My Cord-Cutting Adventure (2020) | Hacker News Reader

My Cord-Cutting Adventure (2020)

brander.ca

84 pointswizardforhire67 comments

Needs a (2020), and that's just when it was last updated. Because the whole way down the page I was wondering, "what decade was this written?"

I was also wondering why it should be an "adventure". Yeah, back when we cut the cord some fifteen years ago, things were a bit rough. Mac Mini with a tuner dongle, and a bunch of hacks. Now it's just turn on AppleTV that outputs to unconnected TV, sorted. (Or sail the high seas if my money is inexplicably no good.)

Yeah, I think if the article was written today it would just be an exercise in spinning up the typical Usenet piracy stack with Plex or Jellyfin.

What I do think was true back then and is even more true today is that this kind of effort just isn’t worth it. Antenna channels absolutely suck except for the increasingly rare sports events that haven’t been moved to pay TV. And that sucky experience gets even worse if you don’t live in a large metro area close to the broadcast antennas.

Television isn’t even enjoyable enough to go through all this effort. I’d rather just not watch TV at all. And honestly, I think a significant number of former TV customers may have made that exact choice - not just cutting the cord but finding other activities entirely. Gaming comes to mind, which I immensely prefer over basically any television show.

Another little note, I think a lot of cable and streaming providers have done a good job resolving the issue of streaming bitrate being inferior to antenna bitrate. My local OTA market has a grand total of one 4K demo channel and everything else is broadcasting at a bitrate that appears inferior to modern streaming platforms.

> What I do think was true back then and is even more true today is that this kind of effort just isn’t worth it. Antenna channels absolutely suck except for the increasingly rare sports events that haven’t been moved to pay TV.

I don’t watch much, but at the cost, I get enough value out of watching basically just olympic and election coverage.

Yes, There are only so many re-runs of Walker Texas Ranger. I've seen them all dozens of times on OTA TV ;)

I agree with you about gaming, Twitch and YouTube as being replacements for mindless/relaxing viewing.

Funny, I was thinking that pay TV just sucks these days. Maybe we're both right though.

For reference, I just pointed my antenna in the attic towards the nearest metropolis, picked up 108 channels, sent them to an HDHomeRun box that sends them to Plex which handles the guide data and DVR to an SMB share.

It took a couple hours in the evening, most of which was just fiddling with the antenna mount and scanning the channels. It’s a lot easier than it used to be. Granted I planned and ran ethernet to the attic years earlier, but it’s not rocket science.

How does ethernet to the attic help with this?

The versions of HDHomeRun that support 4K only have ethernet for networking. This has been a limiting factor for me in terms of reception.

Nothing a $40 wifi-Ethernet module couldn't patch up.

The coax and the network have to meet somewhere and for this person (maybe no existing coax runs in the house or to the attic?) it was easier to have them meet in the attic instead of say in a utility room or closet.

I think the only concern might be subjecting the HDHomeRun to attic temperatures in the summer.

Yes, that is where I am confused. Surely, attic temperatures are not ideal for the HDHomeRun device.

I was concerned by this and humidity also, two summers in (one extra hot) and no issues yet. It even handles the MPEG2 transcoding locally for good measure.

In a signal limited environment somewhat far from the local metropolis the coax run from the attic to wherever can make the difference between channel and no channel, fixed most simply by bringing the box to the attic. There are alternatives that sometimes work.

I ended up running coax to my network cabinet and put the HDHR there, because my attic gets significantly hotter than the maximum rated operating temperature of the HDHR.

I'm also long-term concerned about how Plex as a company is moving away from its server product and towards FAST (free, ad-supported TV), a feature I almost never use. I'd love to see Jellyfin get some equivalent features.

Yeah I am definitely not a fan of the new Plex app either

I did the same. Digital antenna in the attic with a coax to my cabinet in the basement. Been working great for years, although I don't use it for much beyond watching the bears play live.

I'm also quite displeased with plex's new direction. Would love to see some real competition.

Mac Mini(s) connected to my TVs since 2007 ... prior to finding a Mac Mini I connected PCs to TVs to enjoy all things ;-) on the Internet from a couch or place where you sleep. I do have a one Roku TV as it's a shared TV.

