HELP me ditch cable!!! What device/setup?
 

Our number for base housing finally came through! It's super tits... right on a lake, awesome cul-de-sac, big parks, NEX right across the street, hot half-naked SEALs running around everywhere... boner!!!

But, it's COX cable. Never the fuck again. Fuck them and the horse they rode in on. I've had Direct TV in the past... and FUCK THEM TWICE with Hustlers dick. For the past 2 years, I've been in digital heaven with $200/mo worth of FIOS that gets me every channel under the sun and internet so fast I usually come early... but it's time for a change.

I think I'm stuck with getting the COX internet, right? I'm doing homework on HD antennas, so will have that covered.

I guess my question is... what's the latest streaming devices, websites, services, etc... that gets you the most shit for the least money and hassle.

I've fallen in straight up man-love with Destination America Channel, so anybody figures out how to get me that wins.

Oh... and if anybody cares what I've been doing the past 4 months, this happened a few weeks back. My boy "Meat Sweats" Mohoney pulled this off... pretty smooth. And yes, we have given him endless shit for his interview.

Justin.tv's entertainment section has lots of archer, family guy, south park, crime dramas, etc. streams going 24/7 for just background noise / something to play while people are over. Doesn't sound like any shows you're particularly interested in, but maybe you'd find something there.

I'm running a Win7 HTPC as a DVR...works very well but definitely not a plug-and-play device like a Roku.

We also have a Roku3 for the bedroom TV. Works great, don't bother with the older/cheaper Rokus, they are slow and don't work as well.

My father-in-law has a Chromecast and it does basically everything the Roku does, except you don't get a dedicated remote for it.

I bought a Roku earlier in the spring. Netflix, Hulu plus and lots of free channels. I'll never pay for cable again.

I was sick of mowing around the damn satellite so we canceled our Dish about a year ago. I picked up an HD antenna and get a few local channels; they are all crap. Cancelled Netflix too. We turn the TV on maybe once or twice a week, usually to watch a movie with my wife or chip away at an old video game. I don't miss it all. We actually took the TV out of the living area and stuck it in the basement. Next move is the trash.

Seriously, you don't need it. It's lowering your standard of living. Hit up the used book-store in town and start working on a collection. I get so much more stuff done without that miserable time suck.

We ditched cable in Jan and use Chromecast exclusively with Netflix. Tried Hulu+ but basically had same shows as Netflix. We bought season passes for those current shows we gotta watch, like The walking Dead). Many cases, I can live stream my races of the PWC and Tutor, or just stream them from YT if I miss them live. Still hella cheaper than cable. I do have hd antenna for the local news and storm season.

We picked up Chromecast for our living room TV, and I picked up a 2nd Chromecast for my basement 2 hours later. We started with Hulu and Netflix (paid) but dropped Netflix. Between Youtube and Hulu something is always on. There are so many good car themed channels on Youtube. I also find that we stream a lot of music through Pandora and Google Music. Actually we seem to stream music most of the time and TV is very limited now. Also with my daughter, Google Movies is the bomb! I can stream to any of my TVs, tablets, phones and I can stream TV/Movies for her on car trips! Very happy that I ditched cable and save $90 a month.

I also use Xbox as there is free TV on the Gold membership that isn't an option on Hulu.

I watch almost exclusively Netflix, but there are shows the wife watches that were only available on Hulu plus. So, we got both.

Depends on what you want to watch as to what channels to pay for. Surf the websites of the various channels so see what's available on each one before buying. I still haven't gotten Amazon, but I plan to once I catch up on the stuff I am watching now.

Hell, at 8 bucks a month, having several pay channels is still cheaper than getting one prime channel on cable. I save over 100 bucks a month, which pays for a lot of pay-per-view.

I use my chromecast all the time with netflix, hulu+, and crackle which has many classic movies and is completely free. I have Dish network also but almost never use it, probably going to cancel it soon.

I discovered the most incredible function of the Chromecast and my Samsung phone:

You can cast ANY streaming video. Any. From sketchy sites with bootleggedpirate HD streams. That means if you can google it, you can watch it.

And there's not much you can't google. That plus Amazon Prime and Netflix and I can pretty much stream ALLOFIT.

