So a couple of weeks ago I talked about the nerd side of getting rid of the dish. I’m still playing around with the configuration some, but I think I’m getting close to having a good usable solution. Becky keeps telling me “just teach me how to use it once it’s all working”, so I guess I should try to get to that point sooner rather than later.

But the other side of this is the why – why get rid of the Dish? Was it really just the $60/month we were spending? (We bought enough new hardware it’ll take us several months to break even.) Or is there more to it?

I’ll admit I didn’t come to it in quite this direction; my push to switch things up was driven a lot by the desire to have an HD DVR option. But as I sat with my Dish remote in hand and flipped through the channels, I came to the realization that out of the 150 channels available for our viewing, we’d never watched most of them. Most of them had programming that we couldn’t care about in the least. For the most part we spent our tv-watching time tuned to one of our local network stations. The exceptions: ESPN for sports, Nick and Disney for some kids programming. Oh, and a backlog of Food Channel shows on the DVR that never really went away. So we talked about it, and we agreed there were other ways we could access the sorts of programming we really wanted to watch, and that we’d be OK with missing the rest of it. So we cut the cord.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit there are things I’m gonna miss. Monday Night Football on ESPN, for example. And the Cubs games on WGN. (OK, maybe it’s good for my mental health to miss those…) But on the whole it’s been a positive thing. What we’ve eliminated is the mindless noise at night. We had a bad habit of just turning the TV on as we headed towards bed, watching the Cubs if they were on, but often just pulling up Sportscenter on ESPN and ignoring it while we read books and such before going to sleep. Without ESPN available, we’ve either had to decide to watch something we specifically wanted to enjoy (we’re catching up on 30 Rock) – or we just leave it off. And that’s been a very good thing.

Back before we first got a Tivo, I wondered (a lot) whether the Tivo would be a good thing, or whether it would just cause us to watch more TV. It ended up being the former; the Tivo allowed us to watch the shows we wanted, when we wanted, without having to schedule our lives around the start times. (Oh, and we got 20% of our TV-watching lives back in skipped commercials.)

Before we got rid of the Dish, I wondered if we’d just hate it and miss the programming. But I’m pretty much believing now that we will make do just fine, and it will be an improvement overall in how we spend our time and allow ourselves to be entertained distracted.

Now, believe me, there are a couple of internet-based options that I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on. If MLB.tv can ever get rid of their silly blackout restrictions (there are six teams that Iowans can’t watch. most blacked-out state in the country!), I’d subscribe in a heartbeat, and that’d let me watch Cubs games again. And I’d really love to get ESPN360.com, but that’d require me to switch internet service providers… and I’m not real keen on that idea, either. Ah well. I should just take the sage advice given by Bob the Tomato after he catches Larry the Cucumber overly engrossed in a TV show: “maybe you should read a book.” Yeah.

So we’re getting rid of our Dish. We’ve had cable or satellite TV pretty much ever since we moved into town seven years ago, but now we’re cutting the cable. Now, we’re not giving up television altogether; we’re just switching to a setup that will let us record and playback over-the-air TV, and giving up the paid stuff. There are a couple of sides to this, so I’ll make it a couple of posts. This is the nerd post. You have been forewarned.

The Goal
The Dish DVR we are replacing allowed us to record shows and watch them on either of our two TV locations, one downstairs in the family room, the other our little 13″ standard-def TV in our bedroom. We don’t watch the upstairs one that much, but it is very handy to keep around for times when the girls want to watch a show, and for in the mornings when they’re awake but we want to sleep in some. We didn’t have HD through Dish Network; I really wanted HD. Oh, and I’d really like to still be able to watch some Cubs games. That’s about it.

What We Ended Up With: Downstairs

To go with the 42″ Vizio LCD TV downstairs we invested in a relatively-inexpensive tower PC. It’s got a dual-core Pentium processor, 4GB of RAM (I know, I know, the 32-bit OS won’t use all 4, but that was the stock configuration), a 1TB hard drive, and lots of room to expand. It came with Windows Vista Basic (ick); I upgraded it to Windows 7 RC, and have preordered a regular Win 7 license for it. Add a Windows Media Center remote, and it works pretty smoothly. A little noisier than I’d like, but tolerable. This machine is our primary recording unit.

For an OTA tuner, I got a HDHomeRun networked tuner. If there’s one piece of this system that I’m most happy with, it’s the HDHomeRun. It’s got dual tuners in it. Basically, you plug in your OTA antenna and your ethernet to the back of the tuner, and you’re done. There’s a small piece of software to install, but then Windows Media Center (and EyeTV on the Mac) pick it up with no trouble whatsoever. (Supposedly XBMC in Windows will handle the HDHomeRun, too, but I haven’t been able to get it to work.)

The final component downstairs is an old tower (I forget the specs) running Ubuntu. I mostly use it as a place to save backups; there is just north of 1TB of disk space in it. I’ve also got some recorded TV stored on it which gets served up to the other computers on the network.

What We Ended Up With: Upstairs

Our little friend the Mac Mini