Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

It’s too bad they’re destorying themselves. I say this as a LONG time subscriber (over 15 years) who only has cable to keep my TiVo working.

The new software update they released last year that overhauled the UI completely is a total disaster. Change for the sake of change.

It takes more button presses on different/additional buttons to navigate the menus. You can’t just use the d-pad and select. The menus aren’t hierarchies anymore, they’re just a mess you have to memorize. Fitts law doesn’t work as there are things at the top of some menus you don’t want to select so you can’t wuickly get to the top without then pressing down two or three times.

Their fantastic guide has been replaced by a generic one and a new... thing... that’s confusing as hell and worse than the old and new options.

Also, the guide data has been getting noticeably worse in the last two years or so.

I can’t go back to the old interface, and even if I could I imagine I’d be shoved forward again at some point.

I’m really questioning why I’m paying so much for cable and TiVo if my TiVo keeps making me mad and they’ve shown ZERO sign they actually understand the issues.

Sunk cost fallacy. Time to give it up guys and course correct. You pissed off all the loyal fans and aren’t drawing anyone new in.

I haven't tried the new UI yet. I saw the preview on their site and I wasn't impressed.

The guide data is bad now because Rovi bought them and switched to using their guide data.

They broke "push to tivo" functionality for their TiVo Desktop software and haven't fixed it for almost 2 years (if you trace the network traffic you'll see it tries to login at mind.tivo.com and gets a memcache error—sigh). This breaks my favorite usage of pyTivo, where I can ship stuff up to the TiVo that I've downloaded elsewhere.

Which leads me to…

This month I spent a solid week researching every option I could find to replace my TiVo+Cable and none of them were very attractive. Pretty much every legit streaming service has unskippable commercials (IE, every iOS network app). And they also tend to get episodes the day after they air (I could live with that but some, like DirecTVNow on-demand, get episodes weeks after they air). And the services that do get it right (Netflix, Amazon, maybe Hulu) only have a small subset of the TV shows that I watch.

I came away very frustrated that the only solution I could find that was a better experience than my TiVo+Cable was piracy. Torrents of practically every TV show exist, come out quickly, have the commercials pre-stripped, and don't have restrictive DRM.

I don't understand how people cut the cord. They must either not care about unskippable commercials, or they don't watch as much TV as I do, or they pirate (I was trying to avoid it, but man it's enticing).

Look into a SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime. CableCARD support, and compatible with a variety of DVR software backends.

I've been pirating everything I can for as long as I've been watching TV. My wife and I still have a box of CD-R's labeled in marker with our favorite late 90s - early 00s movies on them. Back in the day we've leeched off private FTP servers. Now we run a torrent box in EC2. Weirdly enough, AWS neglected to send us warnings in almost a decade.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Does Amazon not respond to torrent notices for illegal downloads? Do you periodically rebuild the instance to get a new IP?

I’ve considered setting up a torrent box but ruled out EC2 before even looking further into it. Figured it would need to be something overseas.

Before the torrent box went up, we used to get notices from our ISP every few weeks. Amazon just... swallow them somewhere, I guess. I do rebuild the instance occasionally when it gets too crusty, but I use an elastic IP for my own convenience.

Funnily enough, I do keep another box in Moscow which I use for more serious stuff than piracy.

How much does it cost you to use an EC2 instance for torrenting? Doesn't that eat up a lot of bandwidth? Any guides you recommend following?

...I am asking for a friend.

At the minimum, you would need a t2.micro instance with enough disk to store files before you've copied them to wherever you're going to do the watching. I've tried doing this with a t2.nano, but the memory there simply isn't enough.

There are dedicated torrent box packages out there, but I have no personal experience with them, as for me tmux + rtorrent + nginx has been sufficient for years. It used to be that only certain versions of rtorrent supported magnet links, but the latest Debian stable ships with one that works just fine, so there's no longer any need to compile anything from source.

I do recommend reading through rtorrent's configuration file because the settings can make a difference in how long it takes to download something. Also, be sure to adjust your security to allow BitTorrent traffic.

As for cost, it's never been a problem: I haven't seen an AWS bill above $60, which includes a bunch of EBS volumes, the instance, the bandwidth, and my various encrypted long term backups in S3.

What's the advantage in using an EC2 instance as opposed to a box sitting in your house behind a VPN? VPN services cost about $6 / month or less.

I can (and do) use the EC2 instance for other things. It often pulls quadruple duty. The available bandwidth also allows me crank up rtorrent to aggressively seek other peers, such that a typical 45 minute episode takes about 15 minutes to download in 1080p. I then feed the https URL to VLC and watch the file. Torrenting directly here always takes longer. I've never tried a VPN, but it wouldn't make the bits travel any faster.

Additionally, in my household everything with a CPU and a network interface ends up getting cannibalized for some project or another. There must be a name for this phenomenon.

>I've never tried a VPN, but it wouldn't make the bits travel any faster.

No, definitely not; its purpose is only to hide your true IP. Fair enough, if I had other things running in EC2 I'd probably consider this as well.

I agree. There are so many times I've wanted to hand someone some cash to watch a movie or TV show and not been able to, and resorted to torrenting. Now, for TV shows, I have a wonderful little automated workflow of ShowRSS > Catch.app > Transmission.app > iFlicks.app > iTunes. I have the latest TV shows the night they air, ad free, HD quality, with metadata and artwork, and it costs me nothing.

The only thing comparable, for some shows, is either iTunes or Hulu Plus, and with iTunes, 3 bucks a pop doesn't seem competitive in the slightest.

