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Thinking about ditching the dish.... lots of questions


conn-e-rot

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School me

I currently have directv costs us about $100 a month thinking about ditching it for roku or something similar.  

What device do you recommend?

What channels are available? 

Are there good DVR options available?

Are current shows/series available? 

What services do you recommend?

What are the costs of the services you use?

What is your internet speed?

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I use an mk808b android tv stick. Has wifi, hdmi out and a couple usb ports, controls with any wireless mouse or pointer doohickey. you can use it to download any movie or TV show via torrent. Popular shows are usually up on pirate bay right after they air, so no huge inconvenience. You can get all the networks over the air with an antenna. The android stick also supports netflix, hulu, amazon etc so you can watch all that shit too. They cost around $40 and are much more versatile than a roku, can do anything an android phone or tablet can including 3 gaming. Can also run Dos or windows emulators and play downloaded roms of games like quake, halo etc...

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I use Hulu and Netflix. and I game. I have the standard 15 mbts although it seems to run faster than most. I pay $40 for internet and $8 each hulu and Netflix. $56 total. Youll be fine with those as netflix has a ton of tv shows and movies. Im getting to the point after having it for 8 years or so that I dont have a whole lot to watch. hulu is nice for catching up on current shows. and I use redbox for movies I want to see sooner.

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I have OTA for local TV and football, buy blu-ray movies via VUDU, Amazon for their Prime free stuff, a Roku I hardly ever use anymore, and a Chromecast for watching Youtube videos on my TV.  

 

I dropped Netflix since I couldn't find anything to watch, and don't care for Hulu.

 

Screw cable TV....I only need their internet service for streaming and playing games online (BF4, COD-G, NFS-Rivals on my PS4).  

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Find someone else that has dish, have them get a extra receiver on their account, take that receiver to your house and hook it up to the dish you already have, and split the bill.

Edited by 2talltim
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Of course the day I talk up the mk808b it figures I go to turn it on and it's stuck on the boot screen. Ordered the newest fastest one before leaving for work. While there I realized I could probably just re-flash the os rom. Got home and had the thing running again in ten minutes. Now I'll have 2. Am thinking of trying to find a cheap 27" tv to put in the garage and hook it up to the 808 so I can download service manuals on pdf and display them on it instead of getting greasy fingerprints on my phone.

Back to topic, we must be dumb or lazy, we have cable, high speed internet, netflix, amazon, cable on demand movies etc... I've thought about shutting off cable but I love having a dvr and coming home from work to find new episodes of whatever series I'm addicted to at the time waiting for me. Yes I can torrent them for free but it takes time and my cable company has busted me a few times downloading sopranos.

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Here is a thread about the Roku box and some other options.

 

http://ohioriders.net/index.php?/topic/103203-roku23-vs-cable/?hl=roku

 

Yes I can torrent them for free but it takes time and my cable company has busted me a few times downloading sopranos.

 

 

VPN will stop that. Not that difficult to set up.

Or you can get an "Off the shelf" version for little cash.

Like this one https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/buy-vpn/

Edited by Strictly Street
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Yeah I have an account with private tunnel but I can't get it to jive with the 808. There's a kernel missing called tun.co so I rooted it and flashed in a rom that supposedly had this tun.co but it still wouldn't work. The only time the cable company would say anything was when I would let the download go too long and it would start seeding. I guess hbo tracks the ip address of people uploading their content.

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Yeah I have an account with private tunnel but I can't get it to jive with the 808. There's a kernel missing called tun.co so I rooted it and flashed in a rom that supposedly had this tun.co but it still wouldn't work. The only time the cable company would say anything was when I would let the download go too long and it would start seeding. I guess hbo tracks the ip address of people uploading their content.

 

A kernel called fun.co, um you might want to look into that. Doesn't sound quite right.

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I use a Mohu leaf paper thin indoor antenna. Works good, screw paying for tv.

Can I get more details about this?  I need to know what antenna will work for us.  My inlaws use huge rabbit ears and still lose signal, but also have almost no cell service.  They are only 5 miles from our house so its weird.  The website where you can check what an address will need for signal says I can use the unpowered basic antenna but I wan to see what others say.

