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So Long U-Verse

Haywood

Haywood

Well-Known Member
Famous
After realizing that my AT&T U-Verse bill had ballooned to $187/mo., I decided that I'd had about enough of having to call every six months for a new promotion. Comcast probably isn't any better going the conventional cable box route, but that's not what I'm doing. I signed up for their 45 channel basic cable package with 50mb internet. It came with a non-HD cable box, but I got them to give me a multi-stream CableCARD instead at no extra charge. I'm renting a gateway box for $7/mo. I could buy one, but it would take almost two years to break even, so that's not a high priority right now. The plan costs $50/mo for the first six months and $70 thereafter. Throw in the gateway box rental and taxes and that puts me at about $82/mo after the six month promo. Can you say $125/mo in savings?

So how am I going to get TV?

I'm replacing the bad hard drive in my wife's old laptop with a 1TB Hybrid Drive that has 64GB of Solid State cache. I already have a copy of Windows 8 Pro with the Windows Media Center add-on for that machine. I ordered a nice, compact Logitech wireless keyboard with built-in touch pad that should be perfect for use on the couch, as well as a Windows Media Center Remote. Finally, I bought a Silicon Dust HD Homerun Prime triple-tuner, network-attached CableCARD box.

I'm going to set up the laptop with a bunch of very useful Windows Media Center plug-ins, including one that automatically scans each recording as it finishes, flags the ads and then transcodes it to MP4, removing the ads and dumping it to the directory of my choosing. This will work on all content flagged Copy Freely, which should be everything on basic cable. I'm going to install Plex Media Server on the laptop and use that to expose all of my recorded shows to my Roku boxes and the rest of our Plex clients and DLNA devices. I'm also going to move my Logitech Media Server (Squeezebox) to the laptop.

This will get all of the media server functions off of my desktop machine. That's a very good thing, as I do a lot of heavy media processing on my desktop (i.e. ripping discs and converting files) and that tends to interfere with media server operations.

Windows Media Center is an excellent DVR with a very nice interface. We will be able to watch, pause and record live TV in the living room, just as we can now. This is not something we will use often, however. 99% of the time, we watch content recorded on the DVR. The beauty of the new scheme is that this content will be available everywhere in the house (and elsewhere) shortly after recording.

I will update you guys on my progress as I work on this over the course of the week.
 
Cool! I tried a couple of years ago to cut the cord but wound up frustrated, mostly because of my lack of technical ability. You obviously don't have that problem.
 
Very nice Haywood. If I didn't have two small children I would probably go the same route as you.
 
What I'm doing is not really cord-cutting per se, as I will still have cable. I'm just getting rid of all the boxes and the fees that go with them and paring my programing package down to basic cable, which has everything that I actually watch and can't stream. I had to maintain a larger package than I wanted or needed just to get HD DVR service. Now I don't have to.

I have a small child, but she mostly streams kid's shows off Netflix, Amazon and PBS Kids via her Roku box. Her usage pattern is pretty typical in my household. We stream far more than we watch on cable. I considered cutting the cord entirely, but with the package I got, eliminating TV service altogether would not have saved me much money.
 
I cut the cord on Cable TV a month ago and haven't looked back. For the most part, I was recording my favorite shows on Tivo and watching them months later. I can get most of them on Netflix or Hulu by the time I get around to watching them.

So, I canceled my Cable TV service, returned the cable cards and boxes, and upgraded to the highest speed internet. Time Warner still gets my money, but instead of paying $175 a month I am now paying $60.

I purchased a Netflix account and Hulu account, so my total monthly payments are still well under $100. This was made that much easier because I already record all the local broadcast channels on my Windows Media Center PC. I use my Tivos to stream Netflix and my PC to stream Hulu (it shows in a window, so it isn't ideal). I plan on setting up my BluRay player to stream both accounts when I get around to it.

So far, so good! I am saving $80 a month and still get 90% of the stuff I want to watch. The one show I am missing is Red Eye on Fox News. I find that show absolutely hilarious, but now I cannot watch it.
 
Flint, you might want to look at getting a Roku 3 for $99. Roku has channels (apps) for Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, Vudu and tons of other streaming services. It also gives you access to huge numbers of educational, non-profit, religious and other programming at no cost. Some of the no-cost channels offer public domain movies. Others are provided by PBS and other broadcasters. When combined with something like Plex Media Server for local content, it is a convenient way to watch pretty much anything and everything. You can get a plugin for your Windows Media Center that will remove the ads and transcode your broadcast TV shows to MP4 and put them in a directory exposed to Plex, then watch them anywhere.
 
