Accessing your HD HomeRun Prime from over the Internet
Imported from our old blog @ phreefi.com and updated for legibility where appropriate…
For those who have a slingbox, you’ve paid for what I’m doing for phree…. but this phreedom comes with a bit of sweat on my part (but not for you!)
For those of us already with HD Homerun Primes that want to access their tv from over the internet, here’s the tutorial you’ve been waiting for!
In this post I’m going to teach you how to set it up so easily, you’ll be kicking yourselves on why it took so long for this tutorial to come out? Well, I only realized a personal need for this when I had to travel for client work and realized I was going to be away (and possibly working) during the Patriots game vs. the Broncos (man, what a blowout!). The slingbox’s functionality immediately came to mind, to broadcast my home tv signal hundreds of miles away to my laptop…. but alas, I dont have a slingbox. But I do have a 6 month old HD Homerun Prime! Technically, I knew its only meant for LAN usage…. partly because of drm restrictions imposed by content providers, but also partly because of subscriber upload bandwidth concerns.
I googled and found some places and podcasts here (around 00:36:00) and other various fourms that showed how much people REALLY want this feature – but no solutions! I then thought what would be needed.
1- HDHomerun Prime (fi)
2- Windows Media Center on my laptop (fi)
3- VPN Software (OpenVPN) (phree)
4- VMWare Player (phree) or VMware Workstation (fi) or VMWare ESX (fi) or VMWare ESXi (phree) or some other virtualization product like Virtual PC (free) or Virtualbox (phree)
#1 is mandatory. #2, #3, and #4 are optional and other software can be substituted.
Lets get started…
Part 1:
To start things off very easily, I need you to understand that your home network and your offsite network must NOT have the same first few ip address octets.
For examply, many homes (and businesses) use the internal private ip address scheme 192.168.1.x. Well, if both your home ip address and the offsite location (a cafe, a library, a friends house, a hotel, etc) also use 192.168.1.x, your VPN will get confused when sending the data back and forth. This won’t work. Eliminate this by setting your entire home network to use 192.168.[2-254].x. This means all ip address on all computers in your home must use something like:
192.168.100.2…. 192.168.100.3, 192.168.100.4, 192.168.100.5….
…or whatever else you may want as long as you follow the sequence and as long as your home network doesn’t match the offsite network’s ip addressing scheme. Use an obscure number like 192.168.57.x!
I’m not going to get into ip addressing but there are many other dhcp and network addressing internet help sites out there. I’m going to assume you use 192.168.57.x at home for the purposes of this tutorial. Go re-ip your home network because you’ll possibly not know what the other networks ip address scheme is until you get there.
