SiliconDust HDHomeRun EXTEND. FREE broadcast HDTV (2-Tuner)

This review is for the SiliconDust HD HomeRun Extend Device: HDTC-2US. The reason I bought the device was to put our household on the path to cut the cord from our cable company, along with the ability to display over the air broadcast content on our portable devices.The SiliconDust HomeRun device is a great piece of hardware, but it lacks necessary software to be truly useful by the masses. I've had the device for about a month now and I am impressed with it's capability. The picture on my Galaxy Tab is brighter, crisper, and clearer than the same show from my HD Digital Cable connection on our new SONY 50" HD TV. I was pleasantly surprised with the Galaxy HD Tuner app; you can call up a list of available channels, and the each channel has a title graphic from the program, and it shows the name of the show currently playing, along the name of the next show. My DLNA equipped television easily found the device and was able to play the content. I easily connected the device to my Windows Media Server and was very pleased that WMS recognized the two SiliconDust tuners, along with the existing cable tuner. To my surprise, WMS was able to record three shows simultaneously. The hardware it truly a transformational leap in its space.The biggest problem is the software, marketing description, and documentation.The lead description on the device on Amazon is that the device has two-tuners and you can watch two shows simultaneously. And you can watch live TV on Android and iOS devices. All true things, but there are limits to the features. First you need to understand that there is a one-to-one relationship of the tuner to a single viewer. Just because a tuner is locked onto a channel, that doesn't mean that two or more devices can watch the same stream. I was sorely disappointed last night when I watching a basketball game and I had scheduled the same program for recording in WMS for my son so that he could watch the game later.Which leads to the second problem. I went into WMS to check on the progress of the recording and to ensure that there was enough disk space; WMS reported no TV signal and consequently, no recording was made. The software needs to be able to allow two or more viewers of the same stream. This is technically possible, if the correct protocol is chosen. Also the software needs to be able to set priorities over who can change the channel.Third problem. Wireless is great for portability but is subject to competition and interference. Everyone shares the same sets of radio spectrum; the more users on wireless, the lower the thru-put; not everyone can do what they want to do in the same timespace. Certainly you can configure for different channels, but everyone else in the neighborhood is doing the same thing. Over-subscription of the wireless capacity results in freezes, dropped frames, and pixilation. This is an easily solvable problem in software. For example, Netflix can recognize dropped frame conditions, and it will drop quality to ensure that the content gets thru; SD should be able to do the same.Fourth problem. SD needs to own the software. SD provides SW for Windows, MAC, and Android; but a third party provides the iOS software. The marketing literature also doesn't tell you that the Android and iOS apps are not for free. The iOS app was listed for $9.99 on the app store. Nice!!! And I learned that my iPAD gen 2 does not have the necessary hardware to support decoding, although it can be done in software.A couple of suggestions for SiliconDust. Invest in software. Create features that make it easy to use for the masses. I'm a computer nerd and have spent countless hours trying to make HomeRun device live up to its promise. You can do it yourself, but it's a lot of work. Also, there is a window of opportunity for SD. Microsoft announced this summer that it was dropping WMS; SD should buy the rights and sell it independently and with the HD tuners.Think of the HD HomeRun Extend device as a single in baseball, not the home-run that the name would imply. I have hope that the SD Product Managers and Marketeers make the right choices to improve the software side and if done right, then it may deserve the name HomeRun.I'll be back later with some more analysis and suggestions as I gain more experience. Good luck to those that buy.

If your in the market for a network attached over-the-air/basic-cable tuner and your not technically inclined enough to build to build you own solution then this is probably a decent enough alternative. Both only have two tuners, which means two different broadcasts can be viewed at the same time. I bought both the DUAL and the EXTEND to evaluate because they are the same product with one minor difference; H.264. Don't fall for the printed materials SiliconDust provides: both are perfectly capable of streaming HD content to any device that supports uPnP - with any uPnP client. However, I think the DUAL is a better product.The EXTEND costs an additional 30$ but only really gives you what they're calling on-the-fly h.264 encoding, which is a widely used codec for digital video and audio compression. The main draw here is that it allows you to stream HD content to wireless devices more efficiently, using less bandwidth on your network. Unfortunately, the EXTEND does a poor job of accomplishing this. Under powered hardware, poor response times switching channels, random freezes and frequent digitization plus a tiny little fan whirring away when your utilizing both tuners, really put the nails in the EXTEND's coffin for me.The reality is the HD content you'll receive from over-the-air or basic cable will rarely reach a bit rate higher than what a modern wireless connection effectively handle. The only draw back being that it will require a processor to work harder to render the output. On the flip side it means that the HDHomeRun doesn't have to work very hard to deliver the video because the tuner itself is handling the decoding in hardware, which means faster channel surfing, more consistent output and no whirring fan to listen too.Setup on both is simple for the beginner, however if your looking to view these streams in xbmc or another media center not utilizing a PVR backend or the uPnP features you'll need to look to the community for solutions. While not impossible, you'll just need to have a higher skill set to utilize the the HDHomeRun in that manner. SiliconDust even provides a great linux tool to help build your stream urls.I'm streaming both SD and HD content wirelessly to a raspberry-pi running Openelec connected to a samsung television and I couldn't be happier with the performance of the DUAL. My only complaint is the devices' lack of support for open standards and making customers pay a premium for easier access on a wider range of devices but providing lack luster results.

Excellent device...works as advertised. I only wish the setup software was available on it's own...it was until a recent update so now it's bundled. But I would recommend the product.