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Who's a Cord Cutter?
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Frog in the Kitchen Sink Offline
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Post: #81
RE: Who's a Cord Cutter?
I'm a card carrying corder and probably won't switch (although with fiberoptic, I don't have any cords in a literal sense, ironically). If I was younger and pinching pennies, I'd be more interested. But I can afford a bundled package, it's convenient and I don't want to hear any grief from the wife and kids if there is some hoop they have to jump through to watch their show. And I don't want to risk missing an important game. I will pay extra for convenience. I suppose there is a limit there- if it was several thousand dollars difference I might. But at the current rates the convenience is worth it.
09-14-2017 02:58 PM
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umbluegray Offline
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Post: #82
RE: Who's a Cord Cutter?
(09-14-2017 02:21 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  I'm considering it very very hard. My main downside is I have a bespoke Linux/MythTV DVR setup that allows me to hardware encode at FULL BROADCAST QUALITY on the fly. The ability to take a one hour show, can it out without commercials but maintaining full bitrate and DTS 5.1 surround? Oooooo that's nice. And nobody on the streaming side comes close to that kinda quality for TV programming. Netflix and Vudu do high quality streaming. But none of it is live.

I could probably save $30-50/mo cutting the cord. It doesn't sound like much, but you can buy a lot of beer with $350-$600/yr. I would probably pull the trigger right now if I had something more MythTV friendly to go to.

I hadn't heard of MythTV so I looked it up and read a bit about it.

What's the setup? Are we talking about OTA, Cable/Sat feed?


Just the high-level I read it seems similar to PlayOn.

I haven't dealt with Plex so I'm not sure what it is/does.

But PlayOn streams content and records the stream which it saves to your hard drive.

You can eliminate commercials. You can cast to various devices. You can load the PlayOn channel to your streaming device. You won't find it search from your Roku device. You'll have to log in online and push it from there to your device.
09-14-2017 03:14 PM
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umbluegray Offline
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Post: #83
RE: Who's a Cord Cutter?
(09-14-2017 02:58 PM)Frog in the Kitchen Sink Wrote:  I'm a card carrying corder and probably won't switch (although with fiberoptic, I don't have any cords in a literal sense, ironically). If I was younger and pinching pennies, I'd be more interested. But I can afford a bundled package, it's convenient and I don't want to hear any grief from the wife and kids if there is some hoop they have to jump through to watch their show. And I don't want to risk missing an important game. I will pay extra for convenience. I suppose there is a limit there- if it was several thousand dollars difference I might. But at the current rates the convenience is worth it.

I hear ya.

For me DirecTV at $150/mth ($1,800 per year) vs $35/mth ($420 per year)...

Didn't make much sense to give DTV and extra $1,400 per year. Especially since my daughter is starting college.
09-14-2017 03:16 PM
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georgia_tech_swagger Offline
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Post: #84
RE: Who's a Cord Cutter?
(09-14-2017 03:14 PM)umbluegray Wrote:  
(09-14-2017 02:21 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  I'm considering it very very hard. My main downside is I have a bespoke Linux/MythTV DVR setup that allows me to hardware encode at FULL BROADCAST QUALITY on the fly. The ability to take a one hour show, can it out without commercials but maintaining full bitrate and DTS 5.1 surround? Oooooo that's nice. And nobody on the streaming side comes close to that kinda quality for TV programming. Netflix and Vudu do high quality streaming. But none of it is live.

I could probably save $30-50/mo cutting the cord. It doesn't sound like much, but you can buy a lot of beer with $350-$600/yr. I would probably pull the trigger right now if I had something more MythTV friendly to go to.

I hadn't heard of MythTV so I looked it up and read a bit about it.

What's the setup? Are we talking about OTA, Cable/Sat feed?


Just the high-level I read it seems similar to PlayOn.

I haven't dealt with Plex so I'm not sure what it is/does.

But PlayOn streams content and records the stream which it saves to your hard drive.

You can eliminate commercials. You can cast to various devices. You can load the PlayOn channel to your streaming device. You won't find it search from your Roku device. You'll have to log in online and push it from there to your device.


Linux machine running MythTV <--(USB2)--> Haupaugge HD-PVR <--(IR blaster, USB connected to Linux machine)--> Motorola DCT Series Converter Box <---- Charter Cable

Because Linux has "zombified" the converter box to do its bidding, it handles all the stupid crap like making sure the channel has been requested to be available to upstream equipment from the cable operator. Because if no nearby customer is watching a channel, they stop sending it down the line to free up bandwidth for other things. Otherwise you would need to use a CableCARD, which means HILARIOUSLY no official Linux support even though THE GOD D*MN CABLECARD PRODUCT FROM CETON IS RUNNING EMBEDDED LINUX ON THE F*CKING ADD ON CARD. Not that I'm bitter about that. But MAYBE I AM.

The downside versus CableCARD is you only get one channel at a time. CableCARD lets you get at least 2 or 3, mayble more. Not a problem for me.

