Video Asylum

TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Home Theater systems and more.

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RE: Thanks for your explanation

Posted by Rod M on February 16, 2018 at 11:28:34:
Here's my rack for cable/tv/internet:

You can see the HDHomeRun boxes on the right sitting on the Cisco STA1520s which are the tuner adapters. The Prime boxes are connected via ethernet to the router which is under the phone.

From there, you can use the HDHomeRun app with an Android player or Roku to view live TV, but you won't get any DRM channels which are everything except the major networks, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS and maybe a few others. The HDHomeRun app connects directly to the HDHomeRun Prime via ethernet or WiFi.

With Windows WMC, you set up the server to use those cable cards in the Prime box. WMC can use up to four tuners which is why I have two boxes and a total of 6 tuners. Because we have 7 TVs, I set them up to use different boxes/tuners so that my WMC server has all 4 tuners for recording most of the time. You can see below that WMC is using one tuner from one box and the 3 tuners from the other one. So, the Xbox 360 connects to the WMC server which uses one tuner to send programming to the paired Xbox. The WMC server can support 4 Xboxes at once watching live TV or one can be viewing TV while the server records 3 programs. In essense, WMC is a middle man between the HDHomeRun Prime boxes and serves programming to the Xboxes.

Here's a screen grab of the WMC recordings which are copy once and can only be viewed on an XBox 360 that is paired with a specific WMC server. Other recordings get processed by MCEBuddy with commercials removed and get copied to the Plex server.

Keep the X1 box or with Cox, they have a mini box that is only $2 a month, but doesn't do on demand and stuff like that. Once you get everything sorted out, you can get rid of their box and just pay $2/month for the M-card.

If the X1 is like the Cox Contour box, then it has DVR capabilities built in, but it only works if you pay the $10/month DVR charge.

I don't know what blasted box you want to turn off. Our Cox box has a setting to either leave it on all the time or it times out after a couple hours if you don't do anything.

Anyway, yes, the HDHomeRun is just a network/internet box that transmitts up to 3 different programs to anywhere in your network. To view the programs, you need to have a set top box of some kind or a Smart TV that can run the HDHomeRun app. If you want to record and view DRM programming, then the only way I've been able to do it is to use WMC on a Windows 7 PC with an Xbox 360 used as a set top box. But, if you run Plex, you still need another box or Smart TV that can run Plex along with a PC, which can be the same one as the WMC server, or a NAS that can run the Plex server. If you use Kodi for viewing recordings, then you just need a shared disk that it can access where the recordings live as Kodi doesn't require a server to work. I actually prefer SMPC which is a Kodi variant. Both run on Android. Plex is more widely available for different platforms and most NAS products have Plex server apps.

I know it sounds complicated, but once you get it working, it's not really that tough.