Silicondust HDHomeRun CONNECT QUATRO Network DVB-T/T2 TV Tuner HDHR5-4DT(UK)

There are lots of reviews for the HDHomeRun, both good and bad. Most of the bad reviews seem to complain about issues that are outside of the control of the unit. To summarise, there are three issues that can influence the correct functions of the unit, and they are signal strength, network and software. Signal Strength The built-in tuners are quite sensitive but may not be as good as your TV. They need a good strong signal from your aerial. If you are in a weak signal area then consider getting an aerial amplifier to boost the signal. Network The unit connects to your local network via an ethernet connection. Each TV channel can use up to 6Mbps of network capacity, so if your network is already congested you may run into trouble. It’s well recommended that you plug the HDHomeRun directly into your router for the best results. Software The quality of live video and/or recorded video does depend on the software you are using. There is free software available to download from the manufacturer and available for most platforms. This software will let you watch live TV for free but requires a subscription for recording TV. There is other compatible software available such as Plex and Emby. You can use more than one at the same time as the HDHomeRun unit controls the tuner allocations. I use Plex for my library at home and this has live TV and recording facilities. You do need a Plex Pass subscription to gain these functions but it’s well worth it. It has the facility to remove adverts from recordings as well which is nice. This works reasonably well but it’s not perfect every time. The quality of recording is good but it can get a few jagged edges on video now and then. Setting up the unit is easy. It only has three connections, a power socket, an RJ45 ethernet socket and a UK compatible aerial socket. Please note though, there is no pass through on the aerial socket which means you need an aerial splitter if you want to share the aerial with your TV. Overall, this is an easy to use system and is very much a plug in and forget box.

I've been fiddling around with a PC to act as a DVR for a long time. Since the sad demise of Windows Media Center, I've been looking at various options for TV playing and recording and have got precisely nowhere in finding anything that would suffice. I'd even tried Plex, but I found the length of time it took to tune channels was unacceptable. So, after discovering that Emby didn't suffer quite so badly in those stakes, but wouldn't work with my TV card setup, I bit the bullet and bought this tuner. It's a remarkably small device, smaller than the switch installed in my TV cabinet and definitely less unsightly and power hungry than the PC I was using. It was easy to set up, found all the channels quickly and was found and configured instantly by Emby. The picture quality is very good, there's no buffering issues and using Emby with it is a breeze. I'm now wondering why I bothered spending almost £170 on a TV card in the first place. It's not cheap, not by any stretch of the imagination. But the fact it just works, and works well, makes this a very worthwhile purchase if you're planning on ditching Sky or Virgin Media at any point.

UPDATE 18/6/20 Well, ahem, it turns out my signal booster in the loft was duff. Signal strength for some of channels was 93% this then caused symbol quality to deteriorate causing image deterioration and blocky display. Needed to use hdhomerun config software for Linux to troubleshoot this. Replaced the booster and all is now good. Back to 4 stars. I think it does need a really good signal. My PC tuner card is much more forgiving. UPDATE 7/4/20 Sadly the new unit I received is now playing up. If it records a film for example which would be around 2 hours long I find that in the latter half the signal it breaks up. I know it's nothing to do with signal strength. I believe the thing just overheats and can't cope. I will again have to send the thing back at my expense and be without live TV recording for 2 weeks and then what? Another gamble. Really fed up. UPDATE 22/1/20 For a couple of weeks it was great. Then in the morning I would find it hadn't recorded anything and furthermore I could not tune into any channel. Unplug the box for a short time and plug in again and all would be well for 12 hours until it broke again. Support responded to my ticket within hours. They asked me to turn diagnostics on and re-tune. But then it could not find any of the 192 channels it found before (until I left it unplugged for several hours) They asked me to return it (at my expense) and said a replacement would be cross-shipped and has now dispatched. I'm loping off just one star because equipment can break and they have responded in all the right ways and quickly. I'm hoping this was a one-off and the replacement will be good - other people have told me these devices are normally rock solid. ---------------------- ORIGINAL 5* review I've been tinkering with media centers for years now and had settled on using SageTV my PC with a PCI quad tuner card keeping the PC turned on 24/7. I wanted to turn off the PC to save electricity get away from the very unstable windows OS and moved to a QNAP NAS running Emby and this HDHomerun quattro as tuning device. I have found the device really easy to setup, it has run flawlessly, has stayed coo,l and the picture and audio quality good. The (browser based) configuration and status screens are simple but good enough and I was delighted that I could disable channels I am not interested in. The device has met expectations and is only 4" x 4". I have not seen any of the issues that others have cited. My TV signal strength has always been good because I made sure its accurately pointed, I amplify it at the aerial, and don't split it downstream that sorted all the issues I used to have with digital TV signals If I could name a single improvement it might be for an RF out so you can daisy chain two HDHomeRuns together without splitting the signal (my PC tuner card has that ability). But four tuners is enough for me so its not a biggie.