 

How far do you think you are from the signal antenna/station?  

 

I am dropping everything Friday and CANNOT WAIT, Cable is so shitty anymore and with Roku and Netflix all I do is watch whatever I want with no commercials, and movies anytime.  Shit, I haven't even touched the surface of the movies yet I am sure there are so many on there.  Will probably get Prime come new years too, but I didn't like Hulu, just didn't see enough stuff Id watch except South Park but I can get that online.

 

Only thing I will miss is sports, but anymore ABC/CBS shows enough to keep me interested.  Losing F1 and GP will suck the most.  Fuck the cable companies and just watch South Park episode this season about all this lol.  

 

Also, plan to double my internet speed for 5.00 more and then the Netflix is 8 a month so 13 dollars, which is WAY less than the 65 we are paying right now for cable.

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Madcat, I don't know what to tell you more about the antenna. It's about the dimension of a piece of paper and works better than the rabbit ears did. Not sure where my local towers are. I know there were 3 channels with football games on yesterday but I'm not sure which ones they were.

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I have one of these on my kids tv and it picks up all the Columbus channels and we live 60 miles from the signal towers, we are also on top of a hill. Might only be 50ish miles by the crow flies

http://mobile.walmart.com/m/phoenix#ip/RCA-Outdoor-Digital-Video-Broadcast-Terrestrial-with-Amplified-Antenna/20976675

Edited by 2talltim
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Tim, yeah our internet will be something like 45 dollars for the mid level, which is fine for us.  I stream Netflix and 2 WIFI pcs, 2 cell phones, and a tablet at the same time no issue.

 

Thanks for the info on the antennas all, I am going to try a few from local places, actually Biglots has 1 that goes on the back of the TV so that would be nice so it's not all huge and rabbit ears.  I just don't want those lol.

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Yeah I have an account with private tunnel but I can't get it to jive with the 808. There's a kernel missing called tun.co so I rooted it and flashed in a rom that supposedly had this tun.co but it still wouldn't work. The only time the cable company would say anything was when I would let the download go too long and it would start seeding. I guess hbo tracks the ip address of people uploading their content.

 

That makes absolutely no sense to me at all.

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A kernel called fun.co, um you might want to look into that. Doesn't sound quite right.

TUN.co. read much? Tun.co is the kernel you need in order to run a private TUNnel. Weird tho, I can run openvpn connect on my phone with no problem, but it just won't run on the 808b, says it cannot find tun.co so I downloaded an app that supposedly installs it but it just freezes the device. We don't torrent hbo stuff any more any way, a friend of ours lets us use her hbogo sign on info.

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TUN.co. read much? Tun.co is the kernel you need in order to run a private TUNnel. Weird tho, I can run openvpn connect on my phone with no problem, but it just won't run on the 808b, says it cannot find tun.co so I downloaded an app that supposedly installs it but it just freezes the device. We don't torrent hbo stuff any more any way, a friend of ours lets us use her hbogo sign on info.

 

Ah, after looking at the MK-808b I understand what you're trying to do.  Sounds like you need to make an investment in a centralized media server, or at least something that can run Sickbeard/SABnzbd with a SSL (or VPN, if you really want to get pedantic) connection to a Usenet host.

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I have a 2nd router in my house through which I network my media drive, then stream it to any device in my home via xbmc. I suppose I could just torrent from my phone which will run openvpn connect and then upload to the networked media drive and stream to my tv stick... or just ignore my cable company and pirate whatever I want.

Edited by CrazySkullCrusher
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A HD hooked up to a "stupid" SAN does not a media server make. If you want to do it on the cheap, invest the $35 in a Raspberry Pi and run some sort of NAS flavor of Raspbian (the name escapes me, but I know it's out there) so you can at least offload and automate the fetching part of things. If you wanted a longer lasting solution, invest in a Synology NAS with some WD Red drives, with hat you'll be able to run full scale Plex (with the right device), and basically run your own cloud service, stream to your phone from the house, run your own Dropbox, make your own VPN connection, the works.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

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