HD Homerun DVR by SiliconDust

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morgwon

Supreme [H]ardness
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They started a kickstarter campaign for their new software DVR. With the future of windows mce uncertain its nice that someone else might offer an alternative.

HDHomeRun DVR

Watch and record live TV. Your way.

It’s our mission is to simplify and change the way we watch and record live television. SiliconDust is readying the ultimate live television viewing and recording software tool called HDHomeRun DVR. It enables the viewing and recording of your full over-the-air and cable TV lineup using your home network.

Our concept is that Live and recorded content can be watched from media devices with our brand new and innovative interface. And yes, it even works with protected content. HDHomeRun DVR doesn’t require an always-on PC (or media center software) - it works with network attached storage devices.


The best part? It requires practically zero configuration. With HDHomeRun DVR combined with current HDHomeRun products sold today, you will soon have the freedom to watch and record Live TV. Your way. On your terms.
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You provide the investment capital, and get nothing in return. Gotta love kickstarter.
 
I got their e-mail, this morning. Interesting idea, but they'll have to get by without any money from me.
 
Tyler-Durden said:
I got their e-mail, this morning. Interesting idea, but they'll have to get by without any money from me.
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Same here, looks interesting but i'm not even sure what the heck they're selling.
Not sure if it's just alternate firmware for the hdhomerun devices or if it's a standalone box. It does look like there's a yearly fee and that's got nope written all over it for me.
 
The reason why they're asking for funding for it is because of the licensing costs for CableLabs certification and more importantly Microsoft PlayReady in order to implement a protected path capable solution that will make the content companies happy. The licensing fees are on the order of about $50,000 just to start out, and currently the only solution that is capable of handling copy protected content is Media Center which Microsoft no longer supports.

I'd be all for kicking in on this except that it looks like its a subscription offering. If I'm backing it, I'm not paying a subscription on top of it.
 
FnordMan said:
Same here, looks interesting but i'm not even sure what the heck they're selling.
Not sure if it's just alternate firmware for the hdhomerun devices or if it's a standalone box. It does look like there's a yearly fee and that's got nope written all over it for me.
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Its a DVR software solution that works with existing Homerun products. So if you have a NAS you can run the DVR software on your NAS and that is where you shows would record. Then you can view them on any DLNA device. It can also run on PCs as well. Its an alternative to using Windows Media Center.
 
SunnyD said:
The reason why they're asking for funding for it is because of the licensing costs for CableLabs certification and more importantly Microsoft PlayReady in order to implement a protected path capable solution that will make the content companies happy. The licensing fees are on the order of about $50,000 just to start out, and currently the only solution that is capable of handling copy protected content is Media Center which Microsoft no longer supports.

I'd be all for kicking in on this except that it looks like its a subscription offering. If I'm backing it, I'm not paying a subscription on top of it.
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Fine I'll donate 1,000 and take 1/50th of the net profits.


But they sure as shit won't do that lol.
 
If I still had cable, this would be the holy grail of what I've been trying to make work around my house for the past 15 years. Of course, doing this now would require me to replace all my Roku's with FireSticks/FireTVs/AppleTVs, and I'm not quite willing to do that.
 
David_Schroth said:
If I still had cable, this would be the holy grail of what I've been trying to make work around my house for the past 15 years. Of course, doing this now would require me to replace all my Roku's with FireSticks/FireTVs/AppleTVs, and I'm not quite willing to do that.
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Eh, I pretty much have this setup already.

Ceton infiniTV6 ETH -> Windows 7 Machine running WMC / Emby (formerly MediaBrowser) / ServerWMC -> Roku with Emby app

I get LiveTV on the Roku, or any device connected to Emby. I can get LiveTV on any desktop browser, or android device. I think they have an iOS app as well. No subscription fees, though I did back Emby for $10 so I could get slightly better guide support on the Roku.

The biggest thing lacking with this is losing the stellar programming guide that WMC has, the Xbox360 in the other room is a much better TV browsing experience. But for just watching, the Roku + Emby solution works pretty well.
 
Erasmus354 said:
Eh, I pretty much have this setup already.

Ceton infiniTV6 ETH -> Windows 7 Machine running WMC / Emby (formerly MediaBrowser) / ServerWMC -> Roku with Emby app

I get LiveTV on the Roku, or any device connected to Emby. I can get LiveTV on any desktop browser, or android device. I think they have an iOS app as well. No subscription fees, though I did back Emby for $10 so I could get slightly better guide support on the Roku.