Haywood said:
The Comcast bastards never showed up to change our service over.
Click to expand...
Welcome to the Dark Side. :| Hope you brought sanitizer.
 
I've now wasted a total of five hours on the phone and on web chat with these useless assholes trying to sign up for service and get someone to come out and hook me up at the street. Every time, I get transferred from unhelpful idiot to unhelpful idiot with huge amounts of time on hold in between. It is almost as bad as dealing with the IRS.
 
Haywood said:
It is almost as bad as dealing with the IRS.
Click to expand...

Heh, no its not. You only have to pay the IRS once a year.

Seriousry, Haywood, I'm sorry you're going through so much trouble; they usually get the installation right, before the "right to cancel" time (it was 30 days, is it still?) was past.
Competition, ultimately, wins out. There seems to be a new shift in smartphone providers, wherein there are no long-term contracts, and prices seem to (finally) be falling. I'm still tempted to go with a standalone 4G transponder and get rid of everything, intranetz, cable TV and phone. Threads like yours just keep nudging me closer... :handgestures-thumbup:
 
As it turns out, the patch panel is not outside. My wife had an "aha" moment and showed me a small panel behind a door in the utility closet. I was able to figure it all out and now I'm hooked up and happy.
 
Are you using their Arris router? I switched to Comcast about 6 months ago for two weeks and I had nothing but trouble with that router. I hope that's not the case for you.
 
I am using the Arris router and have had zero problems with it thus far. If it becomes a headache, I'll just suck it up and buy my own gear.
 
I got the CableCARD working with Windows Media Center, but only for local channels. Comcast can't figure out why, so they are sending a tech out to my house free of charge Saturday afternoon.

In the meantime, I now have Windows 8 on the laptop and am installing Windows Media Center. I'm simultaneously experimenting with a bunch of different plug-ins and add-ons on my PC to see which ones work well and which ones I want. My goal is to have the laptop mostly set up and configured to use the CableCARD before the cable guy gets here, so we can do whatever is required without having to mess with my PC in the other room.
 
After spending many hours installing the new hard drive, installing windows and everything, I plugged the laptop into the HDMI cable, sat back on the couch with my new keyboard and remote and fired it all up. The video card maxes out at 1280x768, but that's livable until I can get something better. I walked my wife through all the cool customizations I spent hours setting up and then got down to cable. And that's when I discovered that the HDMI output on that laptop is not HDCP compliant. Talk about being bitch slapped. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or swear. I settled on swearing. Extensively. I just finished pricing out the components of a serviceable HTPC on Newegg and can do something for around $250 if I re-purpose the hard drive I just bought and the operating system that's loaded on it. Sadly, that will have to wait for a month or so while my wife gets some dental work done. In the meantime, I'll have to settle for using the laptop as a media server and background DVR. I can still schedule shows to record, transcode them and dump them to Plex.
 
I did a bunch more research. My long-term solution will be a new HTPC with an AMD A10 3.8Ghz quad-core APU on a MicroATX motherboard with 8GB of DDR3 1600 with the 1TB hybrid hard drive I bought for the laptop running Windows 8 Professional with Media Center. Short-term, I'm using the DLNA capabilities of the HD Homerun tuner to watch live TV on my PS3. Recorded shows get transcoded to mkv and put out where my Plex server can pick them up and expose them to the Roku boxes. It is a lttle clunky, but it gives me most of what I want until I can scrounge a few hundred bucks for hardware.
 
VICTORY!!! The laptop video card is not a problem after all. The goofy thing could not handle mirroring content to two screens at different resolutions. I extended the desktop, made the secondary monitor (my HDTV) primary and disabled the laptop screen. Voila! 1920x1080 resolution and suddenly I'm not getting that content protection error when I try to watch TV. I have no idea what this is, but I'm happy to have a working solution. The only fly in the ointment is that I'm now getting an error telling me that a file or files required for video playback are not working properly. I need to go to bed now, but I expect I should be able to fix it tomorrow.
 
I got everything working now and it runs exactly as I originally envisioned. DVR functionality works great. Watching TV is as simple as it should be. I have a gorgeous interface on top of my media library (though I still have a little bit of metadata cleanup to do). This was a huge pain in the ass to do, but totally worth it. I might want to upgrade to a faster PC at some point down the road, but the current setup is quite usable and should do the trick for awhile.
 
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