OTA DVR? Looking to pull the plug on cable....

[Hockeynut]

I bet you will find that the HDHomerun will be a nice addition to cutting the cord king3pj.!.Have the dual tuner here.Really nice when working in the shop or on the dish farm when a sporting event is on OTA.Just carry my laptop wherever.

Have not checked lately but Newegg had them cheaper than the price you mentioned.Less than 60 bucks.

 

[king3pj]

You might want to put Dish, as has been suggested before, at a low level for a couple of months as you see how the new equipment and cord cutting works out. Cheap insurance policy and still reduces ETF.

Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys

Yeah, I plan to test everything before I cancel. I'm just not watching much on the actual cable channels. I have recently noticed that almost all of the shows I watch come from channels I can get for free. The couple cable shows I'm really into I can easily get as a season pass on my Apple TV. Tigers baseball is really the main thing that has kept me hooked on cable/satellite but I don't think I can justify $77 a month to watch them. My parents have an extra hopper in their finished basement that is rarely used. I can easily Sling my Tigers games to my HTPC. If that wasn't an option it would be a much harder choice for me. I really could Sling everything I would miss but I'd rather have a season pass for better picture quality and 5.1 sound.

The other big factor here is that I am a young, single guy who lives alone. A family has diverse tastes and would require more season passes. If you start buying too many of those you might be better off just sticking with cable/satellite. I can probably get by on 3 or 4 a year. A family might also have people who are less tech savvy and would be more comfortable with a traditional DVR like TiVo. I don't have to worry about anyone's TV preferences but my own so that makes all of this easier.

I would go ahead with all of this right now but my promo pricing isn't bad for AT120. Once that promo pricing runs out in April and the bill goes up by $30 a month it will be more than I want to spend for TV. It looks like I will be holding out until then.

 

[king3pj]

Here's something I have been wondering about. I was planning on using my indoor amplified antenna. I'm about half way between Flint and Detroit. I have done this in the past and it gets me all of the big 4 plus CW and PBS as a mixture of Flint and Detroit stations. I was thinking that if I go with an outdoor antenna I might be able to get all of the channels from both markets including a couple smaller networks I might be missing with my indoor antenna.

The reason I haven't already done this is because I don't feel comfortable running cable in from outside and then fishing it through my walls. Now that I think about it Dish has already done this for me though. There is a Joey at my bedroom TV and a Hopper at my main TV downstairs.

After I cancel dish is there any reason I can't remove the cable from the dish and hook it to an outdoor antenna? Could I then just replace the single node with a splitter to get the OTA signal to both TVs? Would using a splitter degrade the signal enough that I would be better off sticking with an indoor amplified antenna at each TV?

 

[Hockeynut]

Take a look at tvfool.com for your area.Yup you can use the existing cable from Dish.Yeah using a splitter will degrade the the signal but will be trial and error for your particular setup.Am using a commercial Scientific Atlanta head end amplifier here going to a 4 way splitter and am getting locals from 3 different markets,Greensboro,Raleigh and Charlotte.Location helps for sure.

Good luck cutting the cord king3pj.

 

[king3pj]

Take a look at tvfool.com for your area.Yup you can use the existing cable from Dish.Yeah using a splitter will degrade the the signal but will be trial and error for your particular setup.Am using a commercial Scientific Atlanta head end amplifier here going to a 4 way splitter and am getting locals from 3 different markets,Greensboro,Raleigh and Charlotte.Location helps for sure.

Good luck cutting the cord king3pj.

http://www.tvfool.com/?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=29&q=id=5b947dc46dca33

Here is my TV Fool report. I already know I can get at least 1 CBS, Fox, ABC, NBC, CW, and PBS with my indoor RCA amplified flat antenna. I have used it in the past and get all of those channels most of the time. Some are spottier than others. I was hopping an outdoor antenna with a splitter would be better than an indoor antenna at each TV. If I have to I could forget the splitter and just run the cable to the Homerun and watch everything that way instead of having an OTA feed at both TVs.