There's gotta be a more sustainable way to do this...

> I don't understand how people cut the cord. They must either not care about unskippable commercials, or they don't watch as much TV as I do

I find a Roku or FireTV plus Netflix and Hulu gets me most of what I want (and I pay a couple bucks extra each month for no commercial Hulu). I have prime too, for the few things I watch there (they have a couple good series).

That gets me a long way, and I have TerrariumTV on the fire stick for the few things I can't easily get legitimately.

I’m a cable cutter. I use both AppleTVs and Rokus.

I subscribe to Hulu Plus with no commercials. I currently get Netflix free via T-mobile and I have DirectvNow. I also have Amazon Prime and STARZ. I hardly ever watch live TV but my wife does. I had CBS All Access with no commercials before getting DirecTVNow when I had Sling, but DirecTvNow has all of the broadcast channels in my market (NBC, ABC,CBS,Fox,and theCW).

The trick to watching commercial free TV for shows that aren’t available on Hulu is Plex. You don’t have to pirate shows that are available on the network’s websites. Just add the channel via Plex. The Plex channel scapes the content from the website in real time. For all intents and purposes, you are watching it legally from their website - without commercials.

Oh neat, I've been using Plex but hadn't explored the plugins yet. Sadly it still seems like there's not a lot of choices beyond OTA channels. I see Comedy Central, but no FX, AMC, USA, Syfy, etc. Also it appears to suffer from the same problem as PlayOn, which is that shows offered over the web are only available in stereo.

Reading experiences like this make me quite pleased I don't watch much TV, even then, especially here in Australia, it's a pain to view the couple of shows I'm interested in (GoT, Mr Robot etc).

Why are you looking to cut cable? Most people claim its cost, but if you are an avid tv watcher, cable is not a bad deal, especially with the bundles available and in certain circumstances is cheaper than the streaming alternatives.

We cut cable for a lot of reasons that may or may not make sense for most people.

1. My wife has a split shift and has a lot of down time during the day. When she isn't at the gym, she can just watch her shows on her phone.

2. We have unlimited gigabit internet for $70 from AT&T. If you have capped internet, it either costs extra to get uncapped internet or it's not available.

3. We have alot of TVs - our room and our son's room, the guest bedroom, home gym, living room, and my wife's study. That would be $50 a month by itself in set top box rental fees. Instead we have three Roku TVs, two Roku sticks, three third gen AppleTVs* and one 4K AppleTV (free for paying three months with DirectTV) the interfaces are much better and with the Rokus, I can stream the audio to my phone with headphones while watching TV.

4. We have gigabit Ethernet jacks throughout the house. We don't have to worry about flaky WiFi for streaming.

5. Very few markets have streaming alternatives where all of the broadcast TV channels are available live. I live in a market where they are available with DirecTVNow.

* I run PlexConnect on my Plex Server (https://github.com/iBaa/PlexConnect) to get a native Plex Channel on my 3rd Gen Apple TVs.

https://sonarr.tv/ + torrent clint of choice + plex. It's so good that it still shocks me now and then. I would pay for this kind of service if it was a product you could buy.

Hulu and CBS both offer ‘no commercials’. Hulu + no commercials + Live gives you more channels and real time availability, but you may have to ‘commercial skip’ on some shows if you subscribe to the DVR mode instead of the time delay back catalog mode.

Plex with PlexPass (look for a lifetime pass sale) has beta live DVR, supports external digital ‘tuners’ recording up to 4 live channels per device, and auto-stripping commercials. This can be very compelling in metro areas and if you have enough storage.

PlayStation Vue has probably the broadest coverage of channels while supporting iOS + tvOS 11 Single Sign On for channels’ own ‘apps’.

But most folks would be hard pressed to run out of TV between just Netflix and Amazon Prime, supplemented by the $11 ad free flavor of Hulu if “keeping up to date” matters.

Cheapest totally ad free with ‘up to date’ broadcast network shows is probably Netflix + Prime + PlexPass DVR. (After HTPC w/ storage paid for.)

You can downgrade if you want, actually, though the price is wiping your recordings:

https://www.tivocommunity.com/community/index.php?threads/ho...

(Also you can't use the voice button on the new VOX remote)

I know this because I'm in a similar boat, but turned down the "upgrade" to the UI.

Yeah, I know, but I have a lot of stuff recorded and don’t want to lose it yet again (as often happens when upgrading between boxes).

But again, I figure that after having to basically re-do everything after a downgrade I’d just be forced back up again.

Haven't been forced yet, though if you say "give it a few months" I'll nod sadly in agreement.

I was also a long time TiVo user (3 units in 3 rooms for about 10 years) and gave up on them this year. Now I'm just using YouTube TV which has an unlimited DVR, and with a couple Chromecast and Roku devices under displays now, I don't miss it one bit. I get access to everything I need, anywhere I am, and don't have to clean up the disk constantly or pay extra on top of the TV service.

> I’m really questioning why I’m paying so much for cable and TiVo

A while back I plunked down a few hundred dollars for a lifetime Tivo subscription -- I'm surprised you didn't do the same. I'm paying Verizon $10/month for cable access to local TV stations, ESPN, and the weather channel. Yes, cable is slowly being displaced, but that's what happens to all technologies eventually. Why worry? Enjoy your Tivo and stop complaining.

Well, you still have to pay for the cable subscription. If I didn't watch so many cable shows, I'd love to go TiVo lifetime+terrestrial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com