SiliconDust HDHomeRun Flex 4K ATSC 3.0 NextGen TV: 2/4 Tuners HDFX-4K

This was a quick setup that was actually so easy it threw me for a loop. I had no choice but to get a replacement for my Amazon Fire TV Recast. Support was dropped for that and mine finally just failed. After reading reviews, I settled on the 4 tuner (4 x ATSC 1.0, with 2 x ATSC 3.0 capable). There are a couple of things to be aware of on this model and I'm going to go with them under the pros and cons, but suffice it to say, so far, I'm satisfied with it. I wasn't satisfied with my Recast unit from almost day 1, but read on. Pros 1. Handles through ATSC 3.0 so it'll do NextGen channels if you have them in your area and your gear is capable of getting them. 2. Has four tuners so you can record or watch programming on four different tuners, though only two can handle ATSC 3.0. 3. The apps to facilitate getting programming from the HD Homerun appear to work well so far on both the Fire TV, Windows 11, and Android. Scratch that - they work. The Windows 11 app almost locked my system up solid while doing this review. 4. The picture is not only good, on HD broadcasts, it's OUTSTANDING on both the Fire TV and via the Windows app, and it looks fine on the phone, but why bother with a phone when you've got a larger screen? Cons 1. This doesn't come with a guide - if you want the guide and DVR capability you have to do the following: a. Shell out $35.00 for a year of DVR / Guide capability b. Shell out for an external hard drive - yeah, you heard that right - this comes with no hard drive c. While I have nothing good to say about my previous Recast unit, at least that came with a guide, DVR capability and a TB of storage for $179. This was $199 with no no disk or guide. 3. That you even have to use an app to view it on the Fire TVs, but it's not an Amazon product 4. While you may see that I did a scan and found 99 channels (I have 2 x HD OTA antennas) probably 10 to 12 of those cannot be viewed because they're DRM protected So, with those cons, why did I buy this one? First, read the reviews on the other units outside of Amazon. From what I could find online, the top models appeared to be the Silicon Dust HD Homerun models, the Tablos, and the ZapperBox. They each had their pros and cons and the ZapperBox also has a similar setup to the HD Homerun for recording and a guide. The Tablo would have been the more economical model in initial cost, that it came with storage, and has no charge for it's guide. Unfortunately, it's only equipped for ATSC 1.0 (I'd like to be ready for 3.0) and if you look at some of the reviews, no thanks, they're not very good. There was a greater than 20% return rate on the models I looked at on Amazon. I already had enough of that with my Recast unit. So that's why I went with the HD Homerun 4-tuner model. My photos include out of the box (the first 2), via the Fire TV app, and on my Windows 11 Desktop which uses an HDMI input into the same Fire TV as it's monitor. These photographs do not do the HD broadcast pictures any justice. You have to see them in person. Yes, I'd recommend this just out of taking everything into account including technology, customer service (I read ZapperBox now has customers IM or email them?), cost, and the aggravation I was hoping to avoid. It's my hope that in the future, some company will come out with something that's a bit more reasonably priced overall, like the Recast was, if only it had worked right out of the gate.

Should have got this sooner! We got local channels as part of a streaming package but lost access to a channel my wife watches so started looking at over the air antennas but that meant running coax. The HDHomeRun Flex needs an antenna but doesn’t need to be located where we watch. It just needs power and an Ethernet cable to connect to a router or wifi extender. The unit itself has no WiFi and the connection to your router should be solid. I don’t know if it can be beat for ease of setup and quality of instructions. The picture quality is excellent on good stations and the tuner pulled in more stations than my TV tuner could. They make it easy to just turn off and skip all the home shopping and other annoying channels too. It found over 100 channels where I am and being able to cut out the clinkers easily is valuable. We use Roku boxes and Apple tablets to watch. Now we can tune in local news or whatever on a tablet for less TV-centric viewing. I don’t have a hard drive hooked up yet for DVR functionality but it looks easy to set up recordings. You get free channel guides forward and back 3 days but 2 weeks into the future with ongoing recording schedules costs $35/year. With a hard drive and the schedule subscription it functions the same as something like YouTubeTV where you can have recordings - only you really have them unlike YouTubeTV where they live on their servers. That’s good and bad. You can always play them back on the HDHomeRun Flex even without the subscription (according to the website) but you have to supply the storage and it supports multiple kinds. You can use a NAS or computer to store videos but I’m going dedicated external hard drive. They say 18 hours of video can be stored on 500Gb for sizing. And the storage can span devices. The flexibility is pretty amazing. I’m not compensated or paid or a vine reviewer. I don’t have experience with the other OTA DVRs. But this is a pretty full house solution. Very flexible, very powerful, great picture quality, and no problem recommending it if you’re looking for an OTA DVR.

