Which card to buy?

[Galaxysurfer]

I am at a crossroads. I have been using the Hauppauge PCI cards for years. One of my older HVR2255 has Kicked the bucket after 6 + yrs of use & abuse. My newer WinTV Quad was returned to Happauge for replacement under warranty. (Lasted 6 months) I don't like being a beta tester for the linux drivers & want to get away from Win 10. Are the SiliconDust HD Homeruns reliable? I read all the horror stories of the power supplies. ( one of reasons I stayed with a pci card) I prefer to use straight debian rather than ubuntu based distro for daily driver. Don't have a dedicated media server at this point. Can I have confidence in making the switch to Homeruns? I only need OTA access, having given up on cableboxes & uuirts. One thing I liked about the Hauppauge cards is not needing to be linked to net all the time other than for epg updates. They are cheaper too. Which is your preference?

[Tiki]

Silicon Dust gets my vote over Hauppauge for sure. Though I don’t run Linux.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by Galaxysurfer

I am at a crossroads. I have been using the Hauppauge PCI cards for years. One of my older HVR2255 has Kicked the bucket after 6 + yrs of use & abuse. My newer WinTV Quad was returned to Happauge for replacement under warranty. (Lasted 6 months) I don't like being a beta tester for the linux drivers & want to get away from Win 10. Are the SiliconDust HD Homeruns reliable? I read all the horror stories of the power supplies. ( one of reasons I stayed with a pci card) I prefer to use straight debian rather than ubuntu based distro for daily driver. Don't have a dedicated media server at this point. Can I have confidence in making the switch to Homeruns? I only need OTA access, having given up on cableboxes & uuirts. One thing I liked about the Hauppauge cards is not needing to be linked to net all the time other than for epg updates. They are cheaper too. Which is your preference?

I have two HDHomeRuns running under Linux and they are rock solid using OpenDCT (also under Linux.) I am running Ubuntu and can't vouch for straight Debian but I would guess that will be solid too.

[Telecore]

I have the Hauppauge Quad PCIe and an HDTC-2US. If all things are more or less equal, I usually prefer to have the tuner in-the-box (no external network required). However, there is a specific use case that I have become aware of recently which may tip the balance in favor of the HDHR versions - if you want to watch TV using the SageTV miniclient on an Nvidia Shield, you can "clean up" the video stream in real time by running the HDHR tuner through OpenDCT w/FFMPEG. The Hauppauge PCIe tuner cannot do this and the video files and streams from it are often unwatchable with 5.1 sound because the underlying video player, exoplayer, used by the miniclient, cannot handle "dirty" streams. (ijkplayer is better but only has stereo audio).

[JustFred]

Originally Posted by Galaxysurfer

I am at a crossroads. I have been using the Hauppauge PCI cards for years. One of my older HVR2255 has Kicked the bucket after 6 + yrs of use & abuse. My newer WinTV Quad was returned to Happauge for replacement under warranty. (Lasted 6 months)

I've been running 8 HVR2250's for nearly 10 years without failures. The lone WinTV Quad has been trouble-free for over a year. The Quad costs little more than an HDHR dual.

Are the SiliconDust HD Homeruns reliable? I read all the horror stories of the power supplies.

Most of the PS tales-o-woe are related to the Hauppauge HD-PVR. On the other hand, my experience with HDHR's is excellent. Out of 6 HDHRs, one nearly 10-yr old HDHR power supply finally died a couple of months ago. Hard to compain about that kind of reliablilty. But it did take awhile to troubleshoot.

Can I have confidence in making the switch to Homeruns? ... Which is your preference?

My 3 (Win 7) systems run a mixture. The hardware has been equally reliable. There are advantages to both types.

HDHR's are great when it's not easy to run the antenna wire to a PCIe card. Or a long coax run looses too much signal. Or a PCIe slot isn't available. Downside: they need AC power. In a power failure, you won't get any recordings if the Sage box is on a UPS but the HDHR isn't. I like the tuners LEDs; my HDHR's are below the TV, so I can instantly see if something's being recorded and how many tuners are in use at any given time.

PCIe cards have the benefit of "fewer moving parts"; everything in one box. The PC's power supply powers them. Never any wacky problems with network issues (bad cables, flaky network switches, network congestion, etc). Initial setup tends to be more straightforward than a networked solution.

[Galaxysurfer]

Ok thanks for the responses all.
My troubles with linux are in using Linuxmint. To get Hauppauge cards (applies to newer products) working in Linux you need to use a custom ubuntu kernel provided by Hauppauge's contracted developer since all their patches/tweaking hasn't reached the mainline kernel yet. I prefer to use Mx Linux which uses older SysVinit rather than standard adapted Systemd for security & functioning reasons. I wish i could get 10+ years out of my Hauppauge cards. They have bit the dust before they get that old. Last good older card is a HVR-2255 but, it hasn't reached the 10 yr milestone. I may mix & match with some of each. I like the idea of hdhr with its network access & the abiliity to stream live channels to Roku via HDHRFLing. I will have to test that out since my rabbit ears don't fair well on basement tv.