 

[mike123abc]

And now, with TiVo exiting the hardware business (sooner than I expected), you really have to think about it: Avoid them, or grab one while the grabbing is good?

Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys

I read it as we will let others produce boxes that will run our software instead of us doing the low margin hardware.

 

[navychop]

I thought they aimed that at cablecos. But for China Inc to basically continue the GP OTA hardware- well, that could be a good thing.

I assume TiVo would continue selling EPG data. But for new boxes? Maybe Tribune or Rovi or whoever might sell such at retail.

Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys

 

[JTravers]

I'm going to be doing this same thing in April when my new customer promos with Dish run out and my bill goes up to $72 for AT120 and 1H/1J. I will have to eat the ETF fee but I will make up the difference quickly by not paying a monthly bill.

I looked at getting one of the TiVo Roamios that have OTA. I could get that for $150 but then I would either have to pay $15 per month or pay $500 for the lifetime fee. I would also want a TiVo Mini for my bedroom and that would be another $86 plus $6 a month or $150 for the lifetime fee. I really wouldn't want to cut the cord and still be stuck with $21 a month in DVR fees so I would go lifetime and get it all out of the way at once. The problem is, that is a pretty substantial investment to watch OTA TV. It would cost me $886 to get the OTA setup I want.

Then I did a little more research and messaged yourbeliefs because I know he is using a PC for DVR purposes. I found out that I could buy one of these dual tuner HDHomeruns for $75.

I wholeheartedly agree with going with the HDHR. Love mine. Might I suggest the new Plus version with built in transcoding to H.264 format. I can't post URLs yet, but just do a search on Newegg for the HDHomerun Plus.

The recordings being already in the H.264 format will make it simpler to play recordings or to watch live TV on your smartphone, tablet, or to stream over the Internet.

 

[king3pj]

I wholeheartedly agree with going with the HDHR. Love mine. Might I suggest the new Plus version with built in transcoding to H.264 format. I can't post URLs yet, but just do a search on Newegg for the HDHomerun Plus.

The recordings being already in the H.264 format will make it simpler to play recordings or to watch live TV on your smartphone, tablet, or to stream over the Internet.

To late for me to switch to the plus model. I already ordered two HDHomerun Dual tuners and set them up last night. Setup was a breeze. I had the Homeruns installed and showing up in Windows Media Center as 4 available tuners within about 10 minutes.

I have a gaming PC already hooked up to my main TV and then a laptop in a spare bedroom that I rarely use anymore. I didn't want recordings to hurt my gaming performance so the laptop is now my dedicated DVR. I attached a 2TB external hard drive and fired up 4 HD recordings to make sure the 2 year old i5 laptop could handle it. Everything seemed ok but I can already see myself building a dedicated recording PC with lots of internal drive space to replace it.

The HDHomeruns are great because they don't require any hardware installation and all of your PCs running Windows Media Center see them as available tuners. I have two of them so both of my PCs see 4 tuners. It provided some flexibility that I needed. The laptop has 4 tuners to record from so my gaming isn't interrupted and my gaming PC can grab a tuner whenever I want to watch live TV.

It was also super easy to setup a homegroup and turn on video sharing. I set aside 500GB on my gaming PC for the occasions where I want to record something I'm watching live and to use as a buffer for trick play. I also have it set up so that when I go to my recordings it automatically shows a unified set of recordings with picture icons. The unified recordings are something I have wanted on a two hopper setup for almost two years now. The project for tonight is to setup Plex on the laptop so I can view my recordings on the Roku in my bedroom.

The longest part of the night was assembling the 8 bay UHF/VHF antenna. That should have been simple too but it came with little, to no instructions and it took my brain a while to process everything. Right now this antenna is inside the same guest room as the laptop. It will eventually be mounted on the roof but we keep getting frigid temperatures with windchill of -20F. Once the ice melts off the roof and I get a nice enough day to go up there I will mount the antenna and steal the existing RG6 from Dish to wire it all up.