I live about 25 miles west of Philadelphia, and have a GE Attic Antenna (29884-PK1), GE 50-ft RG6 Quad Shield Coax (33532), GE Antenna Amplifier (42178), two way splitter, and finally this device. 1GB internet is provided by a Verizon Fios. Physically, the device is everything I could wish for. It is well made, has a tiny footprint (4" x 4" x 3/4"), is very light, and only has the four connections in the back (power, network, usb, and antenna). It has a 12 watt (12 volts @ 1 amp) DC power adaptor with two unpolarized prongs. With no connections, it uses about 2 watts. With all four tuners running, it consumes about 5 watts, which is nothing. On an m1 mac mini, the HDHomeRun app works fairly well. I used the terminal command, "open -n -a HDHomeRun.app" to run four instances of the app at once, with two ATSC 1.0 and two ATSC 3.0 channels running at the same time. Video and audio worked fine. The app uses 10 to 20 percent of the CPU resources, which is far more than something like Youtube on Chrome. It has some minor bugs. Sometimes, it will not support all four tuners when one or two of the tuners is playing an ATSC 3.0 station. On a portrait-mode secondary monitor, sometime the picture flips back and fourth between horizontal and vertical orientation. It also crashed a couple times, but I was stressing it out with multiple instances on a single computer. In general, a single instance of the HDHomeRun app runs reliably on a mac mini. On an old Windows 10 PC, a single instance of the application was actually more responsive and reliable than on the mac mini. The Windows software also includes two small configuration applications. With a first-generation 9.7-inch iPad Pro, the app supported both audio and video with both ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 stations, and seemed to work well. On a cheap Android Nord N20 phone, the ATSC 1.0 worked fine, but the ATSC 3.0 was audio-only. On a TCL 49S405 49-Inch 4K Roku TV (2017 Model) connected with wired Ethernet, the ATSC 1.0 worked, but the ATSC 3.0 had no audio. Same thing with a Roku Express 4K+ connected to a VIZIO P602ui-B3 HDTV (2015). Finally, on a TCL 43S433 43-Inch 4K Roku TV (2020 Model) connected via WiFi, the audio and video worked on ATSC 1.0 and 3.0. On the mac mini, iPad, Windows PC, and android phone, the app supports pause, fast forward, and rewind. With the roku app, the pause always works, but the rewind and fast forward are not so reliable. I attached an old USB 2.0 16 GB memory stick to extend the buffer time from five minutes to over an hour. I pick up about 30 channels (100 sub-channels) in the Philadelphia area. We have six ATSC 3.0 stations, but only two are not encrypted with DRM (6abc and Fox 29). Both stations work well, as do most of the ATSC 1.0 stations. The tuner has more than adequate sensitivity. Like its physical construction, the system web interface for the HDHomeRun is minimalistic but functional. You access it using its IP address or "hdhomerun.local". It has functions to list and rescan the channels, show tuner status, and show the digital frequency, bitrate, signal strength, and quality percentage of the tuned-in stations. It also shows the model number, IP address, Mac Address, etc, as well as the system logs. But that is it. You do not have to setup an account to use the device as a tuner. I have not setup an account with the manufacturer (SiliconeDust), and have not used the DVR. Finally, for those who are technically inclined, this device is fantastic. Stations can be streamed directly over the network to video players such as VLC or Windows Media Player. The Plex and Jellyfin media servers can utilize the device for live TV and DVR recordings. The Windows, Mac, and Linux client installation programs also install an hdhomerun_config command line utility. This supports functions such as channel scans and streaming tv video to mpeg files. The libhdhomerun library can be used for direct programmatic control of the HDHomeRun. The device reports the signal strength and signal quality using precise percentage values. A signal strength of 100% indicates an ideal power level of -48.75 dBm = 60 dBuV = 1 mV across 75 ohms. Each 10 percent drop in signal strength corresponds to a 6 dBm drop in signal power. A signal quality of 100% indicates an ideal signal to noise ratio (SNR) of 33 dB =~ 2000:1 power ratio =~ 45:1 voltage ratio . Each 10 percent drop in signal quality corresponds to a 3.3 dB drop in SNR. The tuners provide reception with both the signal strength and signal quality above 55% (-75 dBm level and 18 dB SNR). Above 70% is very reliable. Unfortunately, the percentage values only go up to 100%, so it is hard to check when the signal is too strong.

