On Our Desk - 18

HDHomeRun Dual DVB-T Network Tuner

Manufacturer: Silicon Dust
UK Price (as reviewed): £140.00 (Incl. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): $126.00 (Excl. Tax)

In these days of online content, BBC iPlayer and YouTube it’s worthwhile remembering that there’s still a huge amount of entertainment available on normal broadcast TV, with Great Britain laboriously rumbling towards its staggered digital switchover. As popular as Youtube face plants and watching Top Gear on iPlayer will always be, it’s still nice to veg out on your sofa and have a good, old fashioned channel-surf.

However, with houses adding ever more computers, wouldn’t it be great if you could turn any PC connected into your home network, into a TV? Rather handily, that’s exactly what the HDHomeRun, from Silicon Dust, does; it’s a fiendishly clever bit of kit that’s able to transmit digital television signals via you’re home network, allowing any PC connected to the network to access the base unit’s tuners and catch up on whatever’s on.


The unassuming base box probably couldn’t look plainer if it tried, with just a simple HDTV emblem on top indicating that it’s no normal bit of network kit. Setting the unit up is a snap – just plug in RF aerial connections into either or both of the unit’s tuners (it uses separate external tuners for improved signal quality), and then connect it into your home network via the 10/100 Cat5 port and you’re done – it even works seamlessly thorough powerline networking, so if you’re having trouble with signal degradation, you can plug it directly into your antenna in your roof space and then route it back to your router/switch via your existing electrical wiring.

With the unit setup, accessing the tuners is just as easy, with a straight forward installation process allowing you to calibrate the tuners dependant on which tuner application you’re going to be using. The default is Windows Media Centre, but a plethora of players are supported, from SageTV to VLC, with full support for time lapse, episode guides and recording just as if the PC had a tuner installed into it directly, with none of the mess or cables required.

Firing up Windows Media Centre we soon had access to the full range of digital free view channels from a PC that had never seen the business end of an RF cable, and were merrily watching Time Team while recording Jason and the Argonauts at the same time. However, as the device by default has two tuners, these are allocated on a first come first served network across your network, allowing two separate systems to happily watch or record different channels at once. For really busy networks it’s even possible for you to connect multiple HDHomeRun’s at once, increasing the number of available tuners on the network.


The software works flawlessly in both Windows Vista and Windows XP, with the media stream surprisingly light as the unit only transmits the channel that’s requested – close your TV application down and the HdHomeRun stops transmitting from the tuners you were using, so there’s no fear that the unit will spam your network with unwanted TV signals.

Windows 7 support though is a little flaky, and isn’t as reliable, which is to be expected really considering it’s still five months away from commercial release. You’ll need to set the HD HomeRun’s player output to generic tuner to get compatibility with Windows Media Centre, which dramatically increases the bandwidth required for the data stream as the unit is transmitting its full reception spectrum – averaging out to around 20Mbps. However, this seems to be more a problem with Windows 7’s backwards compatibility than with the HDHomeRun itself, and we’re sure it’ll be patched out in due time.

Perhaps the only niggle is the £144 price tag – a little too high considering it costs less in dollars than it does in pounds. For that sort of money you could just as easily purchase four or five USB TV tuners, but then you wouldn’t benefit from the superior reception of your home’s principal antenna and the far greater convenience of having a dedicated bit of kit

Verdict: All in all the HDHomeRun is a very impressive bit of kit, and if you’re in need of an extremely flexible TV tuner for your home network that's simple to use, it’s an easy recommendation.