Picture and audio are both great. I don’t use the FireTV stuff as I have a ShieldTV plugged in. From what I briefly read it’s some sort of bullshit HDR, in that it accepts HDR data but doesn’t have enough brightness to really do HDR correctly. But I mean, it was $280. At that price, I’m fine with it.
And most importantly, the feet aren’t on the sides, so it fits on my dresser.
I’m sure it will get back to that price around black friday. If you want a super-cheap TV, I can definitely recommend it.
If anyone is still looking, YouTubeTV relaxed their forced-VOD (and ads) on every channel other than CBS and CW. So if you don’t watch a lot of CBS and CW shows, it’s a pretty good choice now.
FWIW Tivo sortof/kindof still works like that. You can sub to a show and when the new season shows up on Amazon/Netflix/Hulu, it shows up on the main Tivo list mixed with your DVR recordings.
It’s kind of buggy and the Tivo apps for those services are not the best though. But the Tivo Vox OTA isn’t the worst for that.
I became Tubi aware today and am kind of blown away at the free selection of “great” uncut horror movies (with two minutes of ads every 15 minutes or so). Are there other services/apps like this one? I’m kind of amazed that they can stay in business.
So a couple questions for anyone who’s using an OTA DVR… is the HDHomeRun still a good choice? I’ve heard a lot about AirTV and Tablo as well. Aside from number of tuners, any difference between the 2 and 4 tuner HDHR models? Any problems that I may be overlooking?
Two parts to this, the HDhomerun device itself and the DVR service. The devices are great, and no difference between the 2/4 tuner models other than obviously the number of tuners. I haven’t used the HDhomerun DVR but it is well-reviewed. I played around with the Plex DVR and that works pretty well.
HDhomerun also has an OTA TV channel subscription service, which is pretty unique in that it sends the raw video to the HDhomerun device itself and then you can use any DVR that supports the HDhomerun (like Plex, or their own HDhomerun DVR) to record the video streams. This is the only easy way to easily DVR OTA TV that I know of.
AirTV is crap, but TabloTV is great. Just remember to add $150 to the cost when you buy it for lifetime service.
Personally I glom off a YouTube TV family subscription. Now that YTTV allows you to DVR every channel other than CW, I think it’s pretty good, particularly if you share it with your family/friends.
I’ve used HD HomeRun tuners for years now, but I can’t speak to any of this newfangled DVR service stuff. I have just the tuner (2 tuner Ethernet connected) from them, with a Linux box running MythTV to provide the DVR part. What I can say is that I’m happy with the quality, the HDHR works great in my setup.
Cool, thanks. Doing some more research it sounds like the big negative for HDHR is that it requires a bit more setup for the OTA side of things, which I’m perfectly fine with. The premium TV offering is still some weird amalgamation of east and west coast feeds, and apparently low video quality, but honestly I wasn’t likely to pick that up and there are plenty of alternatives anyway. We’ll see what the wallet says after I do my shopping for others this weekend.
One thing to check before doing the whole digital OTA thing is if you have a stable signal. I had to upgrade to a fairly large directional antenna before it was stable enough to use because any drop out or signal loss is catastrophic when recording. Of course i still have the original HDHR and maybe/probably the newer models are better at this.
It all worked well though, minus the glitch plex had that specifically tanked the first couple of days of Olympic recordings. Man that sucked. Still, plex was a helluva lot easier to setup and configure that the previous programs I tried. Those were all ‘a full weekend if you are lucky’ type ordeals.
Got the HDHR set up today. Amazingly simple and looks great. Seems like it doesn’t work with Fire tablets for whatever reason, which, whatever. Haven’t looked into the DVR yet.
Hulu is running a deal for $1/mo for the first year this weekend so decided to give that a try. We’ll see about the DVR and going for a full Live TV offering if that ends up being a need down the road.
Loading the app gives an error that no tuner can be found on the network. Guessing the app is meant for the fire TV and stick, but I’m not too fussed about getting it to work direct - it’ll work through Plex as far as I can tell.
It’s true they do that. It’s not always clear or upfront why some devices are supported and others aren’t. They say that app is “cloud” only for non Fire TVs.
At the risk of monopolizing this thread, a couple things I’ve run into over the past few days with a simple OTA setup that may help others.
HDHomeRun doesn’t have a Roku app. You can pull up the channel in the Roku Media Player app but it’s… clunky, at best. Using Plex or a supported device like Fire TV Stick can get around this.
The Windows 10 HDHR app’s sound controls don’t work. May be related to my odd sound setup.
The flat, mount anywhere antennas (Leaf, 1byone, etc.) are not good at picking up VHF signals (channels 2-13). If you’re close enough to the tower it shouldn’t be an issue but at 20 miles out, even with a booster I’m having issues with channel 8. If VHF is important you’ll want to pick up an antenna made for those frequencies – the ClearStream 5 is highly rated – and a combiner to combine (duh) both signals before feeding into your tuner. One downside: VHF antennas are bigger and you’ll probably need to attic or roof mount.
For now, I’m happy without all that entails to get VHF channels. I kind of miss Fox, but I don’t $150-and-a-messy-install miss Fox.
Yeah, the problem is that every HDHomerun other than the extend simply streams raw MPEG2 video, and most Rokus don’t support MPEG2. The extend transcodes to h.264 in realtime, but it’s much more expensive.
Just to throw this out there since it’s been discounted recently. Nvidia’s Shield TV runs on Android, so it can use HDHomeRun’s free app in addition to Plex. The Shield can also run Plex Media Server and handle Plex’s OTA DVR features. That’s what I’ve been tinkering with for the past week.
Anyone here use Plex for live TV pretty regularly? I love the idea and it’s great for watching one-off shows like when I want to watch sports while away from home, but all the basics seem to be really buggy:
Rewinding while watching live shows
Starting to watch a recording-in-progress
Watching a recording 30 minutes behind real-time and wanting to skip to the live feed
All of those types of scenarios and the nuances around them seem to not work properly while watching on my iPhone, in the browser, or while using the native Windows client. Playback will often skip around, unexpectedly stop, or just not do what I want it to at all.
For example, often times I’ll try to “go to live” and it’ll instead go to the beginning of the recording, and the only way to actually go to live is to stop playback and recording entirely and start a new live stream.
I’ve reported these types of issues on the Plex forums and haven’t gotten any acknowledgements or replies, so I figured I’d ask here too.
I’m about 35 miles from the towers in Houston. Tried a Leaf a couple years ago when we cut the cable, reception was terrible no matter where I placed it, returned it quickly.
Bought one of these instead, mounted it in the attic and pointed it towards the towers. Worked like a champ, picked up 104 channels. Sometimes 13 gets pixelated if it’s windy or rainy, otherwise reception on VHF and most of the UHF channels is perfect. And it cost less than the Leaf.
