The Cord Cutters Thread
03-20-2019 10:35 AM
So, as the title indicates, this thread is for discussions about cutting the cord: whether that be Cable TV, Satellite, Fiber, or any other iteration or offering from the blood sucking network television providers.
I'd had DirecTV for over 16 years and I would have probably had stuck with them forever, that is until the piece of shit baby Bell company now called AT&T got their grubby ass paws into them and turned it into shit!
I finally took a good hard look at what I was getting for the $100+ that I'd been paying them every month and realized that I was only watching a couple of channels that I couldn't get over the air, and of those I was only really interested in a grand total of 6 programs.
So, I started looking at other options. I'd been using Plex for watching movies for several years and did have the Plex Pass, which for about $5 a month would allow me to hookup a tuner and watch and record live TV shows, so I did try going that route. I bought an indoor antenna, a Silicon Dust 4 tuner Homerun Quatro, which worked pretty well, but Plex didn't have a TV Guide, and wouldn't allow me to customize it very much.
Next I tried Kodi, which was free and offered pretty much everything that Plex had and a whole lot more, but I couldn't install it on my NAS, they didn't have an app for my LG TV, and there were several other things that I didn't like much about it either.
Next I tried Emby, which turned out to be the perfect, or at least almost perfect solution for me. Emby Premiere costs the same $5 per month as the Plex Pass. It had an app for my TV, would install on my NAS, plays movies, live TV, music, has DVR functionality and does have a TV Guide.
Beyond that, with Emby you can add multiple tuners, and iptv providers, as well as customized channel listings and TV Guide Data.
Emby gave me pretty much everything that I wanted, but still wasn't exactly what I was looking for. What I ended up going with was a TIVO Bolt for over the air TV, and Emby for everything else. I got the box from TIVO directly at a discounted price of $199, and the service subscription runs me $70 per year.
I also signed on to Vader Streams IPTV service for $15 a month, which gives me a shit ton of channels, including every channel that I had with DirecTV, plus HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel, and just about every other premium channel there is.
Then, I signed up with iptv-epg.com for their TV Guide data for $24 a year, because I didn't need or want anywhere near all of the channels I was getting from Vaders, but couldn't easily modify the channel lineup or remove channels from the TV guide, and iptv-epg would allow me to do so.
So, all in all I cut my costs way the hell down and was able to free myself from the blood sucking leach that is AT&T, I have far more programming than I had before, and the picture actually looks better OTA that it did on satellite.
So, my setup: TIVO, Emby, Vader Streams, iptv-epg, a WD NAS and an LG LV. What are you folks using?
Sympathy for the Devil only results in victimized angels.
Life is a sexually transmitted disease, with a guaranteed 100% fatality rate
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