This is kind of lengthy... Previously, for the past 6 years, our household used a “Tablo” as our in-home OTA DVR solution. For that purpose, it worked fairly well. I won’t go into any of the downsides, but the final deal killer was the inability to access it remotely using Roku devices. No matter how many router tweaks and settings such as port forwarding I tried, Roku just couldn’t access it. The only thing that worked was using a smartphone. All we wanted was the ability to access our local news broadcasts and sporting events when out of town. We thought we had found a solution by subscribing to “YouTube TV” which provides local channels as part of the package. Imagine our disappointment when on our first trip out of town, we could not get any of our hometown stations but instead those of where we were at the time. Upon our return, I resolved to finally replace the “Tablo” with a SiliconDust “HDHomeRun Flex 4K”. Operationally, much like the “Tablo”, you connect an OTA antenna to the unit, connect to your home network and then power it up. One of the nice things about the “Tablo” is that you can connect to your home network wirelessly. The “HDHomeRun” requires a wired ethernet connection. This meant we would have to run ethernet cable from our router to where the unit would reside. Fortunately for us this was something we did last year for different reasons but in the process, the “Tablo” was connected directly as well which greatly improved its responsiveness and stability. Unboxing the “HDHomeRun” and connecting it in place of the “Tablo” took only a few minutes. I used the “HDHomeRun” app on my android phone while connected to the same network to finish up firmware upgrades and channel scans. The “HDHomeRun”, when connected to our attic antenna, picked up 52 local ATSC 1.0 channels and 4 ATSC 3.0 stations. Now, the main reason we selected the “HDHomeRun” was its ability to integrate with our “Plex Media Server” which we have had operating for years. Within just minutes, the “HDHomeRun” was setup within Plex which, as part of our lifetime pass, provides a guide for all of the channels the “HDHomeRun” found. Plex also provides native DVR support so no additional storage devices or fees to SiliconDust for their DVR functionality. What Plex won’t do is decode AC-4 audio (blame FFmpeg) which is what the ATSC 3.0 broadcasts come with. Not a huge problem since all of the ATSC 1.0 audio channels work just fine. We anticipate that Plex/FFmpeg will provide the AC-4 decoder eventually as ATSC 3.0 adoption picks up, but the main thing is, since Plex is a server, we can access it remotely which means all of our local channels are available remotely as well. “HDHomeRun” also has a Windows 10 app which was downloaded to test. That worked great and after downloading a couple of drivers it said it needed, including a 99 cent one from Microsoft, I was able to play the ATSC 3.0 channels with audio as well. Some users have complained about channel changes taking a long time. For us this is 2-3 seconds. I challenge anyone to go from one YouTube or Roku channel to another much faster. All in all, to date, this change over has worked out well. It picks up all of the local free channels we could ever need. Subjectively, we also think the image quality is great. If I had a wish list, it would be that the “HDHomeRun” apps provided more native info and/or metadata about each channel such as the kind of audio track being listened to and the video resolution. Kind of like YouTube providing “Stats for Nerds” on each of its videos. We’re not sure if we are future proofed on the ATSC 3.0 roll-out but that was not the only or even main part of the reason for our purchase decision. What we wanted is what we got, and it works very, very well.

