"SiliconDust HDHomeRun and SageTV" by Troy H. Cheek on Mar 24, 2008
This article is late because my computer has finally reached the point where I'm spending more time playing with it than working on it. When I'm working on it, I have lots of things to write about, but not a lot of time. When I'm playing with it, I don't have lots of things to write about, but I don't have a lot of time, either.
The newest edition to my daily use main computer play and workstation (hereafter referred to as "the computer") is the SiliconDust HDHomeRun (cue Cheek.Org Link O' Death theme music). The good people at SiliconDust are obviously fans of MultipleCapitalization. They are also fans of creating devices with no practical purpose for a nonexistent market segment yet somehow managing to make a living selling them. That's my clever way of saying that I've never heard of any device like the HDHomeRun before or since this one came out, and that I can't imagine anyone ever buying one but me.
The HDHomeRun is a dual digital tuner for over-the-air ATSC or cable TV unencrypted QAM digital signals. In other words, if you have a local television station airing digital content (which will be pretty much all of them here in the next few years) or a cable television provider who provides digital content which doesn't require a special box to decode the signal, then you can tune it with the HDHomeRun. If your recent model digital-ready television can tune it, the HDHomeRun can tune it. In fact, you can do both over-the-air and cable at the same time, as the HDHomeRun has two antenna connections.
Unlike an analog tuner/encoder/capture device (which tries to sample each frame of video, join it together as an MPEG-2 file, and send it on to the computer), a digital tuner simply scans the incoming data stream, filters out the parts it's interested in, and sends the results to the computer. All the sampling and compressing and joining was done on the other end.
The HDHomeRun is unique in my experience in that it's not an internal expansion (PCI, PCI-E, AGP, ISA, etc) card, nor is it a USB, serial port, parallel port, or even firewire device, but rather it is a network-based encoder. Instead of plugging it into your computer, you plug it into your router. The digital television program stream is sent through the network to any computer on said network. Yes, you can watch two different shows on two different channels from two different sources on two (or more) different computers, up to the limit of your network.
However, since watching "live" television is just about dead to me, I prefer a different method. I've talked about SageTV in the past. It's a personal video recorder (PVR) package with an integrated electronic programming guide (EPG) and enough artificial intelligence (or clever programming tricks that seem intelligent) which automatically records what you want it to record and lets you play it back later. Basically, I've been a PVR for my entire family ever since we bought our first VCR. No one else knows how to program the darned thing; they just tell me what they want and trust me to take care of it.
SageTV does its best to juggle recording schedules so that it catches every show you want to watch, but sometimes two or more shows air at the same time with no scheduled repeats in the near future. The more tuners or encoders or capture devices that SageTV has access to, the more it can record. That's why I went from one tuner (Plextor ConvertX) to three tuners (adding a double tuner Hauppauge PVR-500) to five (adding a double digital tuner HDHomeRun).
To be honest, the HDHomeRun was not so much about adding two additional tuners as it was adding my first two digital tuners. The previous three were analog tuners. These worked fine with my analog cable television service and will continue to work fine until Cardassian Cable converts everything to digital, which will happen anywhere from the turn of the last century to the turn of the next century, going by past press release/actual reality ratios. Regardless, Cardassian Cable already provides some digital content over my existing analog cable. This content is primarily comprised of the local ABC, CBS, NBS, PBS, Fox, and CW (formerly WB and/or UPN) network affiliates. In other words, these are the stations that the FCC tells local cable companies that (if they carry them at all) they must carry them unencrypted and easily tunable by any digital-ready tuning device. In the clear, so to speak.
Everybody talks about how great digital High Definition (HD) television is, especially compared to the dull old analog standard definition (SD) television that our grandparents grew up with. Well, I'll let you in on a little secret: not all digital television is HD. Digital TV is not so much a format as a transmission method. You can use that method to send HD, SD, or something in between. Sending an SD signal down a digital data pipe doesn't automagically make it HD any more than copying an old cassette tape to a compact disc suddenly makes your 80s mix tape recorded from an AM radio sound like CD quality.