And when I've streamed it all, there's always DVDs from the library, dvd rippers, and DNLA.

So basically a chromecast and a capable NAS is all you need--and you probably have that already since someone years ago provided you with a monsterdrive full of pr0n.

i dont understand what sort of programing your guys are watching on netflix or hulu. a documentary on crusty vaginas?

I use a chromecast for netflix/youtube/Pandora

RaspberryPi for Justin.tv, and streams any local media from my NAS server, which is a pogo plug running Arch Linux ARM. Added IR reciever raspberry pi, and using a wireless keyboard with trackpad.

$27 Chromecast
$45 raspberry pi
$20 Pogoplug
$100 3TB External HDD
< $1 IR reciever
+ $3 wireless keyboard on closeout at Staples
~$200. Paid for itself without cable quite quickly.

Older series, for one. My son and I watched all 9 seasons of Scrubs on Netflix since we got it. I'm currently watching several others that are in their 4th or 5th season, and I'm starting with the earlier episodes.

Also, don't forget about Netflix's original programming. I highly recommend House of Cards. It's better than many shows on cable right now.

Actually started to get hooked on Orange is the New Black. It's amusing.

jumped the shark.

I've never had cable. We always had an antenna. 26 full HD channels for free is good enough. Only thing missing is sports, my dad would love to get to watch every Bruins game, and my mom would love to watch every Redsox game that doesnt have Joe Buck as an announcer, and I'd love to watch every F1 race and sport car race and trophy truck etc when I'm home with them. At least the F1 races are normally broad cast on the spanish channel that the antenna picks up.

We also have a chrome cast. IMO once amazon gets its dick out of its hand about casting prime videos, or google just makes it so everything that isnt natively supported stream a whole bunch better its going to be the tits.

chromecast lovers:

https://dabble.me/cast/

watching The Last Dragon on Vimeo right now. OH YEAH.
The.Last.Dragon.1985. on Vimeo

Roku3 + plex media server is how I get all my media needs.

PLEX media server, combined with MakeMKV + Handbrake is a powerful thing. Also watch more Netflix than "pay TV". I would love to get rid of direcTV, but there doesn't seem to be any other way to pick up live sports outside of the very limited broadcast networks or spending my weekends and Thursday nights at the nearest BW3s from September through January. As far as I'm concerned, the TV in my living room exists for the sole purpose of watching football. Anything else that is played on that TV is a side benefit of it's existence. There are periods where it isn't turned on for weeks at a time, just because there are better things to do.

I was actually considering the same thing. My biggest hangup is sports, would love to be able to get baseball, hockey and racing. Most of the channels I watch those on are not local channels so an antenna doesn't help there. Any suggestions for getting sports online easily?

Awesome responses guys. The wife is threatening an override on my "ditch cable" plan. The COX deal is like $80 which gets decent internet and basic HD channels. Of course it's more for a DVR and for additional receivers and for the retarded channel "packs" you have to buy. I'm gonna try to make her hold on a few months while we try other options.

I'm pretty set on getting an antenna and a Roku3 to start out. Being on base, there are plenty of spouses groups that get together for the more popular girl shows on a regular basis if there's something the wife has to see that we can't get.. Maybe get Chromecast too and try it out... for $35, can't hurt.

But basic channels are mostly what you get with the antenna. You should be able to use one of the antenna websites to tell you what stations are in your area and what antenna you need to get the signal from them. A quick one from my parents house shows the 43 channels they get, I think they get a couple more than that, 26 of which are in full hd the last time I checked. With the digital OTA service you get sub stations of a single station like you night get abc on channel 9.1 but you can also get ME TV on channel 9.2.

But football is the easy spot to watch. Your local team + about 5 other pro games a weekend and at least 4 college games will be on the local channels on the antenna. You should also get NASCAR, occasional indy races, western hemisphere F1 races + monaco, popular x-games and similar extremer motorsports, playoff baseball and saturday local baseball team games, playoff hockey and misc weekend mid day hockey games. Soccer on the Spanish channel. I had the Maine Highschool Shrine bowl on live last weekend too. And so one and so fourth.

Once you do, you'll wonder why anyone pays for cable these days. I wish I'd done it years ago.

