HDHomeRun compatibility questions

[Damstas]

Hi.

I am new to HD HomeRun products and have few questions to anyone who has been running these with a Mac and iPhone. I am thinking of buying 2 x HDHR3-EU, so basically I would have either 4 x DVB-C or 4 x DVB-T tuners.

1) If I am running EyeTV on Macbook Pro, can I remotely set recordings and watch them?
2) Do I need to leave the Mac in home to be able to record, or can it record to NAS.
3) If I leave home and I have set recording or will set on the road, will the HD Homerun(s) work in the background and read from the NAS? I mean that the Homerun(s) will work independently without centralized HTPC?
4) Do these features previously asked work with iPhones too with the EyeTV app, so that I can remotely set recordings and watch them via the Elgato EyeTV app outside home?

I appreciate for any answers

 

[Lord Hamsa]

The HDHomeRun operate independently of the computer, in that it reads the antenna signal and converts it to a video stream accessible on your LAN. You will still need a computer running some kind of software (e.g., EyeTV) to tell the HdHomeRun what channel to tune to, capture that stream, and record it to disk.

 

[Damstas]

The HDHomeRun operate independently of the computer, in that it reads the antenna signal and converts it to a video stream accessible on your LAN. You will still need a computer running some kind of software (e.g., EyeTV) to tell the HdHomeRun what channel to tune to, capture that stream, and record it to disk.

Thx for that answer. If it runs independently I can just leave it home and take my Mac to another country and control it from there, or just shut the Mac down?

EDIT: What about the NAS? If the computer is away, will it read the data from the NAS when using Macbook Pro outside home?

 

[Lord Hamsa]

It'll run, but without a computer working as a capture device, all that will be available is a raw video stream on the LAN (maybe over WAN based on router configuration and carrier policies). That'll work for watching a live stream.

For recording, you need the computer reading that stream and writing it to disk.

 

[Damstas]

It'll run, but without a computer working as a capture device, all that will be available is a raw video stream on the LAN (maybe over WAN based on router configuration and carrier policies). That'll work for watching a live stream.

For recording, you need the computer reading that stream and writing it to disk.

I understand that you need the computer, but if you take it away and you have already set the recordings, won't the HomeRun have those in memory and record them to NAS?

This is my drawing what I am trying to reach with the setup.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/71334439@N03/15147262558/

 

[Lord Hamsa]

No, as far as I know there is no way to use an NAS, even one with as many features as Synology, in that fashion without a computer actually performing the capture of the video stream. The EyeTV software on the Mac is what's doing the work. The HDHR is just providing the data and the NAS can be used to store it, but neither are capable (as far as I can tell) of doing the actual "DVR" portion of the work themselves.

On the other hand, who knows what DSM packages are available that I don't know about?

Edited to add: On the other hand, after a web search, I'm seeing some chatter about being able to use the HDHR from the Video Station package... so in that case, if that's a recording solution as opposed to just a pass-through for streaming, your approach might very well work.

 

[Damstas]

No, as far as I know there is no way to use an NAS, even one with as many features as Synology, in that fashion without a computer actually performing the capture of the video stream. The EyeTV software on the Mac is what's doing the work. The HDHR is just providing the data and the NAS can be used to store it, but neither are capable (as far as I can tell) of doing the actual "DVR" portion of the work themselves.

On the other hand, who knows what DSM packages are available that I don't know about?

Edited to add: On the other hand, after a web search, I'm seeing some chatter about being able to use the HDHR from the Video Station package... so in that case, if that's a recording solution as opposed to just a pass-through for streaming, your approach might very well work.

Ok thx for that. If I had Mac Mini doing the basic work at home 24/7, could I then connect it's EyeTV via Macbook Pro or iPhone?

If anyone has tried the solution, that Lord Hamsa provided, feel free to post. I don't have yet either the HomeRun or the Synology NAS.

 

[cdavis11]

Hi.

I am new to HD HomeRun products and have few questions to anyone who has been running these with a Mac and iPhone. I am thinking of buying 2 x HDHR3-EU, so basically I would have either 4 x DVB-C or 4 x DVB-T tuners.

1) If I am running EyeTV on Macbook Pro, can I remotely set recordings and watch them?
2) Do I need to leave the Mac in home to be able to record, or can it record to NAS.
3) If I leave home and I have set recording or will set on the road, will the HD Homerun(s) work in the background and read from the NAS? I mean that the Homerun(s) will work independently without centralized HTPC?
4) Do these features previously asked work with iPhones too with the EyeTV app remotely, so that I can remotely set recordings and watch them via the Elgato EyeTV app outside home?

I appreciate for any answers

I run EyeTV on my mac with 2 HDHR devices connected via ethernet through an airport extreme operating as a switch.

You can view things remotely so long as EyeTV is running - BUT - EyeTV does on the fly transcoding and greatly depends on how much horsepower your computer has to perform that. TO the best of my knowledge, the machine doing the transcoding needs to be local to the HDHR tuners - mine is.

I can schedule recordings that can be viewed on an iOS device through the EyeTV app, but they're saved as EyeTV files and not dumped into iTunes - so viewing locally is a bit of a hurdle if you want to watch shows on an AppleTV through iTunes.

There is an iOS app called "insta-TV Pro" that will bypass the EyeTV software and pull streams directly from the HDHR box, but that's an uncompressed full HD stream...in my experience it needs to be streamed locally and even on a beefy 5Ghz network I see dropout and lag.

I prefer to run through the EyeTV app if you have a newish local Os X machine to handle the transcodes.