A year ago I started the ball rolling on my DVR project when I noticed that Tech Woot! had the HD HomeRun Dual tuners on sale for a great price. It turned out to be a good thing that I ordered 2 of them as there's been a few times when all 4 tuners (dual means each unit has 2 independent tuners) have been active.

My estimated $800 a year savings turned out to have been way off - DirecTV was cancelled 10 months ago and I've already saved $1174. Sure I miss not being current on shows such as Dexter, Game of Thrones, Nurse Jackie and True Blood, but those savings more than make up for it. I believe the extra savings is due to being able to watch a number of my shows on websites like SyFy and TV Land. Of course it's possible that in the future those sites will get locked down like TBS did.

The HDMI to Component Adaptor has worked out just fine, though the Mac mini has an issue with audio via HDMI so I ended up using the mini's optical out instead of the HDMI adaptor's optical out. That works, though it does mean I don't get to utilize the HDMI adaptor's support for a second HDMI device. I should probably give HDMI audio another try as I've upgraded the mini's OS to Mavericks.

My new Harmony Touch is configured via the website myharmony.com. I've entered my device model numbers and it auto-configured the remote so I can now use it to switch between the mini and the PS3. It correctly selects the source inputs for the HDTV and the receiver, and I can control the volume. I haven't had the time to figure out how to make it control EyeTV 3 on the mini yet, so I still use the Ultra-mini keyboard for that. I also don't have the Ultimate Hub yet, so I use the PS3's remote to control it. The Harmony's a bit slower than my Pronto Pro, though I'd adjusted the delays between IR signals in the Pronto to be as short as possible. The Harmony has similar settings, I've just not yet had the time to change them.