Update: I've been so frustrated with the constant freezing. I basically never watch antenna TV anymore because of it and customer support's usual answer along the lines of "it could be worse." In fact, I forgtt all about even having it until I saw the auto payment for another year of the dvr service. I saw it to late to cancel, but I don't renew next year, for certain. I don't even use it anymore until Sundays when I'm trying to watch football on my local station. I miss so many plays because of the freezing and having to restart (and missing every play that happened during that process), but that's not the only problem with live tv. Pausing hardly ever works, and more often than not, when I unpause, it skips right to live and I'm unable to rewind. When I watch something I've recorded, maybe the whole episode will be there... but maybe it crashes. In any case, if i try to pause, it restarts at the beginning. At one point, I blamed the Roku HDHomeRun app, but I later downloaded the app on an Amazon Fire TV, and wouldn't you know it, I have the same problems. I absolutely cannot recommend this product, which makes me sad bc it had a lot of promise, and I paid good money for it. Original review: The only reason I need a tuner/dvr at all is so I can record NFL games—I don't want to miss one while I'm watching another that's being broadcast at the same time, and I want to be able to skip commercials (and sometimes the announcers' chatter). I've tried several OTA receivers/DVRs but finally settled on the SiliconDust HDHomeRun Flex 4K. The SiliconDust HDHomeRun Flex 4K is dead simple to set up: plug in coax cable from the antenna, plug included ethernet cable into the HDHomeRun and your router, plug included power supply in. The HDHomeRun isn't connected to your television, only to your router (and antenna and power)—it streams your OTA channels to your TVs and other devices via app. Viewing OTA (antenna) TV: My two main TVs are Roku Tvs (and a rarely-used 3rd TV uses a Roku device), so I just added the HDHomeRun app. I didn't need to do anything else to view all my OTA channels, not even run a channel scan. I spent a total of about 2 minutes from opening the box to watching TV (and probably 60 seconds of that was bc my arthritic hands had trouble tightening the coax cable). I wasn't missing any of the 77 channels my TV found when the antenna cable was connected directly to the TV. (Incidentally, HDHomerun was not my first choice: I bought a Tablo Dual Lite first, but it could not find as many channels, and not the local networks that broadcast NFL games at all, so I returned it asap.) The picture through the HDHomeRun is clearer than watching when watching from my Dish, which surprised me. Note: Some Samsung TVs cannot get audio when using the HDHomeRun. The site's FAQ says "To hear audio, you need a TV, AV receiver, or soundbar that can decode Dolby Digital or AC3 audio over HDMI. Most modern TVs can do this, though we’ve noticed a few Samsung TVs cannot." DVR: If you want DVR functionality, you'll pay $35/year, and plug in an external hard drive to your HDHomeRun via usb. I tested the DVR functions via the HDHomeRun app on my laptop and on my phone. I started recording a program already in progress. I scheduled recording for a program that would start about a half hour in the future. I used the search bar to schedule recordings of all NFL games, on any channel, at any time. Super easy. The quality of the recording is great. Here's where things get a little less than ideal. I could not for the life of me figure out how to use the DVR functions from the Roku app. I submitted a support ticket to Silicone Dust, and they told me how to find my recordings (just hit the "back" arrow button on the Roku remote), but I can't schedule recordings from the Roku app... yet. I'll paste Silicone Dust's email below: The Roku version of the HDHomeRun app is getting some long overdue updates to help bring it in-line with the HDHomeRun app for other platforms. We'll be adding the ability to schedule recordings, search guide data, and more, in the coming months. When you open the Roku app, it will start playing the last played channel right away. Pressing left/right arrows will bring up the live channel switcher. Icons and guide data might take a moment to load, and we are working to improve those loading times. Pressing "Back" from live TV will bring you to a new "Live/Recorded/Discover/Tasks" screen. Selecting "Live" will bring you back to the live view on whatever channel was being watched before Selecting "Recorded" will show recordings if you are using the HDHomeRun DVR service Selecting "Discover" will give you our guide discover view. Selecting a TV program from "Discover" will show a summery for that program, and will show the current and future episodes (if the program is a TV show and not a movie). If a program is available on more than one channel, you will also see those options listed here. In the future you will be able to use this view to also schedule recordings if you are subscribed to the HDHomeRun DVR service.