HDHomeRun DUAL support (legacy tuners)

Legacy tuners are now supported in Channels DVR.

First, prepare your DUAL with the latest version of the Channels app:

  • install the latest firmware via Settings tab
  • re-scan for channels via Settings tab

The scanned channels will be saved to the cloud so that other devices do not need to scan again. This includes other ATVs, iPhones/iPads, as well as the Channels DVR software.

On the latest version of Channels DVR, via the Settings tab on the web UI:

  • click Scan Network to refresh your DUAL’s channel list
  • verify the web UI shows “xx channels”
  • click on the channel list to add favorite channels
  • click Set DVR Lineup to configure guide data

Let us know if you have any issues.

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This is awesome! I’ve kept my DUAL up and running for a while, mostly just for extra tuners should the (rare, possibly never) situation come up where I’m recording two things on my Extend, and then want to watch a third thing live. (I watch very little live TV, so it seemed unlikely but… you never know!). It’ll be good to have the DUAL in there as another set of tuners for recording TV shows too, which is slightly more likely to come up. Really it’ll just be good to have them all in the pool to be used.

FANTASTIC. I’ve been really frustrated that all the new DVR products (Plex/SiliconDust/etc) have dropped support for my legacy Dual, and my EyeTV software just randomly stopped working with it as well… been SOL for awhile and I’ve missed the DVR functionality. Thank you guys for supporting it. Took me a hot second to get it working, but now that it is… :ok_hand:

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Awesome, glad to hear it’s working for you.

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The only thing that’s odd, and this is true of the AppleTV app as well, is that it labels all channels as SD. Even though most of my channels are broadcasting in HD, none of them show under that classification. I’m assuming that’s just something the legacy model API doesn’t label or something. They obviously play in HD on the App and record in HD on the DVR… but they’re all classified as SD in the App/DVR.

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This is a known issue. The method used to channel scan on the legacy tuners is unable to detect whether a channel is HD or SD. We are looking into workarounds but there is no obvious fix at the moment.

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Good to know. Either way, it’s good to have the basic functionality back. Thanks for the hard work on the product.

It probably wouldn’t be perfect but what about checking the specs of the media stream for each sub channel detected? I think it would be a safe assumption that a sub channel in an HD format (720p/1080i) is an HD channel.

Obviously there’s going to have to be some room for manual tweaking - I just don’t think that can be avoided here.

At the very least, you might just have an option for a manual fallback; let the user correct mis-labelled channel on the DVR server, then sync that data back to the app. Not as elegant, but functional.

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That’s basically how the newer tuners do it, but it all happens in the firmware. We can emulate this for legacy tuners but it will take some work.

Problems with install for use with Dual tuners (I have two of them–HDHR3-US). Downloaded and installed the latest firmware (20161117) on both boxes, and am on the current version of the server (2017.01.10.0517), and the Channels DVR web page sees the two tuners, but when I select ‘Scan Network’ from the web UI, I get nothing–0 channels in both boxes–even though channels is working to watch live TV on my Apple TV and I can watch TV through EyeTV on my computer. The Apple TV error screen says that I need to complete setup through the web interface, but I don’t know what else to do.

Am I missing a step here?

Never mind…I rescanned for channels on the Apple TV itself, instead of on the web UI, and it worked. I did have to rescan twice, which first renamed the device from HDHR3-US to HDHomerun DUAL, and then added the channels on the second rescan of each box. Probably should have rescanned the network for devices first, I suppose.

So far, looks outstanding! Way better than doing the workaround with EyeTV to Apple TV. Looking forward to the HD/SD channels lookup fix, but that’s the only bug I see so far.

Recording is very well thought out and slick.

I’m jacked!

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Not to tell you how to develop :slight_smile: but… either we’ve got to be able to manually tick them as HD in backend setup or they’ve got to be detected as such to be useful… Seems to me that a job that is fired on completion of guide configuration for a DUAL that records a few seconds seconds from each stream and checks them with ffprobe would probably be sufficiently “automagic”.

To me it doesn’t sound difficult but it is a time consumer and may not be of high priority - which is reasonable - as long as we eventually get some way to do it.

After two days of basic tasks and playing around I’m pretty happy with the project and believe it will soon let me retire my WMC setup. Thanks again!

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T H A N K Y O U for supporting the legacy HDHR tuners! Works fine here.

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You can now mark channels as HD with the latest DVR software. Click on “xx channels”, then click Edit next to HD. Check the HD channels and click Save.

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Wow. So quick. Thank you!

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@tmm1 This functionality seems to have gone, at least on my system. I now have a lot of HD channels marked as SD on my legacy tuner.

Are you able to re-mark them as HD?

Hello, I just subscribed to try out the Channels DVR, I installed the Channels DVR app on an iPad Pro and the DVR server on an old MacBook Pro. Live TV, recording, and playback of the recording works on the iPad.

Do I still need to do the firmware update, mentioned at the top of the thread, to my HDHomeRun DUAL that is running the latest firmware according to the hdhomerun_mac_20180817.dmg which is 20170930?

After rescanning a few times I have 5 HD channels and the rest are listed as SD even though several of them are HD, like 4.1 KNBCDT. I do not see a way to retag as HD. There is no Edit button/icon next to any HD text after clicking “xx channels” under Basic Setup -> 1 HDHomeRun found, so how is this done?

Is the ability to re-mark channels as HD only available in the beta?