Still, sending the SD data digitally does cut out a few conversion steps and admittedly does give the end viewer a little better quality. And a few of the newer shows are aired by my local stations in glorious HD. And two more tuners are two more tuners, meaning even fewer scheduling conflicts when SageTV decides that tonight is the last night it can record multiple shows for me. I think I came up with a few more very good reasons to buy the HDHomeRun before I realized that I'd already ordered it.
The HDHomeRun is a tiny little thing, not much bigger than a paperback book, about the size of the wireless router I stuck it on top of. Both are smaller than the Plextor ConvertX PX-TV402U, which is about the size of a decent hardback book. It had one more AC adapter to plug in. At least it was a polite sideways model which is less likely to block an extra outlet or two. The power cord was a little short, so the only place I could plug it causes the "I'm getting power now" LED to light up the wall above my computer at night. I think I have the only computer system which is brighter than its monitor.
Installation was a snap. I downloaded the latest software from the website, installed it, and plugged the HDHomeRun into my router. I split and connected my cable TV cable and rebooted for luck. In just a few minutes, the software had updated the HDHomeRun to the latest firmware revision, scanned for available channels, and offered me the chance to remap them. The remapping is a big deal. Most PVR software (including SageTV) doesn't know how to handle QAM channels, so the HDHomeRun drivers remap the QAM channels to ATSC channels that SageTV knew how to tune. I had to pick and choose because there are only 68 ATSC channels to remap to. Luckily, most of the channels I found were weather, music, my neighbor's video on demand, and other things that SageTV would never need to record from.
Whereas other digital tuners I'd tried recently couldn't find many QAM channels, and couldn't tune the ones they did find consistently, the HDHomeRun found so many (80+) that I can only assume it found them all. Since the EPG knew that Cardassian Cable offered both analog and digital cable in my area, I was able to add digital versions of all my local stations to my SageTV recording lineup without losing the analog ones. There were even a few bonus PBS sub or alternate or whatever channels.
How does SageTV handle having both digital and analog versions of the some television station? Surprisingly well. I can specify to manually record a particular program on one channel or the other or both. Favorite recording, where SageTV records a new episode because I told it I liked the show in general, will record on the HDHomeRun if the show is flagged in the EPG as HD, but will record on one of the analog tuners if the show isn't. If there are more HD programs showing than can be recorded on the available digital tuners, SageTV will record a couple on the analog tuners under the logic that it's better to get a SD copy of your HD program than not to get it at all. Likewise, SageTV will sometimes record my favorite SD shows on the digital tuner if all the analog tuners are in use (assuming that the digital tuner can tune the digital equivalent of that channel). I could tell SageTV to record my favorite shows only on one channel or the other, effectively telling it to use only the HDHomeRun or never use it for that show, but I kind of like how SageTV handles it.
Since the HDHomeRun tunes directly into the MPEG-2 data stream, recorded programs can take up a lot of space. With analog capture, you can set what bitrate you want the file to be encoded at. With digital capture, you get whatever rate the producer used to encode it. The higher bitrate or the higher resolution or higher something caused me a little problem during playback. I had my system perfectly adjusted for playing back what was recorded by my analog tuners. The same decoder software and settings did not work so well for playing back the digital recordings of the HDHomeRun. The decoder which did work well with the digital recordings didn't like the analog recordings, so I have to change decoders from time to time. The VLC media player software that comes with the HDHomeRun (though I already had it installed) plays them all just fine, but it doesn't quite integrate seamlessly with SageTV.
Did I really need the HDHomeRun? No. About the time I hit three analog tuners, there were very few scheduling conflicts and SageTV was finding more television than I had time to watch. Adding the HDHomeRun helped a bit with the conflicts but mostly gave me higher quality versions of a few shows I particularly like. And, in the event that Cardassian Cable suddenly stops the analog cable service, at least I'll have a couple of working digital tuners until I figure out what to do.
I am going to try very hard to make this my last TV-related computer purchase for a while. In spite of the oft-true adage that there's nothing good on TV anymore, if you have an Artificial Intelligence scanning programming guides looking for things you might want to watch, you can fill up a harddrive in nothing flat.
Hmm, maybe I need to buy a bigger harddrive...