I felt like a caveman using my WDTV after seeing all you guys using Chromecast so I just ordered one.

Yes, I would get rid of DishNetwork right now if my wife were not addicted to DIY Network and Fox News. I don't know how else to watch these.

Currently chilling in air conditioned workshop streaming the Blancpain 24hrs of Spa on the YouTube Nismo channel... downing my 5th Lagunitas Little Sumthin'. God I love Saturdays, Chromecast, and beer. Soon to be posting in the Drunken debauchery thread :P

I guess they must have improved it dramatically in recent months. After I was forced to join the 21st century last year with my new hdmi-equipped tv, I looked around to see if anything better than my old WDTV was available (now that I no longer require analog component video) and decided that no, there was not.

Admittedly, I do tend to download all of my media and play it from a local server rather than streaming from the various services like Hulu and YouTube, so perhaps Chromecast does those things significantly better. When I'm watching YouTube in the living room (which is rare) I use my phone or Android tablet as a remote (running the YouTube app) and send the video straight to the TV without any devices in between.


Also, fios ftw. They actually deliver what they advertise. I signed up for 15/5, and that is exactly what I get, no matter what time of day or what day of the week.

I download media and watch it on WDTV from my server like you do. I have been disappointed with WDTV's spotty youtube support lately (seems like quite a few of the videos do not work - maybe 70% of them) and that prompted the Chromecast purchase. I have been very happy with the WDTV's ability to steam my local AVI, MP4, etc files though. My box locks up from time to time if I haven't been using it but I think it is an old WIFI problem that has been plaguing me for years.

Not sure I understand how you are watching youtube on your WDTV??? Can you explain further?

I don't use the WDTV for YouTube, or for anything other than playing files off my server.

If I want to watch youtube in the living room, I just use the app built into the TV. But since the UI in that app is horrible (very slow to search and entering alpha on the remote is worse than texting on a 90s vintage phone), I use either my android phone or android tablet, running the YouTube app, as a remote for the TV. They are all paired via the network, so I search for what I want to watch on the tablet (using the good keyboard / UI) and then tap the icon which says "send this to my TV." If you have a network-connected TV which has the youtube app built-in, this functionality (send to TV) is natively supported by the youtube app on your android device. You just pair the two, and then anything you pull up on the phone/tablet can be sent to the TV.

In theory, I don't really need the WD box at all, since I could just play everything directly on the TV itself. But I prefer it, as the UI is vastly superior, both in terms of the software (browsing is done directly in the windows filesystem, it's fast resresponsive, etc) as well as the remote being very nice.

Edit: to be clear, the WDTV box does have a youtube app (and a hulu app, etc), I just don't use them. To access them, you select "services" from the top menu where the horses are.

The wife went over to a friends yesterday and got to play around with a Roku. She says "do it".

Just threw down on a Mohu Leaf and a Roku3.

Custom firmware? I use the WDLXTV firmware.

Nope, bone-stock. I don't fuck with the firmware on phones / consumer electronic devices / game console anymore.

The wife went over to a friends yesterday and got to play around with a Roku. She says "do it".

Just threw down on a Mohu Leaf and a Roku3.

Again? Do you need 2 of them?

That's the longest delay between double posts, ever.

Crazy. I have no idea how many different computers, relays, networks, servers, radios, antennas, satellites, countries, cables, whatever it takes for me sitting here in my cave on a warship to be able to type something and you see it. I'm lucky every post isn't a 4hr double after my post circles the world 8 times before it ends up on your screen.

Because of Hollywood, I know for certain exactly the image a civilian has of how a modern Naval warship works... that some young kid at a console can pull up the feed on the main screen of any TV camera, radar, satellite feed, drone, whatever from across the world on zero notice, and we can drop bombs or target lasers just by moving a mouse over.

In reality, I can't even take a cold shower. That's right, our air conditioners are only as efficient as the water we pull from the sea is warm... with 90* water in the Gulf, we can only "chill" the shower water to 90*. So after running on the flight deck for an hour in 100* heat, I can't even come down and enjoy a cool shower... on a modern Naval warship.

What the hell is the fun in that? I bought a dash cam a couple of weeks ago - will be taking it apart this week. Not the same as firmware upgrade but I cannot seem to leave anything alone...

