Request for comments!
(Now that I think about it… that title seems too self serving.)
I hate Time Warner. In general, I abhor the fact that cable companies quite often have pseudo monopolies in what ever locality they happen to be operating in (I’m shaking my fist at you FCC), but TWC holds a special place in my heart… one that makes me want to burn them to the ground. Between their price fixing, ever increasing bills, ridiculously ignorant and useless customer service, and general “fuck you world” attitude, they have firmly supplanted OCZ and Tiger Direct (sorry can’t find the link to the TD rant) as my most hated companies. I’m sure many of you out there have had similarly appalling experiences with TWC so I won’t turn this into a pity party, after all, I did file this in my “Technology” section.
I desperately want to replace TWC with Netflix, Hulu and OTA HD TV. More importantly, I don’t want it to inconvenience me so much that I get as frustrated with my own setup as I get with TWC. I’d like to have a unified system that can time shift live broadcasts and access streaming content but am having some serious issues finding a system that qualifies and need some help.
My requirements
- Relatively small form factor
- Capable of accessing and viewing live OTA HD TV
- Capable of time shifting live TV
- Able to access generic streaming content, preferably able to bookmark streams
- Plugin or application ready with Netflix and Hulu addons
- No subscription fees (outside of the streaming services)
I’ve been looking at solutions for months and haven’t found anything that makes me truly happy. Slingbox should really be used with a unified service; BoxeeBox doesn’t have great application/plugin support; Apple TV and Google TV exist for comedic value only; Myth TV doesn’t have official support for Netflix or Hulu and I don’t want to spend as much time trying to fix the streaming services as watching the content I want to stream; XBMC has the same problem as Myth TV although the community seems more responsive to updating their plugins. Insultingly enough, the closest I’ve come to an acceptable platform is PS3 and Xbox 360… the only thing I’m missing there is time shifting for OTA TV.
I’d really appreciate any advice or setups you guys have come up with!
You can use your 360 as a windows media center extender if you have a windows 7 machine with a tv tuner. There isn’t a truly “unified” solution as far as a single application that will do all of that.
My setup:
360 working as a media center extender which timeshifts and records OTA and FIOS tv as well as plays pretty much any video format (with microsoft media foundation compatible codecs installed on the win7 pc). The win7 pc needs fast disk access, especially for the OTA streams since they’re uncompressed mpeg2. The 360 will need 802.11n or 100mbit+ connectivity to stream the OTA video stream from the win7 pc. For streaming content I use the 360 native apps.
Western Digital has a couple of solutions that might be interesting to you. Basically they are streaming hubs but they do have support for some of the services you mention. One has 1TB (probably really 931GB) of space. Supports a lot of video formats, and it’s Western Digital so you know it’s reliable. Saw these at MicroCenter, links below:
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0374022
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0354801
BTW: Why the hate of OCZ and TigerDirect?
@Ben Trube
Sorry Ben, your post got flagged as spam 🙁
OCZ’s product support was terrible and I had a >50% failure rate for the kits I bought. Admittedly, I bought them just as they were starting to get out of the RAM business, but it left a horrible taste in my mouth.
TD tried to screw me out of $800 via multiple cross shipments for multiple bad monitors. I was forced to issue multiple charge backs after weeks long investigations through my credit card because they wouldn’t refund the cross shipment fees even though their own system showed my RMA as being received/processed. This was in college when losing $800 was catastrophic to me and actually caused me a great deal of stress. Not to mention I had multiple managers agree with me that they had received my RMA but insisted there was nothing they could do to get my money back to me.
I liked the AT&T Uverse TV setup, but it’s just too expensive. Alison and I are saving $90 a month now after canceling the TV service part of our plan. I’ve been looking at finding an HD Antenna that I like, so we have no live TV service at the moment, but that’s not a big deal. Most of our TV comes from torrents, but my Apple TV can download anything I’ve searched for through the iTunes Store. I know you’re not invested in the iTunes store at all, but the new Apple TV runs Netflix and has access to the iTunes store.
The one thing I’d recommend for sure is a Logitech Harmony Remote, if you don’t already have one. Even if you have a bunch of different boxes, the harmony remote will make the whole system feel integrated, even if it’s not.
Good luck and I agree, to hell with the cable companies!
I built a windows media center PC, with dual HD tuners for OTA, Netflix integrates directly into media center, and the rare times I use hulu, I open a browser.
Bluetooth mouse and keyboard hidden in coffee table along with a logitech harmony remote controls it all.
Whole thing turns out to be quite cost effective once you drop the cable service.