More for curiosity than any actual plans to implement: I currently have the HDHR Prime connected to my network. Channels DVR runs on my Mac mini. While going through a bag of cables, I found a Thunderbolt to ethernet adapter. That led me to wonder if it is possible to connect the Prime directly to the mini via the ethernet adapter, while the mini maintains an internet and household network connection via its built in ethernet. Would this even work? Can Channels server software 'see' the Prime and the network connection at the same time? And would there be any performance improvement by having the Prime directly connected to the mini?
It would still be a network connection. Running at the same speed even. Just your computer would now have two ethernet networks. You would need to do some kind of connection sharing on the mini in order to allow the devices on the other ethernet network to see the HDHR.
If you used a crossover Ethernet cable and manually set IPs on both the NIC on the mini and the HDHR, you could probably get them talking. However, the HDHR would not be reachable to anything else on the network, without some kind of sharing or bridging as the previous poster mentioned. I wouldn’t count on that working, but if you only need the mini to access it, it might work.
a crossover cable is not required.
You can do this absolutely. When the Prime had Ethernet issues I used to do this.
I had the a second Ethernet port on my DVR and my 3 Primes all connected to a switch. I set a static IP on the DVR's second port (169.254.1.1/16), and when the tuners started and couldn't find a DHCP server they used a self-assigned local link address in 169.254.0.0/16, so the static IP on the DVR could still receive the tuners' broadcast discovery packets.
One thing to keep in mind: depending upon how you have your network set up, you may not have internet access for the tuners. With Channels and other DVRs this probably isn't a problem, but SD's software needs the tuners to phone home for guide data and other authorizations.
Thanks everyone for the replies. I appreciate the input.