The Chromecast for youtube is pretty nice. Sometimes you dont want to dick around with using some custom (i.e. shitty) UI to find and watch a video, you just want the one you find on the net to be on your TV and Chromecast does that. You click the icon and there it is.

In other news, last week I upgraded my ancient WRT54GL beacuse it was not providing me with the ultimate satisfaction.

I was getting about 1/3 of my advertised broadband and just had general flakiness.

I replaced it with the very precious Netgear Nighthawk R7000 AC1900 because it was touted as the fastest router for big houses (not that I have a big house), because I have an 802.11ac laptop, and because newegg had it for $28 off an already rock bottom price.

Advertised is 50/25.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1406511731

Alls I'm saying by posting this is that if you plan to stream to stuff like Chromecasts, this can be a bottleneck.

Yeah so we had some cable watching family over. They were astounded at how clear the picture was on our 8 year old LCD tv over the antenna. 1080p uncompressed broadcasts for the win.

Joe wouldnt be getting as much from a chromecast as most people because he's got one of hem new fangled security risk "smart" TVs.

And also getting what I pay for.
https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...ine=1406512176

Wife and I noticed that with 100+ channels of cable we watched about 3 or 4 stations.

When we bought our house about 1 year and 1/2 ago we decided to not get cable.

have about 45 channels with the TV's digital receiver + a cheap 20 dollar anntena
+ xbox (youtube) and netflix.

We dont watch tv to often, but do go on netflix binges every now and then.

I find listening to Basketball and baseball enjoyable on the radio.

I still get football on free tv


Funny thing is due to some "cable" provider contracts about 70% of Houston doesn't get baseball or basketball either lol and haven't for the last 2 years.

So I was watching TV last weekend and there was a commercial that seemed to be freaking out about congress trying to get rid of free TV over the air due to cable provider pressure.

last weekend? or like 5 years ago?

I imagine that on a modern Naval warship it requires two checklists and a safety briefing to take a shit, and despite the fact that the form for the after-shit-action report was recently migrated to an electronic database, it manages to be more cumbersome and time consuming than filling out the old five-part carbon form by hand, the last few cases of which are being jealously guarded by logistics.

It's great. You sit down, push one button, and the product works. Does it reliably every time, regardless of whether the manufacturer has pushed a ghost update in the background.

Irony: that broadcast you're watching is actually 1080i, and it's heavily compressed. We (TV stations) just do a really good job of keeping it clean and avoiding bad codecs.

Internally, we switch and route everything uncompressed and unencrypted using HD-SDI, which is a transport standard that carries 1080i and 8 channels of 48k AES/EBU audio on a piece of mini RG6 coax (or a multimode fiber) at 1.5 GB/s.

When it comes time to transmit the signal to you, however, we only have 6 Mhz of free-air bandwidth to use, which equates to about 19 MB/s of useful data using ATSC/8VSB. Since most of us split that up into two or three channels, we usually give the main channel about 15 MB/s of capacity, which is 50% more than a typical DVD. This is a significantly higher datarate than a typical cable or satellite channel (and we also avoid the multiple stages of transcoding and muxing that cable / satellite carriers normally do), but it's still compressed using MPEG-TS and AC-3.

In theory, 1080p is supported by the ATSC standard, but nobody actually broadcasts it because we'd have to double the compression ratio; it would look far worse. Honestly, there's no need for progressive transport given the quality of modern de-interlacers. You get exactly the same physical resolution from 1080i as from 1080p, merely at half the temporal resolution, but the human brain is pretty much incapable of distinguishing between a native 60 FPS progressive signal and one that's been re-constructed from a pair of alternating 30 FPS interlaced fields. Consider interlacing to be a form of lossless compression. Back in the analog era, this mattered. Today it does not.





Serious question: how is having my TV connected to my home network any more of a security risk than my WDTV media player, my Vonage gateway, several Android and iOS devices, several Win7 machines, an Xbox360, and a Wii?

You may be refering to one of two issues currently going on.


