I recently bought the HDHomeRun network HDTV tuner made by Silicon Dust. This product has two HDTV tuners onboard, each is capable of receiving QAM unencrypted cable TV high definition channels or ATSC broadcast high definition channels. I have one tuner connected to our local CATV and the other to an indoor HDTV antenna. The Ethernet connection goes to the wired gigabit backbone in our house.
One reason I bought this was to use it with the horrible SageTV software that I deeply regret buying for our media center PC in the TV room. It does work with SageTV although getting anything to work with that horrid software is always far more difficult than I’d like.
But the real joy of using HDHomeRun became evident the moment I fired up EyeTV software from Elgato on my Mac Pro. I already have an NTSC USB tuner connected and configured for use with deprecated channels, and now with HDHomeRun I can have 3 TV windows open at the same time, two with HDTV programs and one NTSC.
Adding the HDHomeRun to EyeTV version 3 was an absolute piece of cake, very easy, very logical, very straightforward. This experience reminded me of what a bonehead error I made when I decided to use a Windows PC for a home media center project. It also reminded me of how glad I am that I escaped from Redmond Prison and became a rabid Mac fan boy, there is a very rational basis for preferring to use a Mac.
My 8-core Mac Pro hardly notices the load from 2 HDTV and 1 NTSC video windows all running simultaneously. If you examine the menu bar in the screenshot above you can see a CPU utilization graphic just to the left of the CPU temperature (which says 165ยบ). I had lots of other software running when I took that screenshot. Normally I have the 3 TV windows spread out across 2 displays on one of my Pages desktops. I gathered them all onto one display for the screenshot.
I’m very pleased with HDHomeRun, I give it 5 stars with no hesitation.
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