Finding eDonkey2000 (2002) and then later BitTorrent prompted me to connect computers to TVs. Nowadays I very, very rarely watch pirated webstreams (totally legal) just YouTube almost always; rarely use my HBO Max or Disney subscriptions. Got them again recently only because they offered a $2.99 deal. Will cancel them once they go to full price!

The studios need to put everything on YouTube it will continue to take share away from them! Im so use to watching 10 to 15 minutes clips cause of YouTube that i have hard time watching long format content unless it's in a social setting and Im old-ish lol

Yes, since I got my first TV (in 2013) I've had Mac Minis connected via HDMI, and the Minis also being the file server and BitTorrent downloading machine. Prior to that, downloaded to my MacBook or watched on YouTube.

There was never a cord for me to cut (and I refused to pay for cable when in uni since I downloaded everything anyway).

Now just have the Mini in the closet and serving files via SMB to an AppleTV connected to the TV HDMI.

Yeah, reads like my adventures in ... 2005 or so?

HDHomerun is so great, easily one of the best, most reliable pieces of tech I own. I agree though cord cutting has become kind of hard for the layman.

Since they also expose streams as http in addition to DLNA, I've used a Tailscale subnet router and VLC to stream live TV from my house while away. It works decently over shockingly poor connections too.

I love my HDHR. I use it with Channels and everything works flawlessly. If Channels' DVR was pay once rather than a subscription I'd buy it immediately.

It should be noted that TVFool hasn't been updated since 2017. It will give incorrect results for stations that changed frequency after the 600 MHz auction in 2016-2017.

Use RabbitEars instead.

https://www.rabbitears.info/

I'm going to give you guys the keys to the kingdom. If you do a reddit search for "plex server sale" you will find dudes that share membership to their curated Plex server.

I pay $20 for a server with nothing but 4K remuxes (zero-quality loss from 4k blurays). 5 streams, no transcoding allowed, so you need an nvidia shield because after testing a bunch of devices those are the only ones that play _everything_ without transcoding, even DTS and Dolby Vision.

Distance to the Plex source can be an issue. My friend in Canada shared his Plex server with me living in Western Australia, and Plex struggles immensely to stream his server to me on the other side of the world.

Even at a distance it should be okay, sounds more like a peering/bandwidth issue between your ISP and his

I'm not doing this, but my friends and I link our Plex boxes so we can see sports in different regions. If you can get enough of them going you should be able to see every NFL game. Too bad baseball is mostly on cable.

TiVo was one of the most delightful products I ever owned. It had near-perfect UX, including the audio effects: to this day my wife and I still talk about "be-bipping" through video when we want to fast-forward. Now I can watch any episode of Star Trek I like, anytime I like, and yet somehow coming home to a TiVo with some freshly recorded episodes was vastly more satisfying. The first algorithmic feed I actually loved.

I can wholeheartedly recommend an HDHR and Channels DVR (https://getchannels.com/dvr-server/), I've found it to be parent proof. Run a Docker container on a low powered PC somewhere and then install the apps on Apple TV or Chromecast. Job done, provides a Sky Q like experience for like £5 a month?

Personally I like Channels DVR which is a single go binary that can run anywhere and they have excellent client apps for every platform. There's even an API and a Home Assistant integration. https://getchannels.com/dvr-server/

From other comments here, it sounds like it is subscription based.

My "stack" for watching TV consists of:

* A Hauppage WinTV HVR-950 tuner, connected to a Kubernetes cluster in the basement.

* NextPVR, scheduled on the appropriate node in the cluster (yes, it's non-redundant, even though I have three nodes). This handles DVR scheduling, and transcoding should I want to watch TV off-network.

* Kodi Media Center, running on a PC in the living room, and a Raspberry Pi 3A in the kitchen. Both pass through the full MPEG-2 stream. I additionally have an XSPF playlist link on my laptop and phone that open VLC to the transcoding-capable playback URLs for NextPVR.

* FreeNAS with a _significant_ amount of buffer available (at least for my one-hour-daily recording schedule), backing the DVR capability over NFS.

I'd argue this setup is actually _better_ than what I'd be able to do with a simple VCR/DVR. It's like having a robotic tape library, but without the physical space required.

