So much of our lives is connected these days so it makes sense that our TV experience is also connected. It was on this thought process I went looking for a TV Tuner that could become part of my home network, with integration into Plex for DVR functions.
I found the HD Homerun Connect.
The HD Homerun Connect is a simple and reasonably priced way to get TV streaming to any device on your network. The setup time for the device is as long as it takes you to plug in power, network and antenna. For individual devices, the setup time (provided you have reasonable bandwidth to download the app) is about 45 seconds. All up the setup time was about 5 minutes which included taking photos before I was watching the footy in HD on my laptop.
There are a couple of little gotchas on this though.
I’ve happily streamed to my laptop, tablet and phone but discovered that lower-power tablets struggle a little with artifacts and stalling on the stream so it’s worth considering whether your hardware is up to the challenge.
As I mentioned earlier you can in fact setup the HD Homerun to work with Plex as a TV Tuner for DVR functionality. Another simple, mainly automatic setup where the EPG for your area is downloaded and made available in your Plex login to record TV or Movies and add them to your available shows automatically.
From my looking around, you can’t find the HD Homerun Connect in your typical stores like mainstream retailers JB or Harvey Norman. You can, however, easily find it through online stores like Scorptec for $179 plus shipping. So while this isn’t a particularly cheap option, it’s cheaper than a new TV for the bedroom and allows the additional functionality of up to 2 channels running simultaneously on multiple devices.
What cool gadgets do you have on your network that you’d like to share with the Ausdroid community?
I use a Raspberry Pi with a Playstation dual tuner and OSMC. OSMC has TVHeadend as a bundled app to install so all I needed to do was add a driver, a single file and setup TVHeadend from a browser. I used Kodi as for me Plex sucks, everything is transcoded which I do not want as my server isn’t powerful enough yet the device I am using can easily transcode it but Plex decided otherwise. So for around $50 I have a tuner that I can stream to all my devices via Kodi and by opening one port on… Read more »
Thanks for the review Phil. I work for the Oz distributor. Has been gaining in popularity since the Plex dvr, there are also a host of apps for Android, NAS and of course the uPnP, dlna and Kodi apps are very nice for those running home theatre. I run this with Synology, and Kodi through and Shield and works a treat.
It’s a great product
I’m really impressed with it
At that price, I think I would stick with my D-Link mobile tuner for my Android devices and physical tuners for the rest. I think my brother has gotten something similar working on one of our home servers too that I know can stream to our Nexus player.
Already ordered one of these when I read about the Plex DVR functionality – looking forward to playing with it 🙂
It even has client software for Linux
I’ve been using two of these for years as the tuners for my DVR and thoroughly recommend them. If you want a top DVR use these with open source MythTV.