Jun 12, 2007

HDhomerun


I just received in the mail today a dual HD tuner called the HDhomerun from Silicon Dust. Link I use Linux, OS X, and Windows regularly and this solution works in all three environments. This has drivers to let it work with Vista Media Center, XP Media Center, and almost all of the 3rd party media centers like BeyondTV and MythTV. It uses VLC to stream if you are not using media center software to play the video. The box itself streams the HD signal over the network using UDP. This seems to work well in my own experience. Using this stream over wireless probably does not work well. The stream could take up to 20 Mb/s with both tuners going and would not do well streaming over the wireless ethernet. The Draft-N standard may change this though because of the increase in speed and performance. This dual tuner tunes HD from over-the-air and clear QAM (unencrypted digital cable). This may be one of the only ways to get clear QAM to Vista mediacenter. It works so well for me because I am running out of PCI slots on my computers and I have more than one mediacenter that can share this device. I will be posting some results and setup how-to's when I get some time to work on them

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