Almost two years ago, I posted of my transition away from cable/satellite TV to using only internet & over-the-air and a Home Theater PC. Since it has been almost two years, I thought it a good time to update how things are going.
We’re still every bit the “cord cutters” we were back then. We haven’t missed satellite tv, and haven’t looked back. There have been some minor changes to our setup, as I’ve learned more and found different things to enhance the experience.
Hardware
At the time of the original writing, I was using the wire that came in from the cable company for internet and phone as an antenna. It gave me all of the local channels and a few cable channels that I didn’t care about too (the C-Span lineup, some local access channels, The Weather Channel, and maybe a couple others – we never watched any of them). At that time, there was an FCC rule in effect that required the cable companies to leave local channels unencrypted, so everything worked well for me.
That has changed since then, and it caused some trouble. In losing the cable line as an antenna when the rule went away and the cable company subsequently started encrypting those channels, I learned that my HDHomerun tuner was Digital Cable-Only. It doesn’t support over-the-air signals. That meant I had to replace it with a tuner that does support over-the-air signals. Since I had, and liked having, three tuners in the original HDHomeRun that I bought, I went with two HDHomeRun HDHR3-US tuners, which each have two tuners, for a total of four tuners.
It seems crazy to me that HDHomeRun has separate products for Cable and Over-the-air signals, and was frustrating to have to replace a perfectly good tuner because of the signal source. But live and learn.
Since the original posts, I’ve also added two more “satellite” HTPCs. By “satellite”, I mean they pull content from the first one. I put one in the bedroom and one in the family room (upstairs). The bedroom machine is an old Mac Mini. I installed Bootcamp and Windows 8 with Media Center on it, as well as Plex (which I’ll get to under “Software”). It is not as powerful, but it doesn’t record or store any media, it’s effectively just a display. The only annoyance is that when watching shows on one WMC computer that were recorded on another, I can’t delete the show on the display computer when I’m done, I have to go to the recording computer to delete it. I’ve learned to live with this minor annoyance.
The second “satellite” computer in the family room was, until just last week, an old Pentium Dual Core laptop. WMC didn’t work very well on it, but I used an XBox 360 to stream shows from the main HTPC for that purpose. The laptop was primarily for Plex, and for any internet content such as Youtube, Amazon, or internet radio.
Last week I built a new HTPC to replace the laptop. It’s an Athlon II, triple-core processor with 8GB RAM, and has Windows 8.1 with Media Center on it. It serves the same purpose as the laptop, but has more power and smoother video. The laptop has been relegated to the kids’ play room for doing educational websites (mostly abcmouse.com).
Another change in hardware is that I now also have a pair of Chromecasts. One is on the same TV as the main HTPC, and the other is in the family room. This is a great little device that’s only $35. We use it for watching shows purchased from Google Play, as well as Youtube and a few other things. It requires a separate device, phone or tablet (Android or iOS) to control what it displays. It’s a nice extra that was worth the low price.
Finally, I dumped the three-disk RAID on the main HTPC in favor of a single disk of the same size. I was starting to have problems with disks in the RAID not loading, and showing signs that a major disaster was coming. Also, going to a single 3TB drive instead of three 1TB drives uses less power and puts less strain on the power supply.
Software
I haven’t had many major changes in software. I still use Windows 7 & Media Center on the main HTPC. The two “satellite” computers that pull from it use Windows 8.1 with no problems at all.
The biggest change is that I gave up pretty quickly on XBMC and went to Plex, which is an XBMC derivative. The biggest drawback to Plex is that it requires one computer to act as a server, and requires the server software to be running. That provides a major advantage though: you only need to set up the media once, and it works on every other computer. It also does a great job of remembering what has been watched, and where you left off. You can stop things on one machine and pick up where you left off on another machine. Windows Media Center doesn’t do that, and it’s an excellent feature. We use Plex to watch our DVD & BluRay collection, Home movies, shows we get from save.tv for the kids to watch (save.tv is a German online DVR), and any other file-based content we watch. It’s also good for a few streaming sources I like, such as Twit.tv, Revision3, and Youtube. I just figured out today how to get Youtube working right.
The problem I had with Youtube up until today was that I couldn’t get it to take my account info, which is useful for things like subscriptions, playlists, watch later, etc. The reason it didn’t work is that I have two-factor authentication set up on my Google accounts, and Plex doesn’t support that. The work-around is to create an app-specific password in Google that you use in the Plex settings. Doing that, everything seems to work great.
One really cool thing about Plex is that you can get it running on a $35 Raspberry Pi. This is great for us, it allows me to watch TV on old CRT TVs in the kids’ play room and the garage. You can’t beat that!
Conclusion
With some tweaks over the last two years, our experience using an HTPC for over-the-air and streaming content has been a good one. There were some shows we liked and watched on Satellite TV before “cutting the cord”, but we have been able to find them all elsewhere. Amazon and Google Play have pretty much everything we would want to watch on Satellite/Cable TV, and is usually available the day after it airs. We pay $2/episode for SD quality shows and $3 for HD, but an entire season of a show is usually around $20-25, and we don’t come anywhere close to paying the $100/month it cost for DirecTV when we had it. Sometimes the cable channels even post full episodes on their websites for free. It takes some know-how to cut the cord, but I really think this is the future. As internet content gets better, we’ll start to see more set-top boxes that do the same thing. Roku and Apple TV (which I don’t use) are already proving that to be the case.