(Netgear Nighthawk 3200). Router connected to 8 port gigabit switch. Each computer in house connected to switch via ethernet cable. The Silicon Dust HDHomerun Prime and Homerun Dual are connected to switch as well. Absolutely flawless so far in quality. Again, we have the 50Mbps internet plan from Comcast. In Media center it shows all the channels, even the ones we don't subscribe to. It won't let you view the ones we don't subscribe to however. Also, you will not have the ability to do pay-per-view, on demand purchases. Otherwise you get a super nice 3 tuner cable box/dvr !!!

I had a lot of trouble setting this up (and the company web site is completely unhelpful) so let me help people out here. I am assuming you want to run this with EyeTV --- I've no useful info if you have other plans. - Install the device in the obvious way --- connect your antenna coax, your ethernet cable, your power adaptor. - Go to SiliconDust's website, find the download section, and download the Mac installer. - The installer will install two basically useless apps, whose sole purpose, IMHO, is to validate that things kinda work. Run the setup app and you should get a truly barebones window which asks you to choose channels. Ignore all that, all we care about is that (presumably) this shows your mac can see the HD HomeRun. Run the Player app, and you should now get live TV and should be able to change the channel. Again, all we care about is proof that things work at this level. Now go to EyeTV. If this is the first time you have installed EyeTV, things should be easy. During the installation process it will ask you what TV tuner you have, and tell it Elgato/HomeRun (or IPTV/HomeRun --- both work). Go through the rest of the installation and things should work fine. Where things are less obvious is if you already have EyeTV installed and running, connected to some other TV tuner(s). You might expect that you'd see the HomeRun in the Devices panel, which lists all your tuners, but you don't, and all the dicking around in the world won't change that. WHAT YOU NEED TO DO is go to the main EyeTV menu and rerun the EyeTV Setup Assistant. This will ask you what tuner you want to use and, like I said above, choose the Home Run. Skip over every subsequent step (like selecting channels). This seems like a terrifying step --- you may fear you will lose all your current state --- but it works fine. EyeTV remembers your current channels (and recording preferences, TVGuide subscription, etc) and just adds the HomeRun to your available tuners, along with whatever other tuners you had previously. Do be aware, however, that when running the Setup Assistant it will ask you for your EyeTV license key, so make sure you have that on-hand before you start down this path. You can check that everything is working by using the command-O command, which will cycle through your list of tuners, showing you the channel each is connected to --- the name of the tuner will appear in the window menu bar, so make sure the window is not maximized. You should be able to cycle through your pre-existing tuner(s) followed by two HomeRun tuners, and obviously you can try changing channels for each one. From this point on everything should just work. In particular, you can set the system up to record as many simultaneous shows as you have tuners, which can be useful for those occasions where three shows you like are all scheduled at the same time. One final thing: Depending on when you installed EyeTV, you may have installed a piece of (now obsolete) companion software called EyeTV connect. This software somehow prevents other software on your computer from seeing the HD HomeRun. In particular it prevents VLC from seeing it. Do a search for "EyeTV Connect Uninstaller" and you'll find an Elgato page with the uninstaller. After you run the uninstaller and reboot, you should now (unlike before) see the HD Home Run in the Local Network/Universal PlugnPlay section of the main VLC window, on the off chance that you want to use VLC rather than EyeTV to connect to the HD HomeRun. If you're trying to debug, the HomeRun registers itself with your DHCP server as you'd expect, so you should see it (and be able to figure out its IP address) from seeing what you have registered there. It does respond to pings. It starts up with only one port (UDP 1900, the UPnP port) open but should respond to appropriate requests from any UPnP/DLNA client on your network (like VLC). The two problems I am aware of are those I described above --- EyeTV Connect blocks the UPnP visibility for VLC until it is uninstalled; and EyeTV doesn't know the box is there until you run the EyeTV Setup Assistant. One final thing. The box is small and crazy light, so once you have everything working the way you want, you'll probably want to hold it down on your media center with double sided tape or velcro or something, otherwise it's very prone to flopping around. Just plan for that so you aren't irritated by it a week or so after the install.

I bought this to replace a HDHR3-US network tuner (previous model, it was 11 years old, so it had a long life). I sort of knew what I was getting into and this model shares many of the same traits as its predecessor and it's a bit cheaper too. After a few weeks of recording shows, it seems to be working well. Configuration: Configuration is close to plug and play as you can get. Plug it into your router, a power source and an antenna and maybe do a scan with their software and boom you're watching tv. The app will quickly find the device on your network and display any channels it can lock onto. Channels are displayed in the app with their local call sign and logo. Picture is very clear depending on what your stations are broadcasting, everything from 480P to 1080i where I am. Thanks to my antena, also from Amazon, I get ~33 channels, the same as my previous model. I use it in a home theater pc setup to record local shows with MythTV. Shipping: Box is a bit dinged up (bought from Techmazen Goods) and may or may not have been opened previously. But everything was inside and looked undamaged and unused. Build: Simple plastic shell over a circuit board. Pros: Easy to setup, configure and use. At ~$60 very affordable. Cons: High bandwidth usage. Because this takes whatever is over the air and throws it onto the network, it becomes a bit of a network hog. Watching over wireless is spotty, but usable. Wired connections are recommended, maybe even a Gigabit switch if you don't have one. I usually watch transcoded recordings, so bandwidth is not a concern. If you want a cheap way to watch/record tv over your network (recommend wired as much as possible) this will probably work for you. Thanks for reading.