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Cutting the Cable

F

FrostBite

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 2, 2004
Messages
1,086
I'm about to take the leap and cut my U-Verse plan. For $80, the wife and I watch maybe 5 different channels, and 2 of those are OTA too; I also got a letter stating that prices are going up too. I've got a NAS full of movies we've collected (lots of DVD's, some HDDVD's, new Bluray's), an HTPC with a Haupage 2250 tuner I'll connect an antenna to again for OTA, Netflix, and an XBox but with no gold membership. I'll need to make another HTPC for the bedroom since that one is running a set top box, but it'll be able to hook up to the network.

I'm curious if anyone else has taken the leap, and what they are doing for shows that are not online? Food Network, Cooking Channel, and Discovery are going to be the shows we miss and I don't believe they are online. Any advice on whether Hulu Plus is worth it (even if I have Netflix) with no cable? Any other suggestions?
 
Sounds like all you need is to put the Xbox at the other TV (assuming its a 360) so that they can share tuners with the HTPC.. That or for about the same price if your needing to buy another 360 for that task you can get a SageTV extender & a licence to put Sage on your HTPC (this is what I do) and then you get the full robustness that is sage TV (only DVR more user friendly that I have used is an actual tivo).. As far as how to get the other programming, I have no suggestions that I can really talk about here.
 
Man we did this too, been over a year I think....best move ever...man we were wasting money....between netflix streamers, and wmc extenders, and the fact we have a very good local ota hd selection.....theres no reason to pay $130/mo for all that....and that was on cable

Whats funny is just last week two guys trying to sell us on att uverse came by and when I told them we do everything including phone ($12.50/mo vonage) over the internet, lan, and antennas they acted like this was impossible....lol

Told them when they offer everything I get for free with their menus for free they can hook it up.
 
When I moved into my new house, I intended to get dsl. Unfortunately, all of the DSL ports in my area are in use (or some other excuse from the company for why they wouldn't sell to me).

Instead I ended up with cable internet. I had the option of either having cable internet and having no TV at all (but paying a premium for having internet with no TV), or to pay $5 more than the premium for the absolute most basic cable package.

I was surprised to find that Discovery was actually included in the super basic $5 package. For other shows that I miss having, I use www.playon.tv. I got in on special about a year ago for a one time fee of $40. It is a little hit and miss and the support / community is spotty, but it does what it needs to do most of the time.
 
Thanks for the advice ya'll.

For the XBox 360, I'm not going to be hooking up it as an extender unfortunately because all the DVD/HDDVD/BR are ripped into MKV's and stored on the NAS; the CD's are stored in a box in the closet. Unless something has changed, my wife and I won't be able to watch these movies so I'll have to build a cheapy HTPC to deal with this.

Unfortunately for U-Verse, there is no cheap basic package, and since everything is IPTV, I don't believe you can just hook it up via coax to all the TV's and watch so I'm stuck with OTA. I haven't seen what was avaiable from that in years so hopefully the channel lineups are good.

As for playon.tv, do you have use a browser to watch shows? I'd really prefer something integrated into WMC so my wife has a one stop shop for all her needs. If it's not possible, I think I'll have to pass on those. Anyone know any other WMC integrations like Netflix?
 
Playon doesn't run through a browser. It needs a host computer turned on and a receiver device (ps3, wii, 360, etc) connected to the TV. It works for me since my desktop is on in the den and just sends to the 360 over wifi.

It will show up under the "video library" tab with a channel list of whatever channels you have installed once you have set it up. As far as working with Windows Media Center, I don't know if playon has been bent into working with it yet. It used to have some problems with that. They do offer a free trial 14 day account or something similar to that if I recall, you could give it a try using that I guess.
 
You can now watch mkv's on a WME like the xbox360. You install some xvid tech preview and then a codec pack like shark 007 and then it just works....much easier than it used to be, no more transcoding.

I have also heard good things about the playon service, but havent tried it myself, not sure how 360 compatibility is.
 
I thought about cutting my cable but I like sports too much. Until we have better live sports streaming over the internet, don't think I will ditch cable.
 
The wife and I cut our cable when we moved. The first month with the money we saved, I purchased a 2TB internal drive. We usually store entire seasons of television shows, our own dvd collection, and more on it and use PS3 media server to stream them throughout the house. You can usually download a show right after it airs, so it's not a big deal. She is happy she can watch whatever, whenever, and and I am happy cause we are saving money.
 
nobody_here said:
You can now watch mkv's on a WME like the xbox360. You install some xvid tech preview and then a codec pack like shark 007 and then it just works....much easier than it used to be, no more transcoding.
Click to expand...

Wait, I don't seem to follow this now. I need to install the xvid tech preview and the codec pack on the NAS, or somehow install it on the xbox 360? It seems like most guides say that I need to convert them out of mkv.
 
We are in the process of turning off DirecTV as we've moved almost completely online for everything.

We have a couple XBOX360's in the house as well as a Boxee box on the main tv and a WDTV Live in the bedroom.

