Shopping for a tuner, MPEG2 or H.264?

General Discussions
1

I’ve been shopping for an OTA tuner and was looking at the SiliconDust HDHR5-4US HDHomeRun CONNECT Quatro 4-Tuner Live TV for Cord Cutters. It’s a four tuner box and decodes MPEG2. They also have a two tuner box SiliconDust HDHomeRun EXTEND.FREE Broadcast HDTV (2-Tuner) and this one says H.264 Transcode. I was going for the four tuner model (30.00 cheaper too) but thought I best ask since I don’t know the difference, and how either will affect me here. I want to cut Directv and run a Plex server and Roku boxes at the TV points. I don’t want to spend the money and find out I really bought the wrong thing. I did some looking online and found that H.264 is more efficient as far as file size and doesn’t require the bitrate for smooth action but most of the references were regarding ripping DVD’s and editing so not sure how much difference it would make with this application. I am hoping some of you here have done both and have seen the difference. Thanks for your advice, John

2

I have the quattro and it works fairly well.

After adding it to plex, you can enable transcoding (on the server, not the homerun) to 264, if you have a decently powered server.

If you are running from a nas or other lower powered device, like I am, then I leave the server transcoding off.

For myself, I wish they would have had EXTEND in 4 tuner, as I would have rather had the tuner transcode, but I wanted the QUATTRO extra tuners and cheaper price.

In summary, you must determine what factors are more important;

  • extend = only 2 tuners, but has hardware transcoding which eliminates the load from transcoding (pre or post) on the server. Higher cost.
  • quattro = 4 tuners, but must depend on the server to transcode (either as it records, or when your playing back on your client). Lower cost.

You can have multiple tuners with plex, so even if you start with one, you are not limited only to that one, you can add more later if you need more tuners.

3

I’ve got the Extend and love it. I’ve got a low, low powered NAS that I use for DVR and with the Extend it can record/playback two streams at at time without problem. I don’t think it would with MPEG2.

4

Yup
I would hold out for the Extend as well.
Plex transcoding mpeg2ts streams will not work so well unless you have a beefy CPU to support transcoding.
On my i7 Plex maxes CPU utilization trying to transcode to h264

5

I can’t wait for the new 6 tuner prime! then I will have 12 tuners… TV OVERLORD… whoops… OVERLOAD!!! lol

6

Thanks for the help guys, sounds like I need the extend as I’m using an older Dell I3 box for my server so don’t want to choke it down.