Wednesday, July 25, 2012

HDHomeRun Prime, loving it!

I purchased the HDHomerun Prime Cable Card Tuner last month and am loving it.  This is better than the Hauppauge 2650 in a couple of ways,
1) it is on the network so all of my PCs can be configured to use it
2) it has three tuners

I've read that you need to call your cable company to configure each PC that uses the Prime, I've found this not to be true, once I got the first configured the next PC was able to see all of the channels without any assistance from the cable company.

It is truly nice to have my cable channels available on all of my PCs, I highly recommend the HDHomeRun Prime.  Now I need to decide if I am going to keep the old model HDHomeRun or try selling it as it is uplugged at the current moment.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

The DVR is gone, we are now 100% on HTPC for television viewing

The DVR was returned to TimeWarner about a month ago and all viewing is now on HTPC.  The problems with the Hauppauge 2650 cablecard tuner went away when I stopped using sleep mode between viewings/recordings.  With the computer online 24X7 operation has become very smooth and virtually hiccup free.

The switch from the AMD X2 processor to the Intel Pentium G620 has lowered our power useage from ~120 watts idle to ~14 watts idle which makes running the computer continuously reasonable cost wise.

The main issue I am facing with the HTPC DVR is the issue with encrypted content from the cable card tuner.  Several channels encrypt all of their shows, these channels include Disney, Food Network and many others.  When you try to play this content on a PC other than the one that recorded it you get a message saying the content is protected and cannot be played.  This issue also comes up if you have to rebuild your HTPC, it can no longer play back protected content that it had previously recorded.