How cable should be.......

[tthurman]

I'm sick of Comcast, but my choices are limited, and my dish mounting choices pretty much ruled out that option.

That said, this makes sense, and is likely the primary reason it will never be. Must keep feeding us with a healthy dose of commercials! :doh! 1:

[jdskycaster]

Streaming is quickly becoming another option to completely cut cable or dish. It is relatively easy to setup a media center PC with a dual or quad-tuner to DVR the free OTA networks in HD. I use an XBOX to stream it to my HT and it is seamless. Add in an Amazon, Hulu or a Netflix subscription along with Playon and you can get a ton of content at a very low monthly cost. Use Redbox to fill any missing gaps with new releases on physical media.

I still have Dish and have been using these methods and services for some time. As more content becomes available via these outlets it will soon make little sense to continue paying cable or sat greater than $100/mo for programming.

[tthurman]

That's a problem for me, my wife is an avid sports fan. I recently reduced our package to digital only, and paid to tack on the sports package. Regardless, this dropped our price about $25 per month. She's okay with MLBTV.com, and we have been subscribing to it for years now, but that still leaves football, and college BB out. That, plus Comcast jacks your rate if you drop cable, I think by $10 per month. Still that is a good savings!

What's a good TV Tuner card? I'm currently building a dedicated media PC.

[sbdman]

Hauppauge makes quite a few internal and external tuners for your PC. I have the dual tinner internal card for OTA, paid about $60 used iirc. You can get single tuner usb devices for $25 or less with a little whip antenna if that's all you need, or hook them up to your roof antenna. A big plus for HTPC is some free software call DVRMStoolbox along with some non-free software Showanalyzer, automatically detects new recordings, and makes a file of commercial points that will automatically be skipped during viewing - will make you really hate watching TV in real time!

If you want to keep your cable, there are also HTPC versions of cable card tuners from Ceton and HDHomeRun from single to quad tuners, the fancier versions will allow tuner(s) to be accessed on your network by other PCs to record and or watch. The cable card is about $3.00/month to rent (vs $10-20 for a cable box or DVR). And one cable card will work for all 4 tuners! Windows Media Center has a pretty nice 1 week guide that it automatically downloads daily for show descriptions. And there are websites that you can access for free that will remotely setup a recording (iPhone, too) while you are away from home - titantv.com

Although the initial price of the cable card devices can be $50 to $200, you'll quickly start to save when you consider returning all your cable boxes!

[jdskycaster]

I have the Hauppage WinTV-HVR-2250 Dual tuner internal card along with an external WinTV-HVR-850 USB stick for a total of 3 OTA HD tuners.

[tthurman]

Thanks for the pointers, most certainly gives me some stuff to consider.