Is OTA better quality than streaming services? Several years ago when I looked into this OTA was there highest quality, especially close to a big city.

Not sure, but I've noticed that especially sports are way better on cable, compared to streaming. It doesn't seem like streaming can keep up in sports like soccer or hockey.

Even Tour de France just looks better on cable. It might just be me, but in terms of specs I should have the better TV between me and my dad, but the details just gets lost somehow in many sports. Only difference I can think of is cable vs. streaming.

Initial roll-out of OTA digital was amazing. I remember watching Tori Amos on PBS ("Austin City Limits"?) and I was almost crying for how beautiful it looked.

Fast forward and OTA started instead using their bandwidth to instead run 4 or 5 lower-bitrate channels. Bummer.

^ Looks like the show might have been Soundstage in 2003: https://youtu.be/iHESs5TxC1Q

You're making an even stronger case for poverty level minimalism than I think I ever could. The freedom you lose by having to maintain all of that... No thanks.

Oh the suffering of... running one program in the basement with the usb thing, and running a different program to view everything?

If it caused any difficulty at all to use different viewing programs on their different boxes, it would be trivial to cut down to one. If using NAS network storage caused problems, it would be trivial to remove it. And they're running kubernetes entirely for fun, making it the opposite of "have to maintain".

The part that actually makes this system tick is quite low maintenance.

To your point though, a simple box you plug in that "just works" would be nice for the rest of us. (Yeah, not an Apple TV though and nothing with a subscription.) Perhaps someone has already done something like that on GitHub.

I've been very happy with Kaffeine, installed on my regular desktop PC, for recording shows.

https://apps.kde.org/kaffeine/

Jesus. When I was a kid using torrents was high tech. Now people are running K8s clusters as part of their TV setups...

My Shaw DVR actually kept working after I ended my TV subscription. It was purchased, though, not rented (still tied to Shaw only though!)

The thing that made me cancel wasn't the DVR hardware or software sucking - it was actually decent, especially after I upgraded the hard drive to a 2 TB WD Purple. What killed it for me was the schedule not matching the recordings. I'd miss 5 minutes on either end of an episode, or for one show I'd be one episode off.

Does Plex TV Guide not work in Canada?

It's a simple solution, if you have a decent enough computer. Buy a TV tuner card (I have one with 4 channels). Plug the antenna in it, and buy a lifetime (or monthly) Plex subscription, and you're done. You can easily watch on your TV. You can watch local channels even while you're away from home.

It. Just. Works.[1]

I just don't know if they support EPG.

Never understood why people use Kodi.

[1] Well, it did before they decided to revamp the Android app.

> Never understood why people use Kodi.

Free, self hosted, and I don't want to watch TV, I want to watch tv shows, in the format and language of my choice and the subtitles of my choice.

All doable with Plex (even their free tier).

This submission, however, was about getting broadcast TV.

Plex can be self hosted against your domain and allow 4k on the free tier? This is news to me!

I'm probably not going to do a write up like this guy, but I'll probably start pulling together my Plex box soon. I don't care about live TV too much, but some shows, sports and news stuff it is better to see live.

Kodi was ok, but kind of clunky on my chromecast. I used VLC for a long time to play off a network drive but it's kind of buggy and a little annoying to control.

I travel with an HD antenna (the plastic square that attaches to a window). I arrive to the airBnB, I connect my antenna program the Roku crap TV to real Live TV. I was saddened when I find out the French Open sold-out to cable TNT for the next 10 years. I rather watched Fraiser re-runs that any cable TV.

Speaking of cord-cutting. My mom used scissors to cut the _power_ cord to our TV that I was watching when I was... nine years old, I think?, and I was shocked that nothing happened other than cutting power to the TV. I still am shocked that there was no short-circuit.

Probably (depending to some extent how old you are) that's just not very much power, so you're not going to get exciting movie style arcing for example. Even if the scissors connect live and ground, at those powers the result is the circuit gets dropped which doesn't look like anything much. And if they don't do that yeah, no more power to the TV and it's all over.

The electrical supply for a whole house can make pretty sparks, you don't want to be near that as it could definitely kill you.

The electrical supply for a whole street can tear a noticeable crater in the street, which is why after my street lost power last year actual street repair people turned up to fill the hole and lay more asphalt as well as the electricity network people.

