With a few guests coming over tomorrow afternoon for beers in the garage and the Hawks playing on the box, I thought we might need some TV where we are drinking. I thought, no problems, I’ll get the Windows notebook out and set it up in the garage and stream TV from the HD Home Run unit in the lounge room. But I didn’t really want to go and dismantle the notebook or have the good notebook subject to beer and chips so I wondered if I could get the unit streaming to my Linux laptop?
I’ve had a HD Home Run device for about a year now and have found it to work pretty well on my Windows 7 setup and really never thought about giving it a go or at least trying to get it working on Linux.
I have just recently been playing with various distributions, OpenSUSE 12.3 and now Linux Mint 14. So first of all I thought I’d just have a check in the synaptic package manager to see if there was anything HD Home Run located within. Low and behold, the HD Home Run (libhdhomerun1, hdhomerun-config, hdhomerun-config-gui) packages exist as standard. I simply installed the packages, the HDHomeRun GUI item appeared in the Sounds & Video menu and I was good to go. Note: If you run Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), then the hdhomerun-config-gui does not exist in the Debian repositories yet. Unsupported, but still works, you can grab the applicable *-gui from the Ubuntu archive and then install it like:
dpkg -i hdhomerun-config-gui_20120128-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb
for example. This will install it and it appears to work ok for me but YMMV.
Simply running the GUI config tool, I could see my tuner, select a channel and hit the view button and I was watching High-Definition TV straight on my Linux Mint notebook.
For bonus points, where I want to record TV, you can simply direct output streaming from the units tuner by the following command:
hdhomerun_config <unit ID> save /tuner# <recording name>
Where:
- <unit ID> is the number shown in the hdhomerun config tool
- /tuner# is the tuner ID. So for example it would either be /tuner0 or /tuner1
- <recording name> is the name of the file you will be outputting to. As this is a .TS stream, use a .ts prefix for easy identification by your media player.
Simply opening up the the resulting file with VLC, you can watch the TV you have recorded, nativity – without conversion.