cable

Benjamin Franklin is widely admired as the father of the modern cable television industry. With a single experiment in Philadelphia, he simultaneously demonstrated the importance of long, conductive strings and the perils associated with outdoor antennas for so-called 'wireless' transmissions. The scientist, author, and future diplomat deftly rebranded wetted kite string into the simpler 'cable' and an industry was born.

cherubs look on as Franklin displays an early version of CableCard

Franklin's experiment was more than a practical demonstration. It was deeply symbolic. The key and the Leyden jar (an early form of capacitor) have come to represent signal scrambling and the set-top box -- pillars of an industry that directly employs almost a quarter of a million people in the U.S. alone.

Scholars have recently argued that Franklin's jar is in fact the earliest ancestor of the digital video recorder (DVR), though this stems from shoddy German translation of Franklin's original correspondence. The key used in the experiment was a 'bit' key for a lever type lock. A period was missed and a key passage was therefore misinterpreted as 'bit storage jar'.

Franklin died long before Nikola Tesla's first wireless television transmission, his 1937 broadcast of game three of the following year's baseball World Series. He was likewise unable to review the HDHomeRun from SiliconDust. I will try to fill the gap as best I can.

I have been using one of these devices since late 2007. That model, the HDHR-US, has been replaced by the HDHR3-US though the original is still available used from Amazon. Within minutes of unboxing my copy of this device, I had it powered, connected to my home network, and plugged into my rooftop HDTV antenna (an amplified box-kite shaped affair from Philips).

It has required exactly zero maintenance in that time. That is remarkable in our day even for a device that does nothing. The HDHomeRun does something and it does it well. Mine takes antenna input into
each of its dual ATSC tuners and dumps raw MPEG2 transport streams in UDP onto my home network. It requires none of the confusing 'media center' or 'home theater' software and drivers that seem to be necessary with more common PCI and USB capture cards.

My device does not handle the encrypted digital signals that are common on US cable carriers. This is no problem if you plan to use the device for over-the-air broadcast with either antenna or metalized kite.

SiliconDust details the device protocol and a control library for their devices is available from them in source form. I alternate between their minimal tuning application and a bash script that produces the same effect. It just works. The popular VLC player does a great job with these streams.

With this device, I can bring Sesame Street from Queens to any computer screen in my home. I have replaced each home machine twice since the HDHomeRun arrived and I've essentially never had to do anything. I've never been prompted for a password or a reboot on behalf of this little box. Nothing is recorded. Nothing is transcoded. Nothing is torrented. Nothing fills up. No cable company required. Everything works. Even Tesla would be amazed.

I have no personal experience with the more recent products, especially the HDHomeRun Prime, from SiliconDust. I am deeply skeptical that any box, however magical, can somehow transform a cable company feed into a pleasant viewing experience. Users of an iOS app compatible with the Prime seem to agree.