Depending on the SCOTUS ruling this month, Aereo is a really great option for anyone that has it available in their geographic region. It has saved my NFL viewing and was the last piece of the puzzle that let me cut the cable.
There’s already been tons of great content in this thread, I have nothing to add besides observing that for as much content and options are available to cutters, if you really want access to all of the content that traditional cable provides you have to be willing to get into some grey areas…vpns, streams, overseas providers etc. In the ~18 months I’ve been a cutter I am always coming across things I want to see that require some “creative” solutions to get access to.
I am looking to add another XBMC player to my distributed video setup and I wanted a cheap, high quality 1080p x264 player. Adding more memory or storage looks very easy but looking around it sounds like 2GB is more than enough for openelec.
Yes, that’s it. There’s no need to add more RAM or storage for openELEC, but you will need a Flirc for remote control, unless you want to use an iOS or android device. More details here.
I suggest also considering the amazon firetv. It’s only $99 and you also get netflix and amazon streaming.
I would personally get the chromebox, because I also run various servers on my HTPC and want to use it for steam home streaming. But if you don’t care about that stuff the firetv is a great choice.
Do you folks experience much stuttering/lag with XBMC? I have a pretty good ISP package with good speeds… but some stuff on XBMC isn’t watchable… too much bufffering
Unless of course you’re talking about the pirate addons, which link to shady file sharing sites like megashare.com or whatever… any problems streaming those aren’t XBMC’s fault.
For watching any recorded shows, it is very rare for any buffering to make the show unwatchable or for it to be a significant issue. I suppose if you were trying to watch the latest Game of Thrones episode within an hour or two of broadcast, you might have some issue due to volume of traffic. If you decide you are going to binge watch a season of something like you would on Netflix? No - no issues at all.
If you are watching a live sports stream via Mashup or trying to watch a live stream of another cable channel, then yes, there can be lag. Depending on the channel, there can be a lot of it, too. (Trying to watch HBO via live stream on a Sunday night is just not going to happen). For most casual viewing, this is not usually a problem though.
For watching a live Sports stream other than through a subscription service, its always hit or miss. Servers go up - they go down; sometimes in the middle of the game. Games come in crystal clear, or they are so poor in res you are wondering what sport you are watching. The more popular the sport and more critical the game – the worse the lag and picture quality. The more you care - the worse it gets.
For casual viewing that may be fine for some people. If you are a sports fan, you should subscribe to one of the pay streaming services mentioned on page 1 of this thread to avoid those issues.
A premium subscription sports stream (MLB.TV, Hockeystreams, etc. ) that is merely being watched through XBMC is generally lag free at all times.
Is there a point to Hulu Plus? It seems like there’s a decent amount of content, some major gaps (depending on what kinds of shows you watch), and programs that you aren’t allowed to watch from your streaming device.
Made good progress setting up my soon-to-be cableless house. Getting an HD antenna this week. We are in a great location to pickup ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and PBS. I have a roku and got plex running on my machine. Everything is on ethernet so it’s pretty fast and smooth. Plex is fantastic. In addition to the official channels, there are a bunch of unofficial ones that pull content directly from the websites of various TV channels. Pulls media from my computer perfectly.
I like Hulu Plus. It saves me time having to hunt down many of the shows I used to watch when I had cable. For 8 bucks a month and plug and play ease with my roku, it’s an inexpensive solution for me.
I like the ease of Roku or something similar. If I set up a media server I become tech support anytime someone wants to watch something and it’s not working, they can’t find it, the stream is stuttering, etc. I see it being a headache. If we ever cut the cable we’ll try a digital antenna and otherwise just use Roku.
My big thing is I have to have the NFL. If the antenna doesn’t work we’ll have to keep cable, at least part of the year.
So I have xbmc gotham running on my acer c720 chromebook which is identical hardware to the asus chromebox. I’m running under crouton but I expect openelec would be even better. I also bought a flirc to just mess around with. I have to say the hardware plays everything I’ve thrown at it so far and flirc was stupid easy to setup. I’m sort of in love with all the cheap haswell based chrome hw, and I’m super tempted to pick up that asus chromebox. The nice thing about the chromebox is that everything in the box is upgradable like the ram or ssd though I probably wouldn’t if all it’s going to do is run xbmc and some browsing.
The chromebook actually makes a fair bit of sense over a chromebox for HTPC use. It basically is a chromebox with a UPS built in at the exact same price. You get a keyboard and screen too. And there’s no particular need to upgrade the RAM or built-in storage for a HTPC. Flirc really is cool. Love that thing.
For most people, the amazon firetv makes even more sense yet, because it also offers pain-free netflix and amazon streaming. Getting that stuff working under linux with pipelight is a huge pain in the ass, particularly since modern chrome no longer works with NPAPI plugins.
Been playing around with XBMC and got 1channel, Icefilms and Mashup installed. Im quite impressed with it. You can get pretty much anything thats been on tv ever, be it network or cable. Its a little complicated for the uninitiated but theres several excellent video guides on youtube that can walk you through it. I had an error issue with icefilms and there was even a video on the specific error and how to fix it. I tested it out on my regular computer but I have a HTPC hooked up to my projection set up and Ill be installing XBMC there as well. If this works out as well as it seems, I’ll try to get streaming feeds for my sports and cut the cable once again. This is perfect timing as Im getting ankle surgery in July and will be down for 2 months. Ill be able to catch up on a lot of tv that Ive missed.
This video was invaluable. It shows step by step, how to install 1channel, icefilms and mashup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQYbNspZr2A There is no dialog, you just follow the steps in the video. It worked great for me.
1Channel under Gotham has proved problematic for some installs. There are ongoing discussions about that on XBMChub.com. It continues to install under Frodo without issue.
I had no problem installing it under Gotham on a Windows 7 machine. On a Raspberry Pi, 1 Channel would not install correctly.
You should refer to the thread about it on XBMChub.com.
FYI, hdmi passthrough audio was a no go under crouton on the acer c720. I couldn’t even get HDMI to show up as an audio output device and there was no option to add custom audio device like I see in several screenshots. Oh well, I guess true dual booting is required for that so just fyi for those looking for 5.1 audio. Plugins installed just fine though. Pretty neat!
