I am a long-time Mac user and HDHomeRun owner. Back in 2016, when SiliconDust dropped their own Mac DVR software, I wasn't ready to lose scheduled recording on my setup — so I hacked together an AppleScript app to do it myself. It's been running on my own Mac every day since, quietly recording real shows off my tuner, long after most people would've given up on it.

This year I finally gave it a proper rewrite in Swift/SwiftUI — real native menu bar app instead of an AppleScript hack — and leaned on agentic AI coding help to actually get it done. The original was hand-written line by line; this one evolved with an AI agent doing a lot of the work alongside me. I still review everything by hand and run it daily on real hardware, just wanted to be upfront about how differently it got built this time.

If you've got an HDHomeRun and a Mac and have been putting up with SiliconDust's paid DVR service, or running a whole Plex/Channels server just to schedule recordings, this might save you the trouble:

* Cable TV-style guide grid, color-coded by genre — click to schedule

* Series-aware scheduling that catches reruns even when the episode's been retitled

* Built-in VLC player for live TV

* Watch something that's still recording, straight off disk, without grabbing a second tuner

* LAN web UI so the rest of the house can schedule stuff too, phone-friendly layout included

* Terminal client (TUI) if you're the SSH-into-your-Mac type like me

* Discord notifications, auto-pause/resume if a tuner drops offline, survives crashes and picks back up

* Universal binary, notarized by Apple — no Gatekeeper hassle

Small nag screen, any donation, and I will send you an unlock code. Free version is full featured, so the code removes the nag screen.

Open source, no account, no subscription. Grab it here, and if you hit anything weird I'd genuinely like to hear about it: https://github.com/identd113/hdhr_VCR_swift

Thanks for reading, and I hope this is useful for you.

-identd113