World’s Cheapest HTPC
The Compaq, powered by an Athlon 64 FX processor and an older Radeon video card, proved to have the computational horsepower the old Dell lacked. It spit out proper 720p resolution and chewed up high-quality videos from Hulu where its predecessor stuttered and stalled. Granted, it sounded like a hairdryer running on low all the time, but for fluid video and proper screen proportions, the price was right.
The Dreaded Mouse and Keyboard: Here to Stay
For the first few days, watching TV without paying for it went off without a hitch. I watched Arrested Development marathons with the girlfriend on Hulu, episodes of South Park with the roomies, and caught up on the latest episodes of King of the Hill when nobody else was around. I was willing to overlook the hum of the computer fan, the occasional buffering issue, and the eternal hunt for more content. But one nag in particular irritated me to no end: Watching TV using a mouse and keyboard sucks.
No matter how sleek you can make these two devices look, having a three-foot long board hanging out by your couch just is not conducive to relaxation, or even proper living room décor, if you’re into that type of thing.
Of course, as most home theater PC aficionados can point out, a number of solutions exist to remedy this. Windows Media Center, XBMC and Boxee are just a number of software packages that recast the PC interface to make it more like what you might expect from a cable box, and suitable to controlling with a remote.
I chose Boxee for our particular rig because it comes with options like Netflix and Hulu preinstalled, unlike XBMC, which requires you to pick and choose each plugin you want. I also wanted to use Boxee’s free remote app for the iPhone, which would allow me to skip on buying an IR remote entirely and control the PC with hardware I already had.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go as smoothly as anticipated. While Boxee does an excellent job aggregating content on its own, the RSS feeds it uses to assemble content weren’t quite complete, so the episodes of Arrested Development we wanted were nowhere to be found on the list it had. And when we watched Hulu shows, the resource-hungry overlay system seemed to make playback jerkier than simply playing it from a browser window. Even worse, it didn’t offer the same option for higher-quality 480p playback that watching through a browser did, so we were left with subpar quality on our high-def TV. Boxee remote, that most compelling of features, didn’t seem quite as compelling when I had to swipe the iPhone’s lock bar and enter a four-digit pin code every time I wanted to turn up the volume.
So Boxee was out. But I didn’t look much further when I realized nothing out there would totally eliminate our need for a mouse and keyboard. Although half our video came in through streaming sites that could be neatly tied up in this sort of packaging, others had to be ripped from DVD or downloaded from sites like Amazon Video on Demand, functions which aren’t yet tied into Boxee’s interface. Until we could truly unplug the mouse and keyboard and do everything a remote, we just didn’t see the point of buying a remote to use sometimes, and still switch back to the mouse and keyboard other times. At this point, Logitech’s diNovo Mini looks like the most suitable substitute to declutter the living room.
Dredging Up Content
Canceling cable can be an intimidating proposition when you’re happily settled into a TV schedule. You might as well be moving to a different country. Will the same shows be available? Will they look the same? Will they disappear randomly? You just don’t know until you make the transition.
For my household, the sacrifice turned out to be smaller than any of us anticipated.
For instance, when we first cut the cable, we were all prepared to lose Sons of Anarchy, our favorite series on FX and a Tuesday-night ritual. But as soon as new episodes began airing, FX began posting them with an eight-day delay through Hulu. Our Tuesday-night ritual simply became a Wednesday-night ritual.
Hulu probably accounts for a good 90 percent of our household television intake. Between Arrested Development, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien and half a dozen others, it’s a treasure trove of free content. But a browser pointed in the direction can pretty much reign in whatever you’re looking for. An unlimited library of every South Park episode ever made? Sure. King of the Hill reruns? Thanks, Adult Swim. And Blinx Remote offers links to many, many more, if you don’t mind Chinese subtitles now and then.
At times, the selection seems spotty. But in retrospect, cable wasn’t much better: we had no control over the shows on our gazillion stations at any given time, Comcast only offered on-demand content for a limited time window, and to get premium content like new movies, we forked out extra dollars in addition to our subscription fee.
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RSSMy name is Brad Stewart. I am a student at Northwestern University in the Medill School of Journalism. For my final project, I am reporting on cable, satellite, and online television. I was hoping to speak with anyone willing to share their exprience briefly about your experience canceling cable TV. If interested, please email me at bradstewart@u.northwestern.edu. It will only take ten to fifteen minutes of your time and will be extremely valuable for my story.
Thanks,
Brad Stewart
Medill 2013
First, i started out with my Desktop. Before this whole endeavor, I moved my barely used desktop into my bedroom. For reasons that I do not care to explain, I ended up hooking the PC in there to the 17'' monitor instead of in my living room that houses a 50'' plasma. This desktop is a pretty solid PC. good graphics card, proc, but more importantly, a 1TB hard drive. About a little over a year ago, I decided to put all my digital media that I have obtained on this hard drive. So, while we are in bed, we can have access to every television show and movie that I have on that computer using WMC for windows 7. Honestly, although it lacks some of the bells and whistles that it could have via plug ins, my biggest turn off for this program is the fact that audio syncing seems to be off at times. currently, I am checking out a number of other programs out there, but currently I am still on the hunt for the right one.
Forget the Keyboard and mouse! Although I do still have a wireless keyboard an mouse stowed away for when I actually want to treat my media center as the computer it was naturally put together as, I solved my problem by heading over to ebay and purchasing a cheap $10 USB remote control. It has more buttons than you will ever need which integrate with WMC exceptionally well.
Of course, my bedroom is not the only room in the house, and is certainly not the place I do most of my TV/Movie watching. In my living room, I have an Xbox 360 that is hooked up to my prized 50'' plasma TV.
There are a few ways that you can watch digital media on the xbox. I first tried the whole syncing the xbox media center to my desktop's media center. I was not a fan of this for very long, as I found that Xbox media center was very particular on which files it decided to be compatible with.
I solved this first by simply using the video library function under "My Xbox". After setting up my media hard drive as a shared drive on my desktop in the bedroom, I was able to browse and watch the videos on my xbox remotely. This worked quite well, and I was able to get some of the files to play that I was unable to do with the media center function.
I went even further my installing TVersity on my desktop. Tversity makes it a little easier for those who are not especially savvy with setting up shared folders in windows. With little configuration, it allows your xbox to see your media with ease, as well as gives you a few more bells and whistles like being able to watch youtube and hulu videos. TVersity also claims that videos will be encoded so that they will be compatible with xbox playback.
Either method, video playback quick and quality has not suffered a bit as long as you don't have your home networked bogged down by downloading or other bandwidth intensive activities.
All in all, I have said good bye to cable and I never plan on going back.