The enormous upside versus CableCARD is you're getting FULL NATIVE QUALITY capture. No downgraded anything! Because CableCARD hardware enforces recording flags set by the broadcasters, you'll find a lot of stuff isn't full quality captured. Worse still, some channels are blacked out ENTIRELY like HBO. Not a problem in my setup ... we're punching out through the analog loophole baby. I get EVERYTHING in FULL NATIVE. Including the audio. Bite me DRM!

Because I have so much equipment between my stuff and this site and other projects and events ... I converted all my gear long ago to rackmount. So I just have a 42U caster cage in my home office. With a proper enterprise datacenter grade PDU that was given to me for free (there are rewards to doing good things in open source software :D), it has only one thick power umbilical to the wall, some CAT6 and one RG-8 coax bundled together to the wall. Everything is self contained in there. My desktop I'm typing this on. The converter box. Retired servers from this site. Servers from other projects. And from there everything else in the house phones home to it. So my main "TV" is a nano desktop running Linux and a MythTV frontend connected to a projector. It then phones home over a wired connection to the desktop MythTV server and anything you watch is being streamed in real time to that projector over the network. And since it's Gig-E wired, no sweat, you can stream probably 5 simultaneous full quality cable captures before coming close to saturating Gig-E. And then I could just make the desktop 10 Gig-E and swap out the switch and bam now I can stream probably 50 simultaneous full quality captures without making any other changes. I roll hard, son.
09-14-2017 03:41 PM
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Frog in the Kitchen Sink Offline
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Post: #85
RE: Who's a Cord Cutter?
(09-14-2017 03:16 PM)umbluegray Wrote:  
(09-14-2017 02:58 PM)Frog in the Kitchen Sink Wrote:  I'm a card carrying corder and probably won't switch (although with fiberoptic, I don't have any cords in a literal sense, ironically). If I was younger and pinching pennies, I'd be more interested. But I can afford a bundled package, it's convenient and I don't want to hear any grief from the wife and kids if there is some hoop they have to jump through to watch their show. And I don't want to risk missing an important game. I will pay extra for convenience. I suppose there is a limit there- if it was several thousand dollars difference I might. But at the current rates the convenience is worth it.

I hear ya.

For me DirecTV at $150/mth ($1,800 per year) vs $35/mth ($420 per year)...

Didn't make much sense to give DTV and extra $1,400 per year. Especially since my daughter is starting college.

When I've done an analysis of what I want, it's not that different. My guess is that you are not getting the same content as you did before. I could cut back right now to a $30 base package on my FIOS if I wanted to save but I wouldn't get the channels I want.
09-14-2017 03:45 PM
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umbluegray Offline
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Post: #86
RE: Who's a Cord Cutter?
(09-14-2017 03:45 PM)Frog in the Kitchen Sink Wrote:  
(09-14-2017 03:16 PM)umbluegray Wrote:  
(09-14-2017 02:58 PM)Frog in the Kitchen Sink Wrote:  I'm a card carrying corder and probably won't switch (although with fiberoptic, I don't have any cords in a literal sense, ironically). If I was younger and pinching pennies, I'd be more interested. But I can afford a bundled package, it's convenient and I don't want to hear any grief from the wife and kids if there is some hoop they have to jump through to watch their show. And I don't want to risk missing an important game. I will pay extra for convenience. I suppose there is a limit there- if it was several thousand dollars difference I might. But at the current rates the convenience is worth it.

I hear ya.

For me DirecTV at $150/mth ($1,800 per year) vs $35/mth ($420 per year)...

Didn't make much sense to give DTV and extra $1,400 per year. Especially since my daughter is starting college.

When I've done an analysis of what I want, it's not that different. My guess is that you are not getting the same content as you did before. I could cut back right now to a $30 base package on my FIOS if I wanted to save but I wouldn't get the channels I want.

Oh, most definitely I'm not getting the same content. Far from it.

But for me, that was the point. Why pay for all the fluff that I didn't want.


I printed the Choice channel lineup from DirecTV. That was the package I subscribed to.

I marked every channel I liked my wife marked hers.

Then I printed the Sling and the PS Vue channel lineups.

They share quite a bit in common. However, Sling doesn't carry FOX News while PS Vue doesn't carry Lifetime Movie Network (LMN).

My wife and daughter like LMN, so they made a sacrifice. I told them LMN has a stand-alone channel you can subscribe to for $4/mth. She was fine with that. Come to find out, the TV they watch most has a Fire TV stick and LMN hasn't released a channel for Fire yet.

Anyway, Sling & PSV offer the bulk of channels you see on cable. What they don't carry are all the infomercial and QVC/auction type channels.

So, yes. I'm not getting EVERYTHING that I had from DirecTV, but as far as the channels that are actually worth anything (to me -- it's all personal preference) I'm not missing much at all.


Oh, and the streaming services still qualify you for all the independent apps like WatchESPN and AMC.

To use those apps you have to log in with your TV provider. Sling and PSV are valid options.
(This post was last modified: 09-14-2017 05:24 PM by umbluegray.)
09-14-2017 05:21 PM
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B_Hawk06 Offline
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Post: #87
RE: Who's a Cord Cutter?
(09-14-2017 10:47 AM)umbluegray Wrote:  
(09-14-2017 07:01 AM)CoastGuardHawk06 Wrote:  "Cord Cutters" humor me. In Aug, I did it. Well, I didn't cut any cords, but I did give up the sat tv that'd I'd been enjoying for almost a decade due to the insane prices they charge.

