vcp
Well-Known Member
Ok, I'm late to the party. I'd been using DirectTV for entertainment TV for decades (and sent them enough $$ that would have bought a pretty nice car), 'cause it was easy and I could afford it at the time. No more.
(Side note: Some of you don't have TV's. Some do but don't watch it. Some will say that it's a time waste that corrodes your mind. You're all better men than me, I readily admit. That aside, we enjoy the TV for entertainment and news. My problem.) I continue.
So I've recently switched to all streaming and OtA. I don't know if I'm doing it right, but what I've done seems to be working out pretty well. I'm curious as to what others are using and how other devices/services compare.
First, I've put Roku devices on both TV's. Earlier we had a Chromecast and a FireTV but the Roku just seems to be easier to use. Very simple and direct menu system that my wife has no trouble using. The phone app duplicates the remote nicely for when she (frequently) loses the remote. (Yes, we had most services available via the SmartTV/DVD players but the menus were never very friendly and my wife could never figure out which she was on - just stay on the Roku and she's fine.)
For services, we've got Netflix, Prime, and Hulu; probably more than is healthy. Hulu has all of the ESPN's and allows recording all of the football games and stuff to their cloud DVR. Drawback is that it won't allow FF thru commercials (though I think for an extra fee, you can avoid many/most commercials). Just had to add Starz to Hulu for Outlander. Will probably drop that and add HBO when it's time for GoT. I'm wondering how Hulu compares to Sling and whatever else. Before Hulu I tried DirectTVGo for a couple of months and it was awful. Their cloud DVR wasn't ready to use at all.
There are a bunch of free services accessible from the Roku - lots of old movies and stuff (with commercials). Some of it is ok. Got NASA TV so that's covered, and the Reuters news is pretty good.
I've got a large collection of DVD's and have long meant to get them ripped and put on a media server. I fiddled with Kodi last year, but it crashed a lot and the navigation was obscure so I know my wife wouldn't have liked it. Enter PLEX. That was easy. Installs on the Roku and laptops. Got an external HD and now ripping with Handbrake. Easy to use and all working well. For a fee (don't recall how much offhand) PLEX on the phone can access the media server remotely. Gotta long haul to rip all the DVD's but there's so many and so poorly organized that we often forget what we have or don't want to go to the trouble of digging for something in particular. There've been occasions when we've gotten something from the library 'cause we couldn't find it at home. That should be all relieved when they're all accessible and organized via PLEX. I never looked around - are there other media servers that work well? I noticed that Kodi can be installed on Roku, wondering if that's worth the trouble? Also, eventually the LR/BR DVD players can go away - one on the PC will do.
Our local internet provider is pretty reliable and high-speed so there's never been a problem with multiple simultaneous video streams. Problem was the bandwidth used. Before PLEX and the OTA setup, we were always bumping the monthly limit (wife would fall asleep with something going continuously). Bandwidth should drop now and I'm hoping we can go to a cheaper class of service.
I'd never bothered with OtA since DirectTV carried the local network channels. Watching anything directly OtA is a pain because believe-it-or-not you actually have to watch in real time and sit through commercials. Didn't try to put up with that for long. What I got was a Tablo. I guess it's something like a TiVO, but I haven't looked at TiVO in a long time. The only thing I know in comparison is that the TV guide subscription for Tablo is $5/month, and apparently $15/month for TiVO. Maybe there's more to TiVO? Anyway, the Tablo records four channels OtA simultaneously. The box sits upstairs with the antenna for better reception. This model required an external USB HD, which I thought I had covered with some old HD's I had scavenged (ironically, from old DirectTV boxes), but they didn't work with the Tablo. I had to buy a new Seagate**. Tablo connected easily to the Roku's, laptops, and phones via the home Wifi. We'd always ignored the OtA digital subchannels before (since they weren't on DirectTV), but now we see they carry a zillion old movies and all the old TV series we like to see once in a while (Burns and Allen!). So far, my wife has set about 40 hours/day of TV to record - I'm hoping she figures out the folly of that pretty soon or I gotta get a bigger disk (how many episodes of 'Petticoat Junction' do we need, really). There doesn't seem to be any Wifi bandwidth problems.
So that's it: Roku/Hulu/Netflix/Prime/PLEX/Tablo. No wonder I never get anything built. How do you stream?
** Side note: Mid-90's I designed a parallel processing database computer. 3x equipment racks, 19" wide x six feet tall. 100 processors, 200 5" disks, 1GB each. So 200 GB total, at a cost of $200k just for the disks. So 25 years later the HD I bought is 5TB for ~$100 and the size of a pack of cigarets. 25x the capacity, 1/2000 the cost, at least 1/10,000 the size, and maybe 1/1000 the power. So not counting any speed improvement, call it 500 billion times better. Why aren't we on Mars already?
