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My Cord-Cutting Adventure (2020)

For starters, the consumer electronics industry, normally so eager to sell us computers, laptops, pads, phones, and watches; the industry that for 30 years has sold us VCRs, competed over Beta vs VHS and Super-VHS (look it up, it existed), then sold us DVDs, DVD recorders with DVD-R and DVD-RW, then sold us DVRs that recorded standard definition, then sold us Blu-Ray players of increasing degrees of quality and declining prices...these days, they've utterly given up selling us anything that can record video. The DVR was so beloved, the culmination of decades of home video-entertainment recording into the most-convenient possible form, it was called "God's Machine" by the chair of the FCC.

The lack of CPU horsepower is revealed by its response to a series of commands from the remote: more than three "jump ahead" clicks during an ad block, and it refuses to take any more for most of a minute while it catches its breath. It is called "DLNA streaming" but the technical details are of only academic interest: the upshot is that WiFi devices on your network will be able to access the TV bitstream, but not smoothly or certainly; the system also depends on you having a computer actually wired-in to your Ethernet, at least the one that does the recording. The "HDHomeRun Quickstart Guide" as shown in the last photo, provides a link to a free application (for Windows, Mac, Android, ios, Linux, etc) that can capture the bitstream coming out from the tiny box, and turn it into a streaming video.

Get the Android app