I have a NAS box running FreeNAS that is running software called Sickbeard. I basically just put the show I want in sickbeard and it goes out and finds it for me. Yes, it may fall into a grey area but it works great for me and saves a ton of dough a month. I really like the Boxee box too as it plays everything I throw at it without a problem. It also has an interface everyone in the house can navigate (unlike the WDTV live).

Used the money saved to upgrade our internet connection to 18/1.5 and buy more storage.
 
did this end of october, picked up the nba league pass broadband; i barely watch anything but the backlog of hundreds of movies, some bball, and old episodes of top gear. suddenly there's a bunch more money in my bank account too.
 
Some of you guys should write tutorials on how to set all of this stuff up. I'd like to do this too, but the wife likes her local channels too much.
 
Chiming in because I JUST did this.

I had att uverse, att phone and internet as well as cell phones.

We were paying several hundred dollars a month on this. We watched probably 5 channles, abc, nbc fox, USA and the sci-fi channel.

We had 4 tv's, one in each room. 2 home theater pc's and we used 1 of the HTPC's in two rooms since it was the next room.

Brother got a wd tv live, built our own HDTV antennas http://www.tvantennaplans.com/ x 4 for each tv.

We use hulu and local channels.

I have a server with all my movies so anybody can get to any move they want.

So what I am saying is do it !
 
Methadras said:
Some of you guys should write tutorials on how to set all of this stuff up. I'd like to do this too, but the wife likes her local channels too much.
Click to expand...

hook antenna to TV, standard rabbit ears are fine if you live in good reception area, and turn tv to antenna input, done

what i want to know is does PlayOn transcode mkv's then stream? or does it decode/unpack on the fly and simply stream the audio and video files? because i can stream mkv's already using Xvix Tech Preview and Sharky's 007 codecs
 
That's exactly what the wife and I did 3yrs ago. Have main HTPC in living room, another cheapo in the bedroom as an extender. Currently using the laptop in the kitchen once in a while until I put together a cheap ITX to mount on back of tv.
 
Right now...I have managed to keep our costs under control (Internet + Cable & 1HD Box = $105/month). It works right now because they haven't encrypted every channel yet and SageTV is an extensible system. However, what i'm fearing, and none too soon, is that internet prices will go "up" or there will be more blatent tiering on bandwidth. With the recent net neutrality lines on hard lines, I have a feeling that prices raren't going to go down...probably go up.
 
I want to do this SOOOO bad, but I am a sports nut. If I found a way to make sure I could get my college team over the net (our conference's TV contract is ABC, ESPN, Fox Sports Net) then I would be LONG gone.

NFL: OTA...would just lose MNF as they don't broadcast on ESPN3
CFB: OTA and ESPN3 have plenty...just worried about my alma mater
MLB: I'll just get the MLB pass via MLB.com
NBA: League Pass for online streaming
NCAAB: ESPN3 or OTA

Most of them are solved but I still have some kinks worked out before I can get to it.
 
FrostBite said:
I'm curious if anyone else has taken the leap, and what they are doing for shows that are not online? Food Network, Cooking Channel, and Discovery are going to be the shows we miss and I don't believe they are online. Any advice on whether Hulu Plus is worth it (even if I have Netflix) with no cable? Any other suggestions?
Click to expand...

man, I've been without cable/sat for the past 6 months and couldn't be happier :)

cable is getting tough to justify these days. I have other things that I'd rather spend money on (xm radio FTW)

As for the source, if I'm not watching something OTA, it's usually something on netflix or Revision3 via the PS3 or Roku box. The only thing that I really miss is the cable news networks (ironically enough). I'm somewhat of a news junky, so I like turning it on for a few mins just to catch the headlines and stuff.

I also miss the discovery channel a lot, but I've found other things to take it's place (documentaries on netflix and such). It sort of sucks a little at first, but you get used to it pretty quick. The money you save makes it worth it.
 
The main thing that prevents me from cutting ties with cable is I need the closed captioning as I'm hard of hearing. I know Netflix is slowly coming around with it, but mainly with movies. Hulu is hit and miss with it as well. Do you guys know of any other alternatives that will have CC for shows?
 
Maverick151 said:
The main thing that prevents me from cutting ties with cable is I need the closed captioning as I'm hard of hearing. I know Netflix is slowly coming around with it, but mainly with movies. Hulu is hit and miss with it as well. Do you guys know of any other alternatives that will have CC for shows?
Click to expand...


+1

I feel it will be a year or so once everything on the "net"is subtitled.
 
I only pay $36/month with dish. HD only package. Has everything I care about.

I have looked into online streaming. I have youtube, netflix, hulu, boxee, etc. on my HTPC. The problem is most of the content isn't in HD. Hell a lot of looks like it's not even 480p. Most of it is 2 channel audio. Online streaming feels like we are going backwards in quality.

OTA reception here is not that good. I'm not that far away from the towers and have a huge honking antenna and an amp on it but our neighborhood is in a little valley so reception can be poor. So depending on the strength of the tuner it can't handle everything. The TV tuner in my dish box works fine. My HDhomerun tuner results in a lot of stuttering.

So because of that I won't switch to that exclusively. At some point when quality improves I absolutely will switch.
 
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