This is a box that takes cable input and then distributes over your internal network to various network devices.
So that for instance you can watch anything on say Comcast from your iPad 2 or from your Windows PC. Sadly these appear to be the only devices supported right now.
So if I wanted to use it I would have to boot Windows 7 (whatever version) and run the media center on there. If I were to put Mac Minis next to each Tv, then I could get rid of the various Tivos that are there now. Plus watch from any iPad. Pretty cool!
Sadly it won’t run say encrypted stations on MythTv on the Mac for security reasons, but you can watch unencrypted on MythTv for the Mac
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2 responses to “Silicondust HDHomeRun Prine”
Check out the Happague HD PVR.
http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html
You hook it up to the component out from the cable box and it redigitizes the signal. By doing that the encryption is removed.
Redigitizing is done fairly commonly. For example my FIOS cable has a bug in the HDCP software that only allows two chained devices – normally an AV receiver and the HDTV. But my wall mounted HDTV has a HDMI repeater that converts HDMI to CAT5. The FIOS box can’t handle the third chained device (Verizon has confirmed the bug in their software).
To work around this bug I plug the component out from the FIOS box into the AV receiver. The receiver has a chip in it which redigitizes the component signal back into HDMI minus the HDCP. Now I can do anything I want with the HDMI. This is the same technology used by the HD PVR.
Hollywood wants to close this analog hole by remotely disabling component out in the DVR, but millions of legal, buggy HDMI setups (like mine) wouldn’t work anymore.
The answer to this mess is AllVid which the FCC is currently working on.
Make sense, with component you get 1080i and it is reasonably decent. I’ll probably give HD HomeRun a try…