One is a movement towards de-licensing LPTV stations and translators which provide crappy programming to extremely small towns in marginal areas. Nobody really cares about those, and I say this as someone who works at a TV station. This has absolutely nothing at all to do with cable companies. It's the wireless data providers (Verizon, Sprint, etc) who are clamoring for more bandwidth, and one way to provide it is to reclaim some of the frequency space that used to be used by TV broadcasters. It's currently being overturned by the LPTV and Translator Act of 2014


The other is a move by the cable (and satellite) providers to overturn a provision of the 1992 Cable Act which presently requires them to pay (or otherwise compensate) TV stations in exchange for the right to retransmit the programming that we produce and broadcast. Essentially, they want to be able to pirate our signal for free, and re-sell it to you the way they do now. Congress isn't trying to get rid of free OTA TV, this is just an attempted cash-grab by Time Warner and DirecTV. It'll probably fail, based on the recent SCOTUS ruling in Aereo, which upheld that retransmission without consent is a violation of the Copyright Act. (Cue JasonC to explain why the Copyright Act is a part of the illuminati conspiracy to prop up the Federal Reserve and take away his 2nd amendment right to own a thermonuclear weapon for sporting or home-defense purposes.)

Also, this argument isn't new, it's been going on for two decades. Here's some more info: NAB Advocacy: Protect TV Viewers and Allow Broadcasters to Continue Negotiating in the Free Market

Your other devices actually have like security software and stuff, combined with having your network encrypted like a normal person, is like wearing a latex condom while having sex with a hooker, where as putting your smart tv on that network is like using a pig intestine based condom with the cheap hooker.

Huh?

I literally have no idea what you are trying to describe. What is it about my TV which makes it uniquely threatening to the security of my network?

How is my TV any less secure than my WDTV box?

How is my TV any less secure than my Vonage router?

How is my TV any less secure than Nicole's Wii?

How is my TV any less secure than the Xbox 360?

How is my TV any less secure than an iPad or Android device?


I'm not aware that any of the above are running anything which I'd recognize as "security software," and most of them are certainly more lucrative targets for a hacker than an LG television set which has a shitty user-interface, no user-accessible storage and contains absolutely no personally-identifiable data about me (passwords, account names, etc) whatsoever.


Also, my network is not encrypted at all, aside from the Wi-Fi portion of it which uses plain ole WPA2 and is therefore vulnerable to brute-force attack against the WPS PIN feature as described here: http://sviehb.files.wordpress.com/20...hboeck_wps.pdf

I cant find the article anymore that showed that most network connected TV devices, refrigerators, light switchs, etc that were checked in a security study/audit were already compromised and sending the information they have access to, including anything in shared folders to random servers. Your Wii, xbox, and hopefully the WDTV box have security features, such as not running all apps as root and other basic protection. The tablets and phones all have even better security than that. And I would hope that router does too.

You don't actually understand how Ethernet works, do you? In other words, if I were to say to you "Explain to me, in simple, non-technical language, the fundamental differences between a Hub and a Layer 2 switch," how would you answer that? Because that knowledge is key to understanding why the attack which you describe is more-or-less impossible (or, more precisely, of virtually no useful value) in the real world.

With smart TV's especially LG I am far more concerned with them phoning home and everything you watch being recorded by the manufacturer and whoever is snooping on the lines between you and them. [IMG]Source.[/IMG] Also hackers have been able to take control of smart tv's and use them for other purposes. Source.

That already happens, not as a result of hacking, but in the ordinary course of business. If you have a current-generation set top box or DVR provided by your cable or satellite company, then depending on what market you live in, your viewing habits are already being logged by your service provider and sold to Nielsen and/or Rentrak for the purpose of ratings. In the case of a DVR, it also logs when (and how many times) you watched the recorded program, whether you skipped over the commercials, etc. This is old news.

Not everyone who says "Privacy is dead" is a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist. Some of us just work in the business.






First, from that article: "In the event a TV is behind a router that uses network address translation, Auriemma's attack won't work at the moment. But with more work, he says it could be possible to use exploits based on IPv6, the next-generation Internet routing protocol, to bypass that protection."

So that excludes > 99.9% of all households.

And the article fails to mention the relatively obvious fact that even if you are using IPv6 (which nobody is yet), a common firewall (built into pretty much every home router and activated by default) will also block this attack unless you deliberately set up an incoming port-forward to your TV, and beyond the fact that there is literally no reason at all why anyone would ever do that, if you even understand how to do that, you are not worried about this kind of attack.




