hey everybody is Lon Seidman we've got yet another video in our series about
cutting the cord we're shaving the cord if you will and I wanted to talk today
about a new beta from silicon dust and makers of the HD homerun they've now got
an app a native app that runs on iOS that's the iPad and the iPhone that
we're going to be taking a quick look at in this video at the time that I'm
recording this this is a beta which you can sign up for but I think the features
will be largely the same on the final release version so I may not do an
update on this if nothing really big changes and if you are watching this one
in the future this will likely be available in the App Store for you to
download now if you want to mention in the interest of full disclosure that
Silicon dust the makers of the HD homerun are occasional sponsors here on
the channel they're not sponsoring this video all the opinions you're about to
hear are my own and nobody is reviewing this content before it is posted now if
you've used the HD homerun app on other platforms the interface will look very
familiar to you it will load up and it will detect whether or not you have the
recording engine installed on your network in this case I do I've got it
running on a NAS device you can see my playlist down below to see how it all
works in my home but if you just have one of their tuners it will connect
directly to that I can tap on the screen here and pull up the directory of
programs currently on the air and then I can browse forward here with their
patented slice view so we can see what else is coming up and then for example
if I wanted to record something because I have the DVR engine installed it will
bring me right over to the DVR interface to begin recording an episode
individually here if I wish I can tap on that one instead of to record or I could
record the whole series I can back back out over here to live TV and you can see
how quickly we can switch between channels maybe I'll go over to CNN here
and see what's going on in the news and it will pretty quickly pull up CNN here
as you can see so it's a pretty quick transition in between channels they also
have the ability to do some time shifting because I have the DVR
installed on my network so I can rewind and fast-forward live TV I can also tap
down here and switch over to my DVR view so if I wanted to check out the
Deadliest Catch that I've recorded from the other night I can go up here to the
most recent recording and click on the play button and there you go everything
starts up very quickly and one of the things that I like about the HD homerun
system it's how fast everything is it really
doesn't take all that long for things to spin up and get working here and it will
also work on iPhone as well so you'll get the same interface here just a
little smaller so we can see I've got some live TV running on here right now
and I can scroll around the slice guide here and I can go back to my DVR if I
want to do that as well what's also cool is that when you turn the volume down on
either the phone or the tablet version I'm guessing there other devices do the
same thing it will start running closed captioning automatically for you you can
turn that off if you want but I thought that was kind of neat that once you turn
the volume down you will get closed captioning when you do that so that's an
option that you can easily disable if you want but kind of cool that it is on
there now there is not an Apple TV version of this app at the time that I'm
recording this review but you can do something like I'm doing here with
AirPlay Mirroring so I've got the app you're running on my phone and I'm
casting it over to the Apple TV but it's not filling up my whole screen and the
video quality isn't the best but it is possible to use it in this way if you
wish there are two native apps that run on the Apple TV one is called insta TV
the other is called the channels app both of those work with the HD homerun
tuner so you can get a native experience on here and both seem to work pretty
well the channels app is something I've covered in the past and I'll link to
that down below in the video description now you'll know from past videos I
always recommend going with Ethernet for this live TV watching just because you
want to make sure you've got the best possible connection that of course is
not feasible on a mobile device like one of these two here so in that case I do
recommend making sure you've got a decent AC wireless network in your home
and that you've got access point stations strategically so that you get
strong signals wherever you want to go to watch your live TV I'm not having any
problem here in my house I've got three AC access points positioned around the
home and everything has been working fine wherever I am but know that some
broadcasts are going to be more demanding than others so right now my
PBS affiliate here is streaming to my iPhone and this is an mpeg-2 broadcast
which is a little more demanding on the network now if you can't get your
Wireless straightened out one way around the problem is to use the HD homerun
extend box this is only going to work for over-the-air broadcasts but it has a
built-in encoder that will convert the mpeg-2 signals to MPEG-4
which are easier to push out over a wireless network I might cover that in
the next couple of weeks to just give you an idea as to how it works because
it really can very effectively make your content more viewable over wireless if
you are having trouble the HD homerun prime which is what I use for cable
systems does not have that function built into it now it's happening for me
is that a bulk of my cable channels are mpeg-4 now through Comcast but some of
them like the PBS station here are running on mpeg-2 still but again no
problem on AC wireless with a good connection that's going to do it for our
first look of the HD homerun app running on the iOS platform I'm really quite
pleased with how fast and responsive it is here especially on my iPad this is
the new 10.5 it is just very quick and responsive to pull up shows to watch
from recordings or switch back to live over-the-air broadcast I really did turn
my iPad here into a TV set now this will work only inside the home but if you do
wish to do things outside of the home as far as watching live TV you can do that
with the plex DVR that we covered in another video and in fact I'm running
both plex's products and the HD homerun DVR concurrently because both of those
work with the HD homerun tuners and those tuners are really agnostic as to
what software you point at them they really allow you to do whatever you want
with the hardware once you buy it and that's been quite liberating on a whole
bunch of levels because I can run what I want for the particular use case that
they might have but it also allows me to liberate myself from the cable company's
rented equipment so I'm saving quite a bit per month with that and for many of
you who are lucky enough to get more stuff over the air than I can get you
can get rid of the cable company completely and put a couple of HD
homerun tuners in your house and build your own network DVR system like I've
done here with my HD homerun Prime so you do have a lot of options here for
making all this stuff work do leave me any questions or comments you have down
below in the video description also check out my other videos you can see
how all of this stuff works together and again the beta is available right now at
the time that I'm recording this you'll have links to that down below and it
should be available soon on the iOS App Store this is Lon Seidman and thanks for
watching this channel is brought to you by my patreon supporters including gold
level supporters the tangential soup podcast
and Chris Allegretta if you want to help the channel you can
by contributing as little as $1 a month
head over to lon.TV/patreon to learn more
and don't forget to subscribe visit lon.TV/s