HDTV streams on PBO with HDHomerun

[JPMG]

I've seen some posts about TV streaming here, and have been playing with XBMC and streaming HDTV from my networked attached HDHomrun tuner.

The thought occurred ... can I access the HDHr video streams from the PBO?
It would be kind of slick to be able to access the clear HDTV feeds from any device that I hook up to a PBO.

For a start, the HDHr is a dual tuner network device that will pump out the HDTV streams to any device that will accept them. Works well with Media center, XBMC and several other apps.

Now the trick seems to be a running app to capture the stream for display, somthing that I can not see running on the PBO. Rather it would have to run on another server.

So I can see the options to be either:

1) Running the HDHr app on a server, the perhaps using he transcode server or another tool to let the PBO access the streams.

2) Possible running a mini HTTP server (see this link at the SiliconDust site http://www.silicondust.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8317) then have the PBO grab the stream that way.

Is there another way .. or has someone else been looking into this?

Any (positive) ideas are appreciated.
(I can think of a million reason why it woudl not work, but I'm trying to find the few that WOUDL make it function).

Many thanks!
... M ...

[snappy46]

Ok let me see if I understand what you are asking.

1) HDhomerun is basically an HDTV receiver that produces a video network stream and is connected to a router ???? Your PBO is connected to the same network???

2) You would like to be able to capture that stream using the PBO and play it on the TV connected to your PBO ?????

) How will you control your HDhomerun ???? PC ????

If my first 2 assumptions are correct than the first thing you need to do is identify the format of the video stream and the video container used. Once we have that we might be able to help a little more.

How is the stream showing on the PC UPNP ???? If XMBC sees the stream then how does it see it ???? network share, UPNP other proprietary network stream ??????

I am not familiar with that box (HDhomerun) so I could be totally off base as to what you are actually asking here.

[JPMG]

OK ... pretty close.

1) The HDHomerun sits on the network and has only two connections, cable input (two) and network cable. It can tune in up to two clear HDTV cable signals and route them over the network to the target.

2) Correct, I just want to grab the stream and be able to display it via the PBO. I realize no pause, rewind, etc. Just view it like old fashioned OTA TV.

On a typical unit the HDHR appears to use an application to get the streams.
When configure it to run with XBMC it scans the available channels and creates a folder with multiple *.strm files. One for STRM file for each channel and tuner.

Each file contains something like this:

hdhomerun://10173345-0/tuner0?channel=qam256:717000000&program=3
hdhomerun://10173345-1/tuner1?channel=qam256:717000000&program=3

So it appears that the XML parser in XBMC reads it as:
Applet = hdhomerun://10173345-0
Display Item = tuner0
Connection = channel=qam256:717000000&program=3

Thus (technically) there is no stream, rather info to call an applet.

It may be that I have to dig into the stream info from the HDHomerun forums then bring that info back here.

Hopefully someone else here has been playing with one also.
Thanks!
... Mike ...

[snappy46]

From what I can figure out .strm in xbmc player is just a string which specify a link to the stream. Again once you figure out the format of that stream then you should be able to do something about it.

Another option would be to feed that link (the one specified in the .strm file) to an UPNP server; there are many out there from various OS (tversity, twonky, mediatomb, window player etc...). Actually come think of it XBMC has a built in UPNP Server (at least in Linux it does I can not say about other OS). The UPNP server can be enable by checking an enabling box under the XBMC settings. Once you enabled XBMC UPNP server; just go to your PBO and the UPNP server will be available under the UPNP menu of the PBO. From there you should be able to play your videos assuming that they are in a format compatible with the PBO. I must admit I am not entirely sure if everything that you see with XBMC will be available at the PBO UPNP menu or if somehow they have to be added in some ways to the XBMC server list or something like that; I do not use XBMC as an UPNP server I use mediatomb.

I realize this is not the best case scenario since you still need your computer running but it's a start.

Hope this help.

[boy914]

I realize this is a bit of an older thread, but to answer your original question: the video stream from a HDHomeRun is mpeg2.

I'll try the XBMC-UPNP trick to see of that works, but obviously if there is a way to do it without the extra middleware, that would be great.