HDHomeRun DUAL

I had a lot of trouble setting this up (and the company web site is completely unhelpful) so let me help people out here. I am assuming you want to run this with EyeTV --- I've no useful info if you have other plans. - Install the device in the obvious way --- connect your antenna coax, your ethernet cable, your power adaptor. - Go to SiliconDust's website, find the download section, and download the Mac installer. - The installer will install two basically useless apps, whose sole purpose, IMHO, is to validate that things kinda work. Run the setup app and you should get a truly barebones window which asks you to choose channels. Ignore all that, all we care about is that (presumably) this shows your mac can see the HD HomeRun. Run the Player app, and you should now get live TV and should be able to change the channel. Again, all we care about is proof that things work at this level. Now go to EyeTV. If this is the first time you have installed EyeTV, things should be easy. During the installation process it will ask you what TV tuner you have, and tell it Elgato/HomeRun (or IPTV/HomeRun --- both work). Go through the rest of the installation and things should work fine. Where things are less obvious is if you already have EyeTV installed and running, connected to some other TV tuner(s). You might expect that you'd see the HomeRun in the Devices panel, which lists all your tuners, but you don't, and all the dicking around in the world won't change that. WHAT YOU NEED TO DO is go to the main EyeTV menu and rerun the EyeTV Setup Assistant. This will ask you what tuner you want to use and, like I said above, choose the Home Run. Skip over every subsequent step (like selecting channels). This seems like a terrifying step --- you may fear you will lose all your current state --- but it works fine. EyeTV remembers your current channels (and recording preferences, TVGuide subscription, etc) and just adds the HomeRun to your available tuners, along with whatever other tuners you had previously. Do be aware, however, that when running the Setup Assistant it will ask you for your EyeTV license key, so make sure you have that on-hand before you start down this path. You can check that everything is working by using the command-O command, which will cycle through your list of tuners, showing you the channel each is connected to --- the name of the tuner will appear in the window menu bar, so make sure the window is not maximized. You should be able to cycle through your pre-existing tuner(s) followed by two HomeRun tuners, and obviously you can try changing channels for each one. From this point on everything should just work. In particular, you can set the system up to record as many simultaneous shows as you have tuners, which can be useful for those occasions where three shows you like are all scheduled at the same time. One final thing: Depending on when you installed EyeTV, you may have installed a piece of (now obsolete) companion software called EyeTV connect. This software somehow prevents other software on your computer from seeing the HD HomeRun. In particular it prevents VLC from seeing it. Do a search for "EyeTV Connect Uninstaller" and you'll find an Elgato page with the uninstaller. After you run the uninstaller and reboot, you should now (unlike before) see the HD Home Run in the Local Network/Universal PlugnPlay section of the main VLC window, on the off chance that you want to use VLC rather than EyeTV to connect to the HD HomeRun. If you're trying to debug, the HomeRun registers itself with your DHCP server as you'd expect, so you should see it (and be able to figure out its IP address) from seeing what you have registered there. It does respond to pings. It starts up with only one port (UDP 1900, the UPnP port) open but should respond to appropriate requests from any UPnP/DLNA client on your network (like VLC). The two problems I am aware of are those I described above --- EyeTV Connect blocks the UPnP visibility for VLC until it is uninstalled; and EyeTV doesn't know the box is there until you run the EyeTV Setup Assistant. One final thing. The box is small and crazy light, so once you have everything working the way you want, you'll probably want to hold it down on your media center with double sided tape or velcro or something, otherwise it's very prone to flopping around. Just plan for that so you aren't irritated by it a week or so after the install.