Effectively DITCHING cable (roku, playon, etc.)

[Chriso]

I hope cable dies sooner than later. The thing that pisses me off most are networks that A) don't put a copy online (ever!!), B) don't put a copy into iTunes or Amazon store, and C) don't sell DVDs. If I didn't watch it live on the day it aired, how am I supposed to rewatch it, you cretins?

I want to pay you, the network, money to watch your shows a-la-carte, how I want them, when I want them. Why won't you let me?

We ditched cable a year ago... Hulu Plus is a lifesaver... Netflix is mostly just crap I don't want to watch, though. We wind up doing a lot of [redacted] to get our shows.

It's hardest for things off of Food Network, Cooking Channel, anything sort of "niche" that the main release channels don't bother to offer. Bobby Flay's 3 Days To Open, or Chef Wanted, or that sort of thing.

Bravo's and Food Network's Full Episodes Player software are crap. They crash constantly. They don't keep your position, if the page crashes. The ad generator constantly breaks at 0:00 and fails to return you to your show. Lots and lots of bugs.

Logo TV has a much better player interface, but plays a ton of ads to make up for it.

Watching my College Football live, though...... .... I think I'm going to be going to a lot of sports bars this fall.

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

I am a maverick among people I know "YOU DON'T HAVE CABLE????" but I know that I know very little other than the fact that cable is a sick and ending bloated beast.

Unless it completely evolves to "on demand" it will die.

I might have looked a little more before I leaped but, again, long story

I will land way ahead of most people.

My desire to set-up a media server came from my children. Over the years I have collected several hundred dvd copies, mostly for the kids. When I started this endeavor, neither of my children could read which made finding that one movie in a stack of hundreds of discs, with hand written titles, a chore.

So, I set out to rip them to a HDD so they could find what they want by the cover image.

It worked. Even my 3 year old can navigate to find whatever he wants to watch without my interaction.

It just wasn't as straight forward as I had expected it to be.

And then another cable bill came, and they raised the price again. So, I just cancelled the service. Everything my kids were watching could be found online and they never missed a thing. And I save over $200 a month not paying for cable.

FTR, we had a "bundle" cable, phone, iNet. We dropped everything but iNet. I switched the phone over to Vonage. Prior to, my bill was at $270/mo plus long distance charges. Vonage doesn't save me much on basic service but our international long distance is free (wifes family is in Malaysia).

We do, however, still take the DVD service from Netflix too for those obscure titles that are not supported for Instant (until I rip them to the server ).

btw, I am running a reworked big box HP Pavillion Elite tower. 1000watt psu, stock quad core cpu, 1gb ati graphics, 8gb sdram, 15tb of media dedicated usb3 external drives, w7, Dlink extreme gigabit primary, dlink extreme gigabit ap/bridge, 3 Roku XDS (1st gen), Xbox360, 67" DLP, 55" LCD, 32" CRT, & a few more 19" LCD.

 

[Revvy]

I bought a ROKU over the weekend as a birthday present for myself. I haven't had cable in years, and rarely turn my antenna tv on except for hell's kitchen/master chef/NCIS/Criminal Minds and shows on the PBS/HDchannel Create, and morning local news. I mostly stream content from JTV, and regular hulu. I noticed late last week, that I'm sitting in my living room watching feeds on my small laptop (usually toggling between the tab with the streaming content and HBT) for hours on end while my tv, which is larger (but not a big screen) sits dark, and I decided to pay 60 bucks to at least stream the programming I like onto a larger tv.

I'm still learning about it, but happy so far. There are a lot of Private channels on there, besides the listed big channels on there. I was able to find most of the radio streams for the non local stations I tend to listen to online from the US and Canada, though I can't find a stream for Radio Ireland which I like to listen to on Saturday afternoons if I am home.

There's several local network live tv streams available, but nothing for the metro detroit area unfortunately.

I was able to find REGULAR hulu and Youtube via the PLEX media server that I had to downloand and link my PC and I-phone. It took a lot of searching online on roku forums to find a clear explanation of what you need to do to find those hidden channels, since it seems most of the ROKU providers are trying to push the subscription channels such as Hulu Plus, Netflix and Amazon Prime. ANd there's some software setting the "conveniently" have selected in the preferences both on the Roku and on the pc that block a lot of content. And they don't explain easily how to find them and change them, so things like Youtube and regular hulu show up on searches.

Everyone keeps saying you need a PC to do these things, but have you actually googled "Using ROKU with Macs?" I just did, and it looks like there's a lot of articles, so it appears that in order to run some of the media servers you need a COMPUTER, regardless of what platform...I know it works fine with my I-phone, I can use the ROKU app to control it instead of the remote (you can use the touch screen Iphone keyboard to search rather than having to click each letter with the arrow keys and "OK" button to search for things.)

I find it doubtful in the era of cross platforms and huge popularity of Apple products that they're NOT compatible with the ROKU.

In fact THIS ARTICLE show how to use the PLEX media server on a Macintosh computer. So it doesn't look like the Macintosh is being ignored by ROKU

But it does look like you need some form of computer to add the private channels to your ROKU. Hope this helps.

 

[Revvy]

Here's also a thread on yahoo discussing using the PLAYON server mentioned above on MACs.