I read the reviews for this before ordering and was a bit unsure if it would work well with Plex. There are 1 star reviews saying how bad it is as well as 5 star saying it works well. My experience is that it does work well. I also read it runs hot - well mine doesn't. It was slightly warm to the touch after initial set up but right now it is only a couple of degrees above room temperature. The mains adaptor is cool too. I use Plex (DVR and live viewing anywhere) and the HDhomerun software (live and LAN only) for viewing. Slow channel change was mentioned in another review. The HDHR software changes channel pretty quick and not far off using a TV. Plex takes about 5 seconds but not really a problem as it is not about flicking through channels. The recording quality is excellent. No artifacts/blocking and the quality to me looks better than freeview on the TV. I have Virgins V6 box and the FTA HD channels on that are better than freeview and the HDHR recording in Plex look similar to me. As a test I recorded 2 hours with all 4 tuners in use on HD stations and all recordings were faultless. I have Plex running on a freenas box. Apparently Plex (with Plexpass subscription which i have) can auto remove adverts from recordings but the server version for freenas cannot do it. May have to try an alternative server to test it out. One time my phone reported network error and refused to play the channel but on closing the app and retrying it worked. So far in my first week of use that has been the only error. Oh and it comes in a big box that is mostly full of cardboard spacers. The unit is 95mm square and 20mm tall. It has a normal UK aerial socket where you just push the plug in - no screw threads.

First of all, when reading these reviews, please note that some are about the cheaper 2-channel device and some are about the 4-channel Quatro. Plus, at least one review is for an item they no longer sell! (not the reviewer's fault, this is a pain that Amazon inflict on us) My device is the Quatro, and it is superb. Probably the easiest bit of kit to set up - plug it in, then go to a website, which auto-detects it. You can then either use their software (free for viewing Live TV, but a small subscription for the DVR - Digital Video Recording - service), or else simply use the box as a tuner device, using 3rd party software. I use Plex, which is easy to configure and looks brilliant - it means that all my music and video content is held in one place, and can be watched/listened to in the same way. The box is tiny (hand-sized) and so can easily be hidden away somewhere. There is one little annoyance - the Amazon listing for this says "Send HDTV via your existing home WiFi or wired network to the widest range of smart devices". Although I know what that means now, it led me to believe that the box cold be connected via either WiFi or Wired. This is not the case - the device does not have an option of WiFi. When they speak of "WiFi" they mean connecting the box to your router by wire, then using your router's WiFi. On another day, this may have lost them a star, but I feel it is a fault of the listing, not the device. As I am otherwise absolutely delighted with it (and I was easily able to get around the issue), I'm keeping my score at 5/5.

I have had this for quite a few months now and it’s been brilliant. Connected to Plex server on my Mac-mini it’s been the hub of all my media, so much so appleTV has been reduced to the Plex app, Netflix and Prime. The only thing that hasn’t worked flawlessly and is actually an issue with Plex Server and not homerun is the ability to remove adverts, it’s chopped out many scenes from recorded TV shows, so much so a 25 minute episode might end up less than 10 minutes long! Yes, changing up and down channels is a bit slow in Plex, but using Guide View is fairly quick, and in the native Homerun app it’s just as fast as switching channels as any TV app/service. Picture is excellent (obviously depending signal), picks up more channels than my Samsung TV can using the same antenna and recordings appear identical to the original broadcast quality. Recordings in Plex are easily editable if you wanted to manually chop out adverts etc using 3rd part software. Again using Plex, you can log into the server and watch live TV and recordings on your phone or tablet from anywhere in the world, definitely a bonus when on holiday. 6 months on I’m still loving this little box

After 20 years of giving Hauppauge devices (in my opinion the main competitor to this device) I have invested in this and am really pleased. The latest attempt to try a Hauppauge device, the WinTV-dual HD, ended with no channels or a few channels that broke up, despite living in a very good signal area. This device picks up all channels and excellent signal strength (85%, matching my TVs signal strength exactly). The 4 tuner version is worth it, especially if you are using Plex DVR or similar as most server based DVRs don't include automatic padding of recordings, so say you add 2 mins to the start and end of each scheduled programme to ensure you catch the start and end, if you record 2 programmes at the same time, fine, but if you then want to record another programme straight after one of them, you are potentially using 3 tuners at once, hence the bonus of 4 tuners. The other bonus of this device over a USB device is that you can watch channels on any device on your LAN/Wifi network that can access a DLNA server, as this is built in to the box. So I have a TV in the bedroom attached to my network by wifi, you can open a channel like a video, and you are watching live TV, really easy and good for TVs that don't have the HDHomerun or app that works with your DVR server or any access to an aerial or TV signal. Nothing to setup once you have tuned it in using the quick start guide included, and it just works!

Great idea, and the potential is there to work really well with all devices, however within 20 minutes of setup (and not being able to see all channels that can be seen when the antenna is plugged directly into the TV), all the channels stopped responding and when scanning again none were found. A few hours later they mostly appeared again when I rescanned, however when streaming to Plex it’s slow to change channel and stops to buffer occasionally making it frustrating to watch. When changing channels on Plex it forces you down to a lower bitrate unless you manually change it back to 1080p - However after changing channel a few times it stops me from pushing the quality above “720p” which comes out with a much blurrier picture that is definitely nowhere near 720p. Overall there’s no way this can realistically be used to replace a proper MultiRoom TV solution such as Sky - Unless you’re happy with missing channels, a broken viewing experience and forced lower quality viewing on HD channels through Plex I didn’t bother getting to the recording stage with this box - It’s getting packaged up and sent back to Amazon!