[mythtv-users] Ceton vs HDHomerunPrime?

[Ronald Frazier]

On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 3:45 PM, Phil Bridges <gravityhammer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the response.  .26, maybe, for official Ceton support?

The OCUR recorder has been pushed back and won't make it for 0.25.
I've been asked about the possibility of including my Ceton patch in
0.25 as a temporary measure until the OCUR recorder is ready for 0.26.
I've been working on porting it over and I just got it fully working
in trunk last weekend. This weekend I'm making improvements and doing
some more extensive testing. I should be done with it soon. Whether or
not it will actually be included in 0.25 I can't say for sure yet. If
they decide not to include it, then I'll certainly make it available
for anyone that wants to patch it themselves.

As far as the devices themselves, it's a bit of a tradeoff. Having the
4th tuner for just a slightly higher price is definitely a huge bonus
in my case. There have been plenty of times when 3 tuners wasn't quite
enough. But I suppose that's going to be highly dependent on your
personal recording tendencies. Another advantage of the Ceton is that
it's internal, so there's no network activity. Even with gigabit
networking, I'd often have trouble where my HDHomerun (original, not
Prime) would crap out and drop packets when there was very high
network activity. To be fair, I can't say whether it was the fault of
my router, wiring, network card, OS, or what. With the ceton being
internal, I haven't had any problem like that.

Advantage of the Prime is obviously that you can install it external
to your box, so nothing to do other than plug it into the network and
install the software. The ceton isn't much more difficult...plug it
into a slot, install the drivers, and reboot. Though obviously you
need to have a PCI-E slot available, there's always the possibility of
heat problems, and a few users have had things like DMA issues (though
I think those were mostly easily solved once identified). I read the
Silicon Dust forums for the first couple months after release and a
handful of users there were having issues with things, though much of
it was Windows DRM issues, and the rest I suspect were just initial
production issues (the Ceton's been out quite a bit longer so those
issues have been better worked out).

-- 
Ron Frazier