Cord-Cutting, Or How to Stream your Way to Success

The indoor temp:


TV is still good!

The only remaining problem is any bit of slightly un-tv-like behavior results in the operator just sitting and staring at a blank screen for hours. Instead of... changing the channel?

I can't really imagine getting it much more tv-like but the training has been a mountain to climb. I wish it had a guide button, and I was stupid to get a remote with movement arrows combined with channel/volume. Right now volume requires 2 remotes and is a source of elderly consternation.

Is the house a 100 deg? Or the closet you got the equipment in?

I have to give you props for getting this all set up but a shield would have been so much easier. Or even a cheap android box.

That is in the living room with the tv. My mom should have been a blacksmith working in the forges of sammath naur or something. She seems immune to heat.

Antenna TV has been really dead the past few days. Apparently there's a big solar storm going on. Anyone else seeing this? I know it isn't my tuner, tested with the TV tuner.

Isn't affecting my wireless inet that I can tell.

Edit: Yea it must have been that. Everything just started working again today mid day. I don't really get how it can affect things in the middle of the night.

Summer really sucks for TV reception. I ended up moving the antenna to the other side of the house and right on the edge to maybe avoid metal roof problems. I lost CBS entirely, but gained 3 PBS channels and some strange foxlike channel.

TVHeadend is just super flaky. I've gotten good at setting it up but if the tater box ever goes down it seems to poop itself quite severely. A friend has an extra HD Homerun and is going to send it to me having observed my tribulations. I think it will integrate well with the tater.

You can't go wrong with hd homerun. Back when I had cable I had four of their cable card tuners and they were rock solid.

I used their dvr software too. It was fairly good but it's been several years since I've used it.

So has anyone found a good ITPV service for live sports? All of the ones I've tried can't even stream 1080p feeds and they end up looking like garbage.

LiquidDeath said:

So has anyone found a good ITPV service for live sports? All of the ones I've tried can't even stream 1080p feeds and they end up looking like garbage.

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I've had good luck with kodi plug in the crew. Not a pay service but has good quality.

The homerun is working now. Had to order a cheap switch to get it going.

Kodi still loses all guide information after a few hours, and it seems there's no way to renumber channels. Other than that it is quite solid.

BTW has anyone managed to get a guide in Kodi with larger fonts? I need something more old people eyeballs friendly.

I tried a few of the skins and they all seemed to be trying to be some kind of starship enterprise console thing. One had a font embiggener, but it only affected the stuff that was already big anyway. Had no effect on the guide.

Haus said:

OK, So I am looking at one of the homerun devices. This one : HDHomeRun SCRIBE 4K - SiliconDust

Am I right in thinking this would be 4 feeds, 4k, OTA off an antenna and DVR? It doesn't seem to show much detail but would I also end up needing to pay for the TV Guide service? (looks like $35 a year?)

Am I also right in thinking the non DVR options don't require the subscription so they're just good to go?

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That seems right. You could just get a tuner and use it with what ever epg program you wanted too.

Their dvr was pretty good when I used it. The guide for the recording was pretty nice. It was by program not time, so I could hide every show I knew I would never record and then only new shows would pop up. Was worth the $35 when I had the cable card tuners. It integrated nicely with the live channels app on my Nvidia shield.

Haus said:

So....

Got the newest HD Homerun box (Quad tuner) and it was set up and running in under 10 minutes. Every device can get to it and use it. Only remining hitch is getting it to insert it's channels into the combined channel layout on my LG Linq based TV (Which is a thinly skinned Google TV)

Saved me needing to run antenna cables through the attic to the three TV's in the house. That alone, IMHO, paid for it.

Click to expand...

Are you able to watch 4k on it?

I have the original box and it works fantastically, but I really want to upgrade to get the ATSC 3.0/4k feeds.

I've just bought a new PC to replace both my dying i5-6600 HTPC and my work laptop. I went for an i7-13700 with Nvidia 3080 thinking this PC would do everything that my two other devices were doing - work stuff and torrent/HTPC.

However, I'm thinking I would have been better off keeping the laptop for work and just buying a budget to mid-range replacement HTPC. All my media playback is done locally with MPC-HC and MadVR.


Currently the new PC is plugged into both monitors and my living room TV. When I want to watch something I use displayfusion multi monitor profiles to turn off the two monitors and switch back after. The new PC has a 6tb HD, I also plugged the old 6tb HD and bought a cheap USB HD dock for the old 4tb HD. One strange issue with this is my home cinema setup is amplifying coil whine that is highly audible when moving my mouse etc. I might have fixed/reduced the whine last night by connecting speaker wire from the stereo amp to the home cinema AVR but this solution is TBC

Now I'm thinking I could repurpose the work laptop as the dedicated HTPC and just keep that plugged into the TV, this would avoid messing with monitor profiles. And would hopefully reduce/eliminate the coilwhine by using a much quieter laptop. I could also keep the laptop running as a seedbox (although ratio on Iptorrents is not an issue). The issue with this option is external storage, either I buy another USB HD dock (my local hardware pawn shop) fortunately had one earlier, or some other kind of solution like a NAS.

The same hardware exchange had a WD mycloud ex2 8tb in the window for £220. I could sell them the 1650 Super from the old pc to get £60 off. This would then give me 12/14tb of storage depending on which HD I use with the dock. However, reviews for the WD mycloud aren't great and I'm not sure if I could use bitorrent through the NAS itself or if I would have to keep the laptop on as a seedbox.

The other option is I just run bitorrent from the laptop, save the files to the mycloud and treat it as a network attached external drive. Or buy a "better" NAS. Seeding/Ratio isn't really an issue like I said.

Thoughts?

Edit, I bought the NAS, was £30 cheaper than I thought it was. £130 for 8 tb seemed a good deal

Apparently you used to be able to send notification messages to kodi. I farted around with it for hours but it looks like that stuff has been slowly nerfed over time.

I was looking forward to trolling my mom with strange messages.