So now, I have Roku and retained my Netflix account through it. I haven't added anything else, but my wife is always wanting to watch live, streaming tv (a lot of channels don't offer that through Roku). To get a lot of the channels you're used to... you have to pay per channel or have someone's cable (of some type) sign on. So either way... you're gonna end up paying something.

Many people split things, like you give me your Netflix sign on and I'll give you my DirecTV sign on, etc.

The reason they humor me is they have this grandstanding attitude towards cable and how obnoxiously priced it is, but have no issue with someone else being ripped off so they can benefit from it at a cheaper price. I don't dislike the normal people that do it, but the people that have this "cord cutting" persona and attitude about it crack me up.

Not sure I understand your point (see bold).

My point is that "cord cutting" still requires a bunch of pay to play in order to watch live tv, via all the "cord" companies. Usually by means of people splitting costs via sharing sign ons. I don't see it as a negative, until someone is getting a cord cutting "preachy". Then I find their hypocrisy amusing. Does that make more sense?
09-14-2017 06:42 PM
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Machiavelli Offline
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Post: #88
RE: Who's a Cord Cutter?
What are you paying a year in service fees for your setup GTS?
09-15-2017 07:52 AM
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Machiavelli Offline
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Post: #89
RE: Who's a Cord Cutter?
I'm more of a brick and mortar type of guy but I do like the technicals here. The one thing I have noticed is the picture on my iPad is soooo much better than the feed on my TV. I've been watching Indians games over the FoxSports app because it's such a better picture. You see every little detail. My TV is supposed to be HD. It's a good picture. This IPAD picture though is like extreme HD.
09-15-2017 07:55 AM
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umbluegray Offline
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Post: #90
RE: Who's a Cord Cutter?
(09-14-2017 06:42 PM)CoastGuardHawk06 Wrote:  
(09-14-2017 10:47 AM)umbluegray Wrote:  
(09-14-2017 07:01 AM)CoastGuardHawk06 Wrote:  "Cord Cutters" humor me. In Aug, I did it. Well, I didn't cut any cords, but I did give up the sat tv that'd I'd been enjoying for almost a decade due to the insane prices they charge.

So now, I have Roku and retained my Netflix account through it. I haven't added anything else, but my wife is always wanting to watch live, streaming tv (a lot of channels don't offer that through Roku). To get a lot of the channels you're used to... you have to pay per channel or have someone's cable (of some type) sign on. So either way... you're gonna end up paying something.

Many people split things, like you give me your Netflix sign on and I'll give you my DirecTV sign on, etc.

The reason they humor me is they have this grandstanding attitude towards cable and how obnoxiously priced it is, but have no issue with someone else being ripped off so they can benefit from it at a cheaper price. I don't dislike the normal people that do it, but the people that have this "cord cutting" persona and attitude about it crack me up.

Not sure I understand your point (see bold).

My point is that "cord cutting" still requires a bunch of pay to play in order to watch live tv, via all the "cord" companies. Usually by means of people splitting costs via sharing sign ons. I don't see it as a negative, until someone is getting a cord cutting "preachy". Then I find their hypocrisy amusing. Does that make more sense?

Yeah, it does. I get what you mean about the ID sharing.


Personally, I've been waiting for cable/sat companies to offer buffet plans where you pick your channels and are charged accordingly. That's definitely within the capabilities of technology.

But they focus on business deals.

Each company has a deal with Viacom, for example. That deal includes all the channels they own:
  • CMT. CMT (Canada) (10%) CMT Music
  • Comedy Central
  • Logo TV
  • MTV. MTV2. MTV Classic. MTV Live. MTVU. MTV Tres
  • Spike
  • TV Land
  • VH1

If given the choice, I would prefer to only pay for TV Land. I really don't want to fund the garbage the MTV channels spew.

Of course, if people were given the choice, many of those channels might not survive.


We don't have a buffet plan option yet. We probably may never get that option.

So these trimmed down bundles via streaming are, to me, a step in the right direction.


BTW, Viacom is not included in PS Vue. This means I'm not giving them any money. I'm good with that.
09-15-2017 09:24 AM
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Machiavelli Offline
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Post: #91
RE: Who's a Cord Cutter?
I've noticed the MTV is not on my silver Spectrum tier. Surprised by that actually. My kids never watch it either.
09-15-2017 09:37 AM
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Machiavelli Offline
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Post: #92
RE: Who's a Cord Cutter?
Or did before. Glad I'm not paying for it. The great thing about this competition is that it is making everything cheaper. Everything.
09-15-2017 09:39 AM
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umbluegray Offline
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Post: #93
RE: Who's a Cord Cutter?
(09-15-2017 09:39 AM)Machiavelli Wrote:  Or did before. Glad I'm not paying for it. The great thing about this competition is that it is making everything cheaper. Everything.

Agreed.
09-15-2017 11:01 AM
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