The biggest thing lacking with this is losing the stellar programming guide that WMC has, the Xbox360 in the other room is a much better TV browsing experience. But for just watching, the Roku + Emby solution works pretty well.
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Can the Emby app play back copy-once protected shows? (specifically, on the Roku)
 
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David_Schroth said:
Can the Emby app play back copy-once protected shows? (specifically, on the Roku)
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Nope. Everyone always misses that part. Only game in town for playback is MCE or official extenders (Ceton Echo, Xbox 360). This is why I am glad at least SiliconDust is offering an alternative. Ceton made so many promises with the Ceton Echo that they did not meet that I think they as a company were discouraged from investing any more money into it. Their rep definitely took a hit.
 
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morgwon said:
Nope. Everyone always misses that part. Only game in town for playback is MCE or official extenders (Ceton Echo, Xbox 360). This is why I am glad at least SiliconDust is offering an alternative. Ceton made so many promises with the Ceton Echo that they did not meet that I think they as a company were discouraged from investing any more money into it. Their rep definitely took a hit.
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Emby does seem interesting in that it can at least do a live TV feed from an ATSC tuner. That's far better than the current Plex "channel" that I have installed that's not exactly user friendly.

I agree on the Echo - I pre-ordered one with high hopes and while it was an improvement over the Linksys 2200's that I had, Ceton abandonment of it got me rather butthurt. It seems like it is too much to ask to get a "Roku" type device that can launch a MCE "app" up to watch protected content that's recorded from cable.

Regardless, since moving to GA a year ago, I have not had a cable subscription, so that has solved my problems as far as needing to watch and DVR copy-once protected shows. We've been doing just fine with Rokus on all TVs with Netflix, Amazon and Plex.
 
Even if this is a subscription I think it's a brilliant idea... having a roku-like device that merges live TV from a cable company with streaming services and your own personal media.
 
pillagenburn said:
Even if this is a subscription I think it's a brilliant idea... having a roku-like device that merges live TV from a cable company with streaming services and your own personal media.
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Tivo is pretty close to that and will gladly charge you a subscription fee.....
 
I threw in $60....at least someone is still trying to support copy-protected live TV. I spent more on a ceton echo and that was a bust. At least with this i can control the hardware.
 
pillagenburn said:
Even if this is a subscription I think it's a brilliant idea... having a roku-like device that merges live TV from a cable company with streaming services and your own personal media.
Click to expand...

David_Schroth said:
Tivo is pretty close to that and will gladly charge you a subscription fee.....
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$30/yr is not terrible. Tivo is $12.50/month and it will take years for you to break even with a lifetime subscription. Cable companies fees are even more expensive.

nitrobass24 said:
I threw in $60....at least someone is still trying to support copy-protected live TV. I spent more on a ceton echo and that was a bust. At least with this i can control the hardware.
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I think many of us Ceton Echo adopters kept asking Ceton to focus on software after all the hardware related issues they were experiencing. To make something that is hardware independent but they insisted on a complete solution.
 
It just won't be included in Windows 10 it seems, but WMC has been effectively out of development for years. It will keep working on 7/8 as long as guide data is supplied, and even if Microsoft cuts it off, there are still ways to get guide data into WMC.
 
With MS officially killing WMC, I decided to throw $30 at the Kickstarter. This might be the best alternative we have if you want to use Windows 10 at all.
 
So their DVR software will cost $30 a year to use?
 
bpizzle1 said:
With MS officially killing WMC, I decided to throw $30 at the Kickstarter. This might be the best alternative we have if you want to use Windows 10 at all.
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Yeah, i'm still on the fence about that one. For now i'm going to play around with Mythtv on a laptop of mine that fragged it's windows install. (basically didn't use it anymore anyway)

It'll give me something to experiment with without the need to reformat my primary recording box. (which is on win 7 w/ media center)
 
Skillz said:
So their DVR software will cost $30 a year to use?
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That's only $5 more than a schedules direct subscription if you went with MythTV. And you'll probably will have to pay it if Microsoft decides to turn off their scheduling service. They do not have to support it as long as they are supporting Windows 7 and 8.
 
Ryokurin said:
That's only $5 more than a schedules direct subscription if you went with MythTV. And you'll probably will have to pay it if Microsoft decides to turn off their scheduling service. They do not have to support it as long as they are supporting Windows 7 and 8.
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This is what has me almost considering backing this project. I already have a Ceton and would have to rebuy my hardware. But if the support for my existing Win7 MCE setup goes away it will literally be the only game in town. So supporting them now with the hope that they build something good and usable might be a good option. I really hate to lose MCE though, it has a really good interface.
 