Dish has me wired up from the roof to a single node outside. The single node then has one RG6 to the Hopper at my main TV and then one RG6 to the Joey in my bedroom. I am going to use this existing wiring and replace the single node with a 2 way splitter. I bought a splitter with one port power passing so I could use a preamp and have the power inserter inside the house downstream from the splitter. This will give me live TV in the bedroom and recordings via Plex on the Roku. The line down to the Hopper at the main TV will be split again into the two HDHomerun dual tuner boxes.

I wasn't planning on canceling my Dish service until that happens so I could test everything but even with the antenna inside my house I'm getting 1 Fox, 2 ABC, 2 NBC, 2 PBS, 3 CBS, 3 CW, 2 MY, and 2 ION affiliates plus a bunch of subchannels. Some of these stations are rock solid and some have some occasional pixelation. The important factor for me is that I have at least 1 rock solid channel for the big 4 plus CW and PBS. Duplicates would just be a bonus but because I can get at least one of each with no breakup I'm happy. The channels I'm getting are mostly out of Flint and Detroit with a couple Lansing channels mixed in. Windows Media Center channel scan shows a lot more Detroit and Lansing channels plus a couple Flint ones but I can't reliably get them to tune in so I'm not counting those. I'm hoping that once I get the antenna up on the roof I can move some of those channels with slight pixelation into the rock solid category. It would be nice if I could fill in the full Flint DMA too but ABC(WJRT) and NBC(WEYI) are giving me trouble.

Anyways, there are my very long winded experiences with HDHomerun and using Windows Media Center as a DVR. If you have an extra Windows 7 PC or a Windows 8.1 Pro PC it is a free part of the OS. It includes 14 days of programing and seems to have all the modern DVR features with no fees for accessing it. I highly recommend trying it out before you plop down $150 for a TiVo Roamio and $500 for the lifetime service. A USB OTA tuner can be had for about $40 and the HDHomerun Dual tuners I'm using are about $75 each. If you try it and don't like it you are only out the price of the tuner. I don't see myself going back to pay TV at this point but if I did I would probably choose cable so I can avoid all equipment fees except the $3 cablecard.

 

[osu1991]

Don't know if this would help anyone and it is not as plug and play easy as WMC, but I have a couple of the hdhomerun duals too. I have Win8 on my desktop so I used NextPVR since WMC is not included in standard Win8.

http://www.nextpvr.com/features/

I could have used WMC on my laptop but didn't want to leave it on all the time for recordings and I rarely watch live tv so having live access everywhere wasn't important. I used klite codec pack 10.2 to get the drivers that Microsoft omits in Win8 without WMC. I could get limited psip listings occasionally and set manual timers, but after looking around a little I found a plugin and figured out how to get the listings online.

This TV Listings plugin
http://www.gbpvr.com/nwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Plugin.TVListings

and this little program that creates an xml file and gathers the listings for your zipcode from whatever provider you select. It get the windows legacy listings or a couple of others (tribune and zap2it I think)
http://mc2xml.hosterbox.net/#npvr

Read the instructions as it took me an hour to figure it out but I now have 14 days of listings and I have it set to autoupdate them each morning at 2am. Nexpvr records a .ts file and I have it set to record to a shared video folder on my network. I have wdtv live's and live hub's around the house that can see that shared network folder and I can play the files directly from there over the network to the wdtv boxes connected to any of the tv's.

I use VideoRedo and Vidcoder to remove commercials and shrink and reencode the files to .mp4, if it's something I want in a smaller portable file to take with me.

