SiliconDust Dual HD Digital Tuner

I have a recent Macbook Pro 7.1 with 4 GB of RAM. I already had EyeTV 3 for my Elgato 250+ tuner. The 250+ has worked beautifully & handles both analog & digital & QAM, cable or Broadcast TV. The 250+ shows both CC 1 & CC 3 caption channels -- you chose one. You can record with it & then play back chosing either channel. CC 1 is Spanish on Telemunod. CC 3 is English on Telemundo -- you may find this reversed on NBC & Ion/Qubo. I use this system for learning Spanish -- I mean like they are taking over, aren't they? My wife came from Guatemala & took me over; my neighborhood in Dallas must be 95 percent Spanish speaking. What the 250+ does not do is show 2 TV windows at once; it has just one tuner in it. And I have been unable to use 2 Elgato devices to get 2 windows. The 250+ uses UBS port. Enter the HDHomerrun which uses the Elgato EyeTV-3 software (same as the 250+) to run on a Mac. The HDHomeRun has two tuners in it for one antenna input. This probably means you get a weaker signal since it is split between 2 tuners. While my 250+ meters out at 100 percent quality signal, the HDHomeRun is something like 90 percent. This test is done with the EyeTV 3's software RF signal strength meter. You choose w/ the software the tuner you are using. I opened it up and found about the least paper documentation imaginable. The little tiny CD they supply w/ software also has little user information. The tiny CD is a problem with a MacBook, since it is not designed to receive it. I stuck the CD in anyway; it disappeared, did nothing. Forunately I was able to get it out. And also fortunately I own a separate DVD Burner/CD player which firewires to the Mac. And it will accomodate those stupid little CD's. How much $ do they save by using them? My plan was to tune both tuners to the same channel (39.1 Telemundo) & run Spanish captions on one window & English on the other; 2 windows on 1 monitor. By positioning one window on top of the other I could end up with Spanish captions in the top window with the picture & the other window mostly behind it, but showing English captions below the top screen. This is probably something very few would do; that is, setting 2 tuners to the same channel & displaying them at the same time. 1) When I hooked it up as designed, Ethernet cable to router, Telemundo 39-1 always crashed when I activated 2 windows on one screen (trying to have English captions on one & Spanish captions on the other). However, 68-2 Qubo would display 2 windows with the captions different on each without immediately crashing. I found that some channels would tolerate 2 windows to one channel & others would not. Incidentally, I saw no immediate problems in displaying 2 different channels in 2 windows on 1 computer/monitor. Since the wireless router connection was not working with Telemundo, I decided to just connect the Ethernet cable from the HDHomeRun Box to the Macbook directly (no router, no wireless). 2) With the Ethernet cable put straight into my MacBook it now worked, even on Telemundo. I don't know if this will be a router problem & if a different router would handle this. I use an AT&T recommended Netopia 3347. Or if perhaps upgrading my computer from 4 to 8 GB RAM wud help the problem. Or is it Airport? I put one window on top of the other, so I could see Spanish captions on top of English captions. What I wish Elgato woul do is just write the software to put both captions on one window at once, or to put the second captions in a special box window under the picture window. Next I tried also hooking up the 250+ tuner. It uses USB port; HDHomeRun uses Ethernet port. Voila; I got 3 tuners now & 3 stations can play at once in their own windows on one screen. But a problem arose. After some time, the system would crash & I would get an error message on the screens saying, "Channel not available." None of the tuners were putting anything out onto my monitor screen no matter what channel I chose. I disconnected the 250+ and tried just HDHomeRun. I got the 2 windows/channels I should get. But still after an hour or so it crashes & I get the "Channel not available" message on the windows. If I close down the EyeTV-3 software & bring it back up, it does the same thing; at once the channels appear in their windows, but after some time it crashes. It does not seem to crash when I have just one window/channel going. Right now I am in the process of upgrading my Macbook Pro from 4 to 8 GB RAM. I will see if that helps. In order to learn Spanish (save dictionary time), I have found that I can copy a Spanish language program that has dual captions (not all do) and have 2 copies of it in my computer. Then I can play each separate copy back at the same time activating Spanish captions on one & English on the other. The trick is to synchronize the play back so you get the same picture on both windows with the simultaneous captions. I found no way to synchronize HDHomeRun on play back. That is because you click on the screen to start playback with each window, & there will be some seconds elapse between starting play on each recording. There is no Remote control with HDHomeRun, you use the mouse. The only way I found to synchronize playbacks is to have both tuners plugged in (HDHomeRun & the 250+) Then you can play back one recording with HDHomeRun & the other with the 250+. You synchronize by putting the mouse in one hand & the 250+'s remote control in the other. You press the 250+ remote's play button at the same time as you click the mouse on the start arrow for HDHomeRun. The 250+ does have a remote; so you can choose to use mouse or remote to control the playback. The cause of the HDHomeRun crash when running 2 tuners (even on different channels) is a mystery. It could be that I need 8 GB instead of 4 GB of RAM. It could be that since the 2 tuners use one antenna lead, the signal is marginal in strength & gets unrecoverabley lost once in a while, tho I have never seen a blink. I have a very large yagi antenna on my roof which leads to an RF amplifier/splitter with 4 outputs. I believe that the result is only a small amplification to each output, since the signal is split 4 ways (3 actually with a 75 ohm dummy on the 4th output). So in my case the signal is again split by HDHomeRun internally for its 2 tuners. I could try assigning one antenna with one amplifier for my HDHomeRun tuner box. The Elgato 250+ has it own separate antenna without amplifier now. I used to have it hooked to the large yagi thru that amplifier/splitter & hardly ever had a problem with it. So that gives me 2 ways I can think of to try to get this to work: 1) more RAM in my computer, 2) better antenna setup. Suggestions for improvement to HDHomeRun 1) better paper documentation (or failing that a good read-me file). 2) remote controler. 3) 2 RF inputs so you can hook separate antennas to each. 4) full size CD 5) perhaps do better computer chip processing inside the HDHomeRun Box. 6) Make some way to synchronize 2 different recorder playbacks 7) Add digital caption capability (right now it does w/ EyeTV only analog captions, line 21 captions) & make it able to display them on screen at the same time (there are 6 digital caption "services") Update: May, 2012 I upgraded the Ram to 8GB with no improvement in performance. Neither ElGato nor SilconDust solved my problems, though I jumped thru a lot of hoops for them, emailing computer log reports.