Two Possibilities

The HDHomeRun is a pretty cool little device with the potential for greatness. Its got 2 Digital Cable/Terrestrial Tuners and a 1 gigabit ethernet jack. It will let you record directly off cable through MythTV and several other programs. Its one shortcoming- no CableCard support. This is the business decision of service providers and not of SiliconDust (makers of the HDHomeRun), so I hold out hope that one day CableCards will work under Linux. Until then, this box is only useful to record OTA and non-scrambled channels. This isn’t really that bad, because much of what I record is broadcast on ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX.

The HDHR also has an IR receiver and can forward IR commands over the network, to save someone from having to purchase a separate IR receiver. Pretty cool feature and could come in handy someday, although I don’t need it right now.

The HDHR setup was pretty straightforward using the provided instructions. The HDHR autoconfigured itself using DHCP and was easily discovered by the HDHomeRun config program. Updating the firmware went flawlessly, as did the inital MythConfig.

eric@shaman:~/hdhomerun/libhdhomerun$ ./hdhomerun_config discover
 hdhomerun device 1019A8F9 found at 192.168.1.149
 eric@shaman:~/hdhomerun/libhdhomerun$ ./hdhomerun_config 1019A8F9 get  /sys/version
 20091024
 eric@shaman:~/hdhomerun/libhdhomerun$ ./hdhomerun_config 1019A8F9  upgrade ~/Desktop/hdhomerun_atsc_firmware_20100213.bin
 uploading firmware...
 upgrading firmware...
 rebooting...
 upgrade complete - now running firmware 20100213

MythTV Config

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Silicondust_HDHomeRun

I added the tuner in mythtv-setup and it was autodetected by Myth. The frequency table should be set to cable. Moving on to the next screen, I added a new ClearQAM input source & entered Schedules Direct info.

I then associated the input source to the capture card.  I used the channel scan for 256QAM on all cable frequencies. I had no idea on the conflicting channels, or how to deal with them so I just ignored the conflicted ones. A little extra documentation about the channel scanner would be great in this area. The HDHomeRUn is connected to Comcast cable in the Boston, MA area. If the HDHomeRun was hooked up to a DTV antenna, I would have used the 8VSBmodulation instead. Once done, I “fetched listings from source”.

At this point I could watch video on all the channels, but the channel names were wrong and the guide data wasn’t correct. The easiest solution is to manually fix the channel database using the MythWeb interface. Simply fill in the correct channel #, XMLTV ID, and callsign. The XMLTV ID is available from the SiliconDust webpage as well as the SchedulesDirect Page.

If you’d like to make your life more difficult, keep reading…

scte65scan

I turned to this page http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Frontend_Channel_Editor which led me down the path of XMLTV ID’s and eventually to scte65scan. This is where I get a bit distracted. Skip over the scte65stuff if you just want to make it work. I downloaded the scte65scan utility and added/modified the following lines to the Makefile.hdhr file:

LIBOBJS += $(HDHR_DIR)/hdhomerun_os_posix.o
LDFLAGS += -lpthread -lrt

To add support for hdhomerun, I downloaded the libhdhomerun tarball from SiliconDust and unpacked it into the scte65scan directory. Then I ran make -f Makefile.hdhr. It failed horribly… The current scte65scan package is meant only to run with the libhdhomerun_200901415.tgz package. I had libhdhomerun_20100213.tgz, and the warning in the scte65scan Makefile was upheld. I wasn’t in the mood to fix it the right way, so I just updated the LIBOBJS to point only to the libhdhomerun.so file produced by the libhdhomerun build. I then created a symlink from /lib/libhdhomerun.so to the original. This got scte65scan to work. If in doubt, check how the dynamic libraries are resolved by running ldd ./scte65scan. If everything is good, the output should report full pathnames for each library.

My STB via the diag screen d06 reports a VCT ID of 9.
Confirmed with ./scte65scan -H FFFFFFFF,0 us-Cable-Standard-center-frequencies-QAM256 where a VCT ID of 3009 appeared. Several others also appeared, I think they were pretty much identical

Then ran  ./scte65scan -H FFFFFFFF -f3 -V 3009 > ../vct.sql to collect the data into a SQL query. Then

mysql -u mythtv -p mythconverg < ./vct-03242010_1.sql  to insert it into the database.

However, scte65scan inserted data for all channels, not just the clearQAM channels, which caused a problem with allocating recordings to the right tuner once I added the firewire card. I don’t reccomend using scte65 scan with the HDHomeRun if oyu have alternate capture cards.