OTA and PVR

There are a few different ways to stream OTA from a HDHomerun.

1) On Windows

Install, detect and initialize (channel search) the HDHomerun software. Launch Winows Media center, which will detect the HDHomerun, and scan the channels for you. At this point you will have the ability to view and record live TV on your machine.

2) On Mac

i) EyeTV

Eye TV  is a really nice app that gives you access to the TV Guide and also works as a PVR. For basic viewing on the Mac, its performance is really good. The install process is pretty straight forward. Just follow the prompts. No tinkering required.

ii) HDHomerun app and  VLC

  1. Download and install “hdhomerun_mac_xxxx.dmg” from SiliconDust web site. It does ask for some firewall access privileges, go ahead and allow them.
  2. Hit Rescan to detect the hdhomerun (NOTE: on install it complained that no homerun device was found. Rescan found the homerun)
  3. Hit the Scan arrows, and wait as it scans thru the channels. it is a bit slow, so give it some time as it goes thru a channel search.
  4. Once it finds a channel, hit the view button. OTA programming will open up in the VLC player. The signal strength will also be displayed.

3) Kodi

KODI (formerly RASPBMC, formarly XBMC) is a really nifty media center app. It works on multiple platforms, is feature loaded and gives you access to multiple media streaming apps.

4) On a TV using AirPlay

Launch EyeTV or the HDHomerun config software, on your Mac.  Go to the desired channel. Resize the TV window to full screen. Finally using AirPlay, stream your Mac display to an Apple TV. Do expect some network lag. This is an option, but not something I would recommend

5) On a TV using VLC

This is another option, that is possible to set up, but something I would not recommend, as it does not provide an elegant out of the box solution.

If you have a TV with VLC, you could point to the appropriate .strm file, to load up the channel of your choice.

Unfortunately, I have not found a way of auto-generating the .strm file on Mac or a Win machine. Previously I had used the Windows Media player to generate the strm files. Somehow I cant seem to do that now.

Once you have your strm files, point to them from VLC and you should be able to watch that channel on your TV.

If you are brave enough to make your own .strm files, here is how one of mine looks like:

hdhomerun://xxxxxxxx-0/tuner0?channel=8vsb:647000000&program=2

PVR

There are a few different routes you could take to set up PVR for OTA

  1. Elgato EyeTV with the programming (Pay for the program + Pay an annual price for programming)
  2. Win 7 with the inbuilt Media center to pair with HDHomerun.
  3. mythTV derivatives

Elgato Eye TV:

For those of you on a Mac platform, this is pretty much the only option. It is a good option none-the-less. I have been using it for a couple of months now, and I see no major drawbacks.

Setting up recording schedules is straightforward. Find the show and hit record. One slight pet-peev I have is with the way the schedule set’s things up. You can only record one season at a time. I haven’t been able to find a way to record all seasons of a show. If that is possible, it would be perfect for me…

Programming is made available via TV Guide, and the first year of programming is free, after that it costs $20 per year. You can also hook it up to Titan TV, but I haven’t had the need to.

Recording

One really nice feature is “Export to iPad”.  The selected program is recorded then transcoded and added to iTunes. So if you are an Apple house, you can now play this on any AirPlay (video) enabled device like Apple TV or RaspBMC.

Options_and_EyeTV_Programs_and_iTunes

Win Media center on Win 7:

I  Bootcamped my iMac, created a 100GB partition and installed Win 7 on it. Win 7 comes with a really good Media Center, which includes access to OTA programming.

Few things to remember when you are using Bootcamp with Win7. A) disable hibernate, B) minimize the PageFile size. Otherwise you will end up losing a ton of HDD space (30GB in my case).

Everything worked seamlessly in Win 7.  I was able to point to my HDHomerun, set up recording schedules using the inbuilt programming guide, as well as watch recordings. For a Windows household, this option is a no-brainer…

BUT, it was getting painful having to continuously keep rebooting between Win7 and Mac OSX. I wanted a more elegant option.

I found that VMWARE fusion lets you access your  Bootcamp partition from within MAC OS X. It seemed like a the way to go. I downloaded a trial version of VMWare and gave it a try. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out. My settings kept getting messed up. I could not set up IP addresses properly and my Win 7 kept asking for reactivation.

Might have been my ignorance or software limitation, but I didnt have patience to debug this. So I nuked my Bootcamp partition and went back to setting up a Mac only solution.

MythTV derivatives:

I tried MythBuntu on VirtualBox, but got stuck, just as I did with VMWARE, and didn’t have the time to debug the setup. I know a few colleagues, who have MythTV working seamlessly. If I had enough time I could have given it a try, but unfortunately, I didnt, and thus went with the easiest route.

I also read up on the mythTV derivative on the Mac. Again, it felt like too much work. Hopefully one of these days, someone will be able to make a nice “default” package, that a non-geek can use.