I like the fact that this is a standalone app. I think were most front end fall short is trying to kludge everything into their main page. With this app I see myself setting a home screen that has the following short cuts.

Netflix, Hulu, Plex, Hd Homerun TV, Amazon Prime, HBOgo, Showtime

Also the fact that its a standalone app makes it easier to integrate into other devices like Smart TVs. There is an api for creating apps for the device so you just have to make it work.
 
Yeah, I was on the no side of the fence but after I saw the news that Media Center's getting shut down an easy to use app sounds like a good idea.

Sure MythTV works but it can be a pain to set up and won't do protected content. (not that I record much of any protected content...)

Going to toss in $30 in the hope they can get it certified by Cablelabs (there's the big unknown right now)
 
Looks like they met their stretch goals and one of them was Plex integration. Seems like a good idea since Plex seems to have a client that works with everything already. I see the Kodi plugin states that it will work with copy-freely channels. Hope Plex doesn't have have the same limitation.
 
morgwon said:
Looks like they met their stretch goals and one of them was Plex integration. Seems like a good idea since Plex seems to have a client that works with everything already. I see the Kodi plugin states that it will work with copy-freely channels. Hope Plex doesn't have have the same limitation.
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Plex appears to be even more limited. They only mention recordings for Plex, not live tv.
 
Plex will also be limited to copy-free channels/recordings currently
 
This is getting more interesting as plex will be supported and you can use plex on xbox so I could still use my xboxs as extenders.

I've been looking into consolidating my media center and main pc into one pc but MS has been making that difficult with xbox one not supporting media center extender and now win 10 dropping media center. (I pretty much always run the latest windows)
 
With Plex, I'd just like menu integration to switch between HDHR DVR and Plex Home Theater that would be simple with a remote control. Similar to how WMC does it right now. I only used WMC for live TV with a cablecard; so if the new DVR software can fill this gap, I can finally ditch WMC completely.

Would switch to Kodi if it had copy-once support.
 
FnordMan said:
Here's hoping they can get certification for the Copy Once content.
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Yep, I did not back the Kickstarter because for now my Ceton + WMC setup is working for my needs. However I am glad they got good support. I hope they implement an awesome solution because I am certainly not against switching hardware and paying a subscription to them if they build something that works well and can view Copy Once content.
 
I wish they would have also had a network tuner with h.265 encoding for some future proofing to throw in with that $30 a year DVR subscription
 
Erasmus354 said:
Yep, I did not back the Kickstarter because for now my Ceton + WMC setup is working for my needs. However I am glad they got good support. I hope they implement an awesome solution because I am certainly not against switching hardware and paying a subscription to them if they build something that works well and can view Copy Once content.
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Yeah, I balked a bit at the yearly fee a bit but after looking at what listings cost via schedules direct it didn't look all that bad. I ended up backing it because WMC is starting to lose it's mind for me. I have to manually tell it to download new listings once a week or it just plain won't grab them. Already have a HDHR Prime so the kickstarter was a bit of a no-brainer.
Won't be too upset if they don't get Copy Once support though given I was already looking at moving to MythTV since I don't do any channels that mark stuff Copy Once anymore.

dragonslee said:
I wish they would have also had a network tuner with h.265 encoding for some future proofing to throw in with that $30 a year DVR subscription
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Would drive the cost up to something half past insane to put a hardware h.265 encoder in there.

The reason it works so well right now is that the box doesn't do any processing other than the bare minimum needed to stuff it on the network.
 
Besides, what would the point of an h.265 encoder actually be? It just simply isn't needed at all. We aren't going to be getting 4k content OTL (over the line) for quite some time. No point in adding it until it is needed. Anything less than 4k and you aren't going to see any real appreciable gains. Hell even at 4k h.264 should be fine for a LAN system.
 
Erasmus354 said:
Besides, what would the point of an h.265 encoder actually be? It just simply isn't needed at all. We aren't going to be getting 4k content OTL (over the line) for quite some time. No point in adding it until it is needed. Anything less than 4k and you aren't going to see any real appreciable gains. Hell even at 4k h.264 should be fine for a LAN system.
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Yeah, then there's the whole thing that most cable operators are still pushing 1080i MPEG-2 for most channels. (with a few oddball exceptions, I recall one of the history channels being 720p60 MPEG-2)

There's only a small handful they've got converted to h.264. Got a letter to that extent when they started, older cable card devices basically won't work with that, the prime and ceton both work without issues because they're "dumb" and just pass the stream along.
 
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