Second, also from the article: "If you use a Samsung "Smart TV" that's connected to the Internet, there's a chance Luigi Auriemma can hack into the device and access files stored on connected USB drives."

Uhm, ok, so if I were to have a USB stick plugged into my TV (why would I, if it were connected to the network?) AND my TV is plugged directly into the internet with no NAT and no firewall, then this guy would be able to access whatever media I have on that USB stick.

Well, duh.

This is a long way from "compromised and sending all of your network traffic to random servers" as Leafy claimed, which is literally impossible in a Layer 2 switched network; it is the nature of a modern Ethernet switch that my TV can't even see the majority of the traffic on my network. (I see that Leafy ninja-edited his post after I replied, to change his claim to "sending the information they have access to, including anything in shared folders to random servers," which is slightly more plausible, though of course still massively improbable owing to the points above.)

The attack described in that article was performed on a TV plugged into the same LAN as the attacker. If someone with physical access to my network wishes to harm me, I'm going to reach for my .38, not my keyboard.




In short: It really doesn't matter if I give a hacker my real-world IP address and the username and password to my desktop PC (or my Xbox, or whatever hypothetical insecure device I have on my network) for the simple reason that like every other living human with DSL / Cable / FiOS, I have a hardware firewall which drops all unsolicited incoming requests into the bit-bucket.


In fact, I'm so certain of this that I'll go ahead and give the whole Internet an opportunity to hack me. I just remoted into my desktop at home and did a WhoAmI. The real-world address of my cablemodem at home right now is 69.116.186.117. It's connected to a consumer-grade router which I purchased last year at BestBuy (can't remember the make or model), and that router is running a 100% stock config aside from the fact that I changed the SSID and key for the WiFi, and I set up a couple of internal DHCP reservations.

The username I use to log into both my desktop and media-server machines is "joe" (this account has admin rights) and I have temporarily changed the password on both machines to "anus." They are both standard Win7 PCs with no fancy security software other than AVG Antivirus installed.

On the C:\ drive of my desktop machine, there is a subdirectory called "HackMyPC" and inside that directory is a single .JPG file. If anyone can post that image on this forum, I will paypal you $100.

Have fun. :bigtu:

I remember Tivo stated that the Janet Jackson saggy titty flash was the most rewound event in TV history (or something like that). They are definitely watching you. I think I opted out of the spying stuff when I signed up with Tivo (you could opt out at one time - not sure about now).

Yeah, I remember after they announced that, all the privacy nuts started jumping up and down and screaming about ethics and whatnot, and then it was quickly forgotten.

People seem to have a short attention span, and a shorter memory. Every time something like this comes up (and it's treated like some new invasion of privacy), I can't help but think "no, you fool, we've been collecting and selling your "private" data in this manner for quite some time, and we even published a paper about it that was presented at a TED conference three years ago. How is it possible that you've already forgotten this?"

In case anybody was wondering, MiataTurbo.net also logs when you sign in, from what IP address, etc. So does nearly every other forum on earth, as well as YouTube, Hulu, Gmail, Facebook, PonyLifestyle.org, and pretty much every other interactive network-based service on earth which relies upon advertising for some or all of its revenue.



I was kind of hoping this would be something cool, like "Hacker penetrates a development system at Samsung, inserts a trojan into an official firmware patch which is then distributed during the next update cycle, causing every single Samsung TV on the planet to automatically join a botnet." Shit like that actually used to happen back in the 70s.

Your security is pretty good. I couldn't hack it no matter what I tried.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1406767074

Wait a sec... are (were) you still on a nuke ship?

My "security" is merely whatever came turned on by default when I bought my $35 router, minus whatever weaknesses I later added to allow myself easier access to my home servers from outside.


Hint: I don't use RDP, so I don't have that incoming port forwarded at the router.


Trivia: there is a VNC client implementation for OSx called Chicken.

https://www.miataturbo.net/attachmen...1&d=1406768041

http://sourceforge.net/projects/chicken/


Hint 2: you don't have to leave your VNC server defaulted to the standard IP port # of 5500. You can set it to any arbitrary port number that you wish.

I sure hope you don't think I was serious.