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

I bought a ROKU over the weekend as a birthday present for myself. I haven't had cable in years, and rarely turn my antenna tv on except for hell's kitchen/master chef/NCIS/Criminal Minds and shows on the PBS/HDchannel Create, and morning local news. I mostly stream content from JTV, and regular hulu. I noticed late last week, that I'm sitting in my living room watching feeds on my small laptop (usually toggling between the tab with the streaming content and HBT) for hours on end while my tv, which is larger (but not a big screen) sits dark, and I decided to pay 60 bucks to at least stream the programming I like onto a larger tv.

I'm still learning about it, but happy so far. There are a lot of Private channels on there, besides the listed big channels on there. I was able to find most of the radio streams for the non local stations I tend to listen to online from the US and Canada, though I can't find a stream for Radio Ireland which I like to listen to on Saturday afternoons if I am home.

There's several local network live tv streams available, but nothing for the metro detroit area unfortunately.

I was able to find REGULAR hulu and Youtube via the PLEX media server that I had to downloand and link my PC and I-phone. It took a lot of searching online on roku forums to find a clear explanation of what you need to do to find those hidden channels, since it seems most of the ROKU providers are trying to push the subscription channels such as Hulu Plus, Netflix and Amazon Prime. ANd there's some software setting the "conveniently" have selected in the preferences both on the Roku and on the pc that block a lot of content. And they don't explain easily how to find them and change them, so things like Youtube and regular hulu show up on searches.

Everyone keeps saying you need a PC to do these things, but have you actually googled "Using ROKU with Macs?" I just did, and it looks like there's a lot of articles, so it appears that in order to run some of the media servers you need a COMPUTER, regardless of what platform...I know it works fine with my I-phone, I can use the ROKU app to control it instead of the remote (you can use the touch screen Iphone keyboard to search rather than having to click each letter with the arrow keys and "OK" button to search for things.)

I find it doubtful in the era of cross platforms and huge popularity of Apple products that they're NOT compatible with the ROKU.

In fact THIS ARTICLE show how to use the PLEX media server on a Macintosh computer. So it doesn't look like the Macintosh is being ignored by ROKU

But it does look like you need some form of computer to add the private channels to your ROKU. Hope this helps.

You can access the Roku website via any web browser to add private channels. Plex is nice. I still found that I had to manually transcode a lot of files since it does not transcode on the fly to Roku very well, if at all. I also find that it was sluggish. There is also RoxBox for Roku too. Same idea but you have to install apache as the server.

Channels on the Roku from teh channel store are pretty solid and reliable. Private channels, not so much. If you have PlayOn and chrome there is a fairly simple script generator that involves a few point and clicks to write a channel. You could prolly do this easily for your radio station.

As for the PC commentary, yes. A lot of these options do have mac compatibility but I think PlayOn uses the emulator or something. I was using PC loosely as in Personal Computer in general.

 

[Revvy]

As for the PC commentary, yes. A lot of these options do have mac compatibility but I think PlayOn uses the emulator or something. I was using PC loosely as in Personal Computer in general.

I just got the impression from Cheesy comments a couple times that he was thinking he actually needed a windows machine to use this.

 

[PlayOnTV]

ive been with you guys for 3 years and you just keep getting better and better.. witch plugin/script would you say is best for tv series since tvlinks got broken? watchseries is awesome but not nearly the data base that tvlinks had...

Thanks again for the support. We don't comment on 3rd party plugins/scripts that we have not approved. But, there is a very active community at both PlayOn Plugins (www.playonplugins.com) and PlayOn scripts (www.playonscripts.com) that will be happy to answer any questions you may have. We also now host our own plugin "store", with a ton of free plugins. You can find that here: http://www.playon.tv/channel-store/

I hope this helps.

 

[duckmanco]

We cut the cord a year so back and much like quitting anything we thought we needed, it was tough at first, but within 2 weeks, we stopped caring. We make do with the following:

Over the air free HD main stations with an antenna
Netflix

We never DVR'd much, I don't care about sports, and she watched and watches mostly main network shows anyway made it pretty painless for us to save 100.00 a month. With Netflix getting better and better (AMC shows have been great) its been pretty easy.

I've also gotten back into my extensive DVD and blu ray collection because of it and find I'd rather watch my movies over again than most TV shows, which is why I purchase movies to begin with. Hell, I could watch the new True Grit again right now... And just might...

 

[cheezydemon3]

I've also gotten back into my extensive DVD and blu ray collection because of it and find I'd rather watch my movies over again than most TV shows, which is why I purchase movies to begin with. Hell, I could watch the new True Grit again right now... And just might...

It is BAD ASS. It is on netflix streaming, no scratched DVDs no storage.

Streaming is the way.

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

Still working it out but, streamed .TS through PlayOn to Roku last night without a single buffering.

Streamed a .m4v from a .TS pre-transcode (via HandBrake) and it buffered every 3 minutes. WTF?

I know, 1st world catastrophe and all. But, this is what annoys me. I would think stuff like this would work flawlessly with todays technology.

 

[cheezydemon3]

I just got the impression from Cheesy comments a couple times that he was thinking he actually needed a windows machine to use this.

I was THANKS!

 

[MisterTipsy]

I tried playon. It worked, but it disabled windows firewall and I couldn't even access the firewall control panel. So, I deleted playon and everything returned to normal with the firewall.

 

[cheezydemon3]

How does the ROKU even see some PC that is hard wired? do you have to hard wire the roku?

 

[PlayOnTV]

How does the ROKU even see some PC that is hard wired? do you have to hard wire the roku?

Nope, they just need to be on the same network. You can have some devices on the network wirelessly, others wired. Google "powerline adapter" if you want an easy/relatively inexpensive way to wire devices to your network.

 

[cheezydemon3]

Thanks!