(Side note: Some of you don't have TV's. Some do but don't watch it. Some will say that it's a time waste that corrodes your mind. You're all better men than me, I readily admit. That aside, we enjoy the TV for entertainment and news. My problem.) I continue.
So I've recently switched to all streaming and OtA. I don't know if I'm doing it right, but what I've done seems to be working out pretty well. I'm curious as to what others are using and how other devices/services compare.
First, I've put Roku devices on both TV's. Earlier we had a Chromecast and a FireTV but the Roku just seems to be easier to use. Very simple and direct menu system that my wife has no trouble using. The phone app duplicates the remote nicely for when she (frequently) loses the remote. (Yes, we had most services available via the SmartTV/DVD players but the menus were never very friendly and my wife could never figure out which she was on - just stay on the Roku and she's fine.)
For services, we've got Netflix, Prime, and Hulu; probably more than is healthy. Hulu has all of the ESPN's and allows recording all of the football games and stuff to their cloud DVR. Drawback is that it won't allow FF thru commercials (though I think for an extra fee, you can avoid many/most commercials). Just had to add Starz to Hulu for Outlander. Will probably drop that and add HBO when it's time for GoT. I'm wondering how Hulu compares to Sling and whatever else. Before Hulu I tried DirectTVGo for a couple of months and it was awful. Their cloud DVR wasn't ready to use at all.
There are a bunch of free services accessible from the Roku - lots of old movies and stuff (with commercials). Some of it is ok. Got NASA TV so that's covered, and the Reuters news is pretty good.
I've got a large collection of DVD's and have long meant to get them ripped and put on a media server. I fiddled with Kodi last year, but it crashed a lot and the navigation was obscure so I know my wife wouldn't have liked it. Enter PLEX. That was easy. Installs on the Roku and laptops. Got an external HD and now ripping with Handbrake. Easy to use and all working well. For a fee (don't recall how much offhand) PLEX on the phone can access the media server remotely. Gotta long haul to rip all the DVD's but there's so many and so poorly organized that we often forget what we have or don't want to go to the trouble of digging for something in particular. There've been occasions when we've gotten something from the library 'cause we couldn't find it at home. That should be all relieved when they're all accessible and organized via PLEX. I never looked around - are there other media servers that work well? I noticed that Kodi can be installed on Roku, wondering if that's worth the trouble? Also, eventually the LR/BR DVD players can go away - one on the PC will do.
Our local internet provider is pretty reliable and high-speed so there's never been a problem with multiple simultaneous video streams. Problem was the bandwidth used. Before PLEX and the OTA setup, we were always bumping the monthly limit (wife would fall asleep with something going continuously). Bandwidth should drop now and I'm hoping we can go to a cheaper class of service.
I'd never bothered with OtA since DirectTV carried the local network channels. Watching anything directly OtA is a pain because believe-it-or-not you actually have to watch in real time and sit through commercials. Didn't try to put up with that for long. What I got was a Tablo. I guess it's something like a TiVO, but I haven't looked at TiVO in a long time. The only thing I know in comparison is that the TV guide subscription for Tablo is $5/month, and apparently $15/month for TiVO. Maybe there's more to TiVO? Anyway, the Tablo records four channels OtA simultaneously. The box sits upstairs with the antenna for better reception. This model required an external USB HD, which I thought I had covered with some old HD's I had scavenged (ironically, from old DirectTV boxes), but they didn't work with the Tablo. I had to buy a new Seagate**. Tablo connected easily to the Roku's, laptops, and phones via the home Wifi. We'd always ignored the OtA digital subchannels before (since they weren't on DirectTV), but now we see they carry a zillion old movies and all the old TV series we like to see once in a while (Burns and Allen!). So far, my wife has set about 40 hours/day of TV to record - I'm hoping she figures out the folly of that pretty soon or I gotta get a bigger disk (how many episodes of 'Petticoat Junction' do we need, really). There doesn't seem to be any Wifi bandwidth problems.
So that's it: Roku/Hulu/Netflix/Prime/PLEX/Tablo. No wonder I never get anything built. How do you stream?
** Side note: Mid-90's I designed a parallel processing database computer. 3x equipment racks, 19" wide x six feet tall. 100 processors, 200 5" disks, 1GB each. So 200 GB total, at a cost of $200k just for the disks. So 25 years later the HD I bought is 5TB for ~$100 and the size of a pack of cigarets. 25x the capacity, 1/2000 the cost, at least 1/10,000 the size, and maybe 1/1000 the power. So not counting any speed improvement, call it 500 billion times better. Why aren't we on Mars already?