 

[king3pj]

Don't know if this would help anyone and it is not as plug and play easy as WMC, but I have a couple of the hdhomerun duals too. I have Win8 on my desktop so I used NextPVR since WMC is not included in standard Win8.

http://www.nextpvr.com/features/

I could have used WMC on my laptop but didn't want to leave it on all the time for recordings and I rarely watch live tv so having live access everywhere wasn't important. I used klite codec pack 10.2 to get the drivers that Microsoft omits in Win8 without WMC. I could get limited psip listings occasionally and set manual timers, but after looking around a little I found a plugin and figured out how to get the listings online.

This TV Listings plugin
http://www.gbpvr.com/nwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Plugin.TVListings

and this little program that creates an xml file and gathers the listings for your zipcode from whatever provider you select. It get the windows legacy listings or a couple of others (tribune and zap2it I think)
http://mc2xml.hosterbox.net/#npvr

Read the instructions as it took me an hour to figure it out but I now have 14 days of listings and I have it set to autoupdate them each morning at 2am. Nexpvr records a .ts file and I have it set to record to a shared video folder on my network. I have wdtv live's and live hub's around the house that can see that shared network folder and I can play the files directly from there over the network to the wdtv boxes connected to any of the tv's.

I use VideoRedo and Vidcoder to remove commercials and shrink and reencode the files to .mp4, if it's something I want in a smaller portable file to take with me.

Yeah, I thought it was pretty cheap of them to only include WMC in Windows 8 Pro when it was included in Windows 7 Home. My gaming machine had Windows 8.1 on it. It was very important to me to be able to use WMC on that machine since it will be my main TV watching computer so I paid the $95 for the Windows 8.1 pro pack. This was a ripoff but it was the only way to get WMC on that machine. Luckily the laptop I'm recording with had Windows 7 on it so it already had WMC.

I hear you about not wanting to leave the laptop on all the time. For me it's a device I never use anymore since getting an iPad. It's also sitting in a rarely used home office/guest room so I had no issues leaving it running. At least I'm finally getting some use out of it again. My upgrade tendencies already have me wanting to build a dedicated recording PC to put in it's place though. This would allow me to ditch the external hard drive and open laptop always sitting on my desk.

 

[stanleyjohn]

I use a recordable dvd player to record shows on my tv these days.

 

[osu1991]

I use a recordable dvd player to record shows on my tv these days.

I'm cheap but I'm not giving up recording in HD, unless I have to.

 

[king3pj]

Same here. Most people probably already have WMC on their PC and it seems to be a pretty great DVR.

 

[jayn_j]

People have been talking about the simple box. It is on sale at WOOT today for $89.99.
http://www.woot.com/

 

[kittyhas1000legs]

Same here. Most people probably already have WMC on their PC and it seems to be a pretty great DVR.

This was what I did, and it's pretty darn easy. One USB tv tuner, one 2TB hard drive, and an HDMI cable to the TV. The guide goes out to a week or so. I use the keyboard/mouse since it's my main PC, but it should be easy enough with a WMC remote.

 

[king3pj]

I wanted to follow up on this. I built a separate computer with a 2TB drive to be used as a dedicated DVR. I have 2 HDHomerun Duals for a total of 4 shared OTA tuners. My main TV and surround sound setup has a gaming PC hooked up to it. Windows Media Center on the gaming PC is able to view any of the shared recordings from my dedicated DVR PC natively. The gaming PC is also able to grab a tuner for live TV. Everything is connected to gigabit ethernet and seems to be working great. Now I just need to figure out how to make PLEX work so I can get my recordings on the Roku in my bedroom.

I have tested everything for a few weeks and I'm getting at least one reliable affiliate for the big 4 major networks plus PBS and CW and this is with the antenna inside my house. As soon as the snow and ice melts off my roof I'm going to mount it up there and hopefully pick up even more channels. Today was the day I officially cut the cord. I planned on waiting until I could get the antenna up on the roof and see what results I get but I am confident enough that I didn't feel the need to wait anymore. I just got off Dish chat where I canceled my service. I am actually excited to shift my viewing habits and start saving money.