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Comment by slindsey | Hacker News Reader

I used MythTV extensively in the late 2000s to capture over the air (OTA) tv. My kids were young and it was a terrific way to capture tv shows for them (and for me when doing 2AM feedings).

It's ability to identify and skip commercials was awesome and I'm sure it's gotten better. The biggest issues I had were hardware related to the capture devices and getting remotes to work.

Honestly, given the state of streaming (40 different services all carrying different content), it might be worth looking at again.

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I was a big MythTV fan in the aughts, and this was a blast from the past.

These days I use an HDHomeRun Flex 4K. Four tuners, 4K ATSC support, clients for virtually all platforms (including Smart TVs) so you don't have to connect a proper "computer" to the TV or fumble with remotes, has cheap "bring your own storage" network DVR support, it's a real neat device for $200.

It picks up 82 OTA channels where I live. Just crazy how much content is on OTA TV these days.

I just connected to the built in web server in my HD HomeRun and it shows 105 channels. I always see people complaining about having to pay for cable to watch sports when 90% of them are available for free over the air.

Do you get ESPN OTA? Or your local sports regional network (likely owned by Bally Sports) OTA?

Because that's usually what people really mean when they say that they need cable for sports. They want to watch some big game that ESPN paid big money for the broadcast rights like the college football national championship. Or they want to watch their local professional NBA or MLB team and the regional network paid big money for exclusive broadcast rights in the area so it's blacked out on League Pass (NBA) or MLB.tv

I see people talking about NFL games on reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/nfl

So many people complain about having to pay for cable. I watch all of my Sunday football for free OTA.

ESPN of course has monday night football and Amazon now has Thursday and you are right that there are thousands of other sports events on pay channels. But I am surprised at how many people in the reddit game threads don't realize that you can watch CBS, NBC, and Fox over the air for free.

The NFL is the exception and has done a good job maintaining OTA availability of most of the games.

That really depends on the sports and maybe the teams you want to watch. Looking at my TV schedule for the next two weeks or so, I get three NHL games OTA, none of which feature my local team (which is playing seven games in the same time frame). There's usually a lot of baseball and football, but whether you teams you want to follow is up for grabs.

There's lots of channels, but nothing to watch :P with cable, there'd be a lot more channels, and still, nothing to watch :)

One thing that you learn pretty quickly if you go deep on the cord-cutter route is that every single consumer situation is unique. The feasability/enjoyment of cord-cutting is going to _heavily_ depend on your _very specific_ viewing habits and physical setup (i.e. nearby towers and your line-of-sight to said towers... in addition to direction of towers if you need to combine multiple sources).

Sports are actually one of the pros of cord-cutting in some scenarios, as you will generally get much higher quality streams OTA. But if there are black-out rules or you care about specific national/international teams then all of a sudden completely cut off. It all just depends on the specifics.

I had a similar experience!

We had 3 TVs hooked up, each with its own instance and a central recording instance with 3 capture cards. It worked great, you could record or playback from any of the TVs.

Main issue we had was getting the remotes to work correctly. I remember editing configs constantly to get correct behavior from the remotes.

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