HD Homerun with a Virtual machine?

[Grimham]

Currently I have a dedicated HTPC/server with a Hauppauge 2250 in it. I would have liked to have used a VM but I could never get the tuner to work properly that way. I don't know why I never thought of it before, but perhaps a HD Homerun is the answer. I assume someone here has to be using this setup or at least tried it. Could you give me any info on how it's working for you and what Vm and host OS you're using? Of course any other info would might want to add would be appreciated as well. Thanks.

 

[Tiporaro]

Ran a hdhr prime to a esxi guest Linux vm a few months back without any trouble from the tuner. Basically once the hdhr is set up right it didn't seem to matter that much where you did the actually watching/tuning from. Of course the vm still had to be configured to tune correctly, but you're not really facing the hardware level compatibility issues that you do with some other internal tuners.

Only problem I had in getting it running at the time was needing a firmware update to tune all 3 tuners simultaneously. Not sure if that's even an issue on the regular non-prime hdhr's though...

Edit: had tested that in a wmc setup windows vm prior to tinkering with Linux for it, and it was even easier to get running. So as far as I can tell, if you're able to use the hdhr in a regular setup, the virtualizing didn't seem to have any negative impact on compatibility.

 

[Grimham]

Thanks for the info.

 

[wkearney99]

Yeah, I had my HDHR running inside a Hyper-V guest and it seemed to work just fine. Since the HDHR are network devices all you need it reliable and well-configured networking. As in, don't have the HDHR stuck two switches away across congested 10/100 network switches. Get a gigE switch and have the HDHR connected with the network interface into the VM. And then make sure whatever VM you setup has appropriate drivers to get max performance out of the hypervisor's network connection.

 

[farscapesg1]

No problems here running a VM and recording TV from both a HDHR (v1) and a HDHR Prime. Been rock solid for about 8 months.

The host is running ESXi 5 and the guest is a Windows 7 VM with 2 vCPU and 2 GB RAM. The system also runs commercial detection software on the recordings, which are recorded via SageTV (damn you Google for buying them!!!!!!). Currently churning through 4 recordings of the Olympics running at the same time (though not HD... I don't want to eat up that much storage for something only my wife is really interested in ).

All recordings are being sent to a 2x2 ZFS mirror on my SAN. Probably overkill for media recording, but with 5 streams going at once sometimes, plus commercial detection running on two of them in real time, I wanted to be safe. Also plan on setting up some scripts to transcode recordings after a certain age from standard MPEG to h.264 .mkv files to reduce space. The VM has been tested on both hosts without any issues. Tuners are upstairs in the datacomm "cubby" where all the phone and cable lines first come into the house. They are connected to a 8 port DLink switch, which is in turn connected to a prewired network port running to the office and connected to a Dell Poweredge 2724 GB switch. Each host has 6 NICs; 2 for the distributed vswitch containing the majority of my virtual workstations and servers, 1 for the management network and vcenter VM, 1 for the cable modem (on a VLAN so my Untangle VM can vmotion between hosts), 1 for iSCSI (on a VLAN with my DrobroPro I use for backups.... yuck!!!), and finally 1 spare for testing or if I need a seperate vswitch temporarily.

I've thought about testing out WIndows Media Center, but unfortunately I don't have an XBOX 360 to test out the extender capabilities which would be a must in my house since I'm currently running 3 SageTV extenders and 2 desktop clients. The thought of having to buy 5 XBOXs to replace everything makes me shudder. Still waiting to see how the Ceton Echo beta goes.