HDHomeRun Prime usage with multiple PVR solutions

[waters10]

As my HD-PVR decides to fail on me, I decided it's time for a major upgrade. I was still using winXP and an old Ahtlon X2. So I'm upgrading my HTPC to an ivy bridge celeron, win7 and HDHomeRun Prime. Getting stuff delivered tomorrow.

The way our family watches stuff works like this. 42" 720p crappy plasma TV in the living room. That's where my HTPC resides and it's used for casual TV watching, mostly kids cartoons and general TV watching. Whenever we want to watch something "better", we go upstairs, where I have a projector set up.

So, the question is. Can I set up 2 of the Prime tuners on SageTV, using sageDCT on my HTPC? And then setup the 3rd tuner on WMC upstairs, where I have my other PC driving the projector? This way, I'd record general TV where I watch general TV and I'd record premium "copy-once" stuff where I actually watch that content.

I could still access TV stuff upstairs with a sagetv client. But I would not be able to access premium stuff downstairs, until I move my xbox downstairs. Kids would suffer a bit for a while, but I can live with that.

So, possible or not? Thanks!

[SprDtyF350]

I have done it. Just enable the tuners you want each PC to be able to use in the HDHomerun setup, and disable the ones you don't want. Do that on the Sage and WMC computers. Works fine...

[nyplayer]

Yes it is possible.

[waters10]

Cool! That's how I'll use my Prime for now. Should go easier with the wife. It also gives me a chance of experiment with WMC and MediaPortal with the computer upstairs, without disrupting SageTV.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by waters10

Cool! That's how I'll use my Prime for now. Should go easier with the wife. It also gives me a chance of experiment with WMC and MediaPortal with the computer upstairs, without disrupting SageTV.

Be careful using MediaPortal it appears that it locks the Hd Homerun tuners only for its own use... will not share them across the network. Needed to reboot the Prime so I could reuse it in Sage.

[waters10]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

Be careful using MediaPortal it appears that it locks the Hd Homerun tuners only for its own use... will not share them across the network. Needed to reboot the Prime so I could reuse it in Sage.

Hmmm. I think I'll experiment with WMC mostly, since it brings something to the table SageTV doesn't have it, premium channels. MediaPortal doesn't bring any new funcionality that SageTV doesn't have it. At least not on the PVR side of things.

I got my cablecard yesterday, my mobo/cpu/memory/Prime is on a vehicle for delivery today. It's build time today. If I can get SageTV up and running before I go to bed, that would be so awesome, as long as that doesn't mean I'm going to bed at 4am!

Thanks guys!

[nyplayer]

That is what I am doing experimenting with WMC but still using SageTV as my main... As you say the Mediaportal PVR and others provide less than you can get with Sagetv. I see no reason switching to other PVR's until they can do copy never shows.

MCEBuddy is great for renaming the WTV recordings in WMC with proper season episode info.


PS... You know how many times I said it will only take an hour and wind up working on it till the early morning.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

PS... You know how many times I said it will only take an hour and wind up working on it till the early morning.

Totally agree. I always try to leave a block of time (6 hours usually - happy medium of what I've often needed for a change) that is free of recordings just incase.

[waters10]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

PS... You know how many times I said it will only take an hour and wind up working on it till the early morning.

That's the main catch of HTPCs. It's a huge time sink. How big of a time sink, it depends on many factors, including one's definition of time sink. I started this as a hobby, before kids. It never bothered me back then. 2 kids later and now I dread the days I have to do what I'm set out to do tonight ...

[waters10]

So 2 nights later, I have everything up and running!

It was very easy to get my cablecard activated. It was a pain to get HD channels other than open ones. It seems like WOW doesn't know how to do this. I found a WOW rep on dslreports that seems to point people on the right direction. Big kudos for that guy.

Best part? I'm getting premium stuff on Sagetv! At this point in time, I don't see even a reason to experiment with WMC. After this upgrade, I'm getting 3 cable card tuners in sagetv, much faster channel changing than with my now defunct hd-pvr and I'm hoping much higher reliability. Really happy with the results!

[cupp]

Dan on dsl reports is a great source for any problems. Without him wow told me that they couldn't help me any further. He also helped me with some modem problems.

[waters10]

Originally Posted by cupp

Dan on dsl reports is a great source for any problems. Without him wow told me that they couldn't help me any further. He also helped me with some modem problems.

Yep. Dan is awesome. I found a lot of posts mentioning a call to NOC to help with cablecard activation. I went through 3 calls with clueless CSRs until I found Dan's posts. When I called and asked the 4th CSR to call NOC, she hesitated, asked me how I knew about it. I explained it, but she still wouldn't call. After I pretty much begged, she called NOC and a few minutes later, I had all channels available. I asked her politely to take notes and sent it to the whole team, because there's a lot of people that go through the same problems ...