Please don’t spread bad information about electricity.

15A at 110V is enough to weld your tool to the wires carrying the current.

The mother probably got lucky and the neutral wire pulled away as it was cut and didn’t complete the circuit to the live wire.

The scissors must have had plastic handles that prevented the mother from becoming part of the circuit.

It's possible that my mom was not the dummy I thought her to be in that moment. She might have played a sleight of hand where she unplugged the cord and cut it almost at the same time. My memory of that event is hazy enough that what I remember was thinking how crazy dangerous what she did was -- I might not have checked if the plug was still in the socket.

Was it on 120V in the US or a 240V country? In my 240V country that would normally make a terrific spark and a bang.

Do you remember if it blew a fuse or tripped a breaker?

240V. I don't remember anything about a fuse/breaker blowing/tripping.

I was so curious about this that I actually took a look at the site he mentioned (tvfool) and tried to see what channels were available in Calgary where I live.

The three 3 oligarchies (Rogers x 2, Bell/BCE, Corus), CBC and a religious network. CBC doesn't even broadcast the NHL finals [1].

At this point, what's the point? Renting Blurays at the library is much less annoying (even when they skip at pivotal scenes).

[1] Incidentally, the actual broadcaster for the playoffs, Sportsnet, is a morally compromised network that specialises in showing gambling ads to children. Shame, but unsurprising given Canada's business "culture".

Agree, subscribed for the playoffs, first time watching since 2004. Quite shocked to be paying $26 a month to watch one Keanu Reeves commercial five hundred times and thousands of online gambling adds. My kids have grown up add free until now at least.

I do recall advertisements being repeated ad nauseum up until I was a college student (after which I stopped watching TV for the most part). I don't know if it is something about the Canadian media landscape or what.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWleK1dvRF0

This specific advertisement used to play over TSN 10-12 times per hour, to the point where it became a pre-internet video meme for me and my friends.

I’m pretty sure CBC does broadcast the NHL finals?

The gambling ads in sports are deplorable, but pretty much ubiquitous in any non-amateur sport broadcast in the country now.

I ended up going all streaming, but a few years ago we tried a roof top antenna and a Fire TV Recast for DVR. Worked well enough, with the usual caveats about using a closed solution.

> one clear, sharp picture. Better than cable. Here's the reason. OTA broadcasts must meet a legally defined broadcast quality: they're all at the top quality that HD can provide

I wonder about this part. I think it's probably still true for the "main" station, like full 1080i for 9-1, but the "extra" stations like -2, -3 ... -6 are usually noticeably compressed.

From my limited understanding, all the extras are sharing the same bandwidth, and more channels = more ads, so it's more like 1080i + 5x 480i. Some channels will look 1080i on both -1 and -2, then maybe 720i on -3.

I don't live near an ATSC 3.0 station, but it would be cool to get 4K/2160p. Soon ... (naturally, I'm curious)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_3.0

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ATSC_3.0_television_st...

This sounds like a lot of effort to keep watching commercials.

Besides PBS being the channel I was most likely to record (in the day), part of the beauty of recording OTA was of course you could skip or fast-forward past the commercials. There were also plenty of attempts to auto-strip, auto-skip commercials by looking for blanking screens, etc.

Never minds "cutting the cord" generally meant getting rid of your cable service/bill. Wild that cable came with commercials and you paid for that ... privilege? (And, again, if you are mostly there for PBS and it is being broadcast digitally over-the-air, why are you giving money to Comcast?)

Anyone else look at stuff that’s <2021 and goes: “ha, this is pre-AI”

TV and then YouTube and then TikTok have drained my creativity. Fully.

Nah, you did. They just gladly facilitated your tendency to procrastinate. At any moment you can decide to not use them. I know it’s hard, struggling with it myself. But don’t act defeated, you aren’t a victim. You’re free in your actions. Besides, the feeling it once gave will never be reached again, it’s like chasing a high.

I wonder, and I'm sure it's probably trivial, did this person dox their home address by listing the distances to multiple known broadcasting points?

Edit: Oh, and a photo out the window of their home. This is almost certainly trivial. Not that anyone should.

https://brander.ca/

haha, incredible. He has no concerns about having his address out there. Alright!

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