HDHomeRun HDTV Tuner Review

A few weeks ago, I purchased an HDHomeRun. What, exactly, is that? Well, it's a dual over-the-air HDTV tuner. That doesn't sound very exciting, does it?

Well, it's a bit different than your standard HDTV tuner. Instead of connecting directly to your television, or plugging into your computer, it is a standalone unit - and streams the HDTV over ethernet. Yep, over ethernet.

You can certainly stream the video live to any PC for instant viewing, by my reason for owning this is that I am never at home when the few shows are on that I want to watch. Since I watch so little TV (and nearly all of what I watch is on PBS), there is no reason for me to pay for satellite or cable.

Each week, a cron job on my Linux server records the television shows that I want. It's incredibly easy to do with the command-line interface: You call hdhomerun_config to tell the unit which channel to tune in, then you use the "save" option to hdhomerun_config, which tells the unit to start streaming, and hdhomerun_config receives the data and saves it to your hard drive.

I started out with a single Digitron DT7701 antenna, which was about $30. I pointed it vaguely in the direction of the transmitters in my city, and could receive all channels acceptably without any finer adjustment. I was so happy with it that I purchased another antenna, so I could use both tuners in the unit. Yes, each tuner needs its own antenna (or connection to cable, if you're using QAM).

The data you receive is the straight MPEG2 transport stream. There is no re-encoding, you get exactly what is broadcast. That means the quality is INCREDIBLE. I have heard many people grumbling and complaining about satellite broadcasts being reencoded to ridiculously low bitrates, but the OTA signals don't suffer from this.

Of course, that produces some very large files - as large as 9 gigabytes per hour. Two open-source packages, x264 and ffmpeg, allow me to convert the video to h.264 afterwards.

The machine will also receive ClearQAM - which means if you have analog cable, and your cable provider also broadcasts those channels in QAM (I have been told, but cannot verify, that ComCast does so), you can skip the antenna and simply connect your cable to the unit.

Overall, the unit does exactly what is promised. There are no quirks, shortcomings, or downfalls that I have encountered. They also provide a nice support forum. Overall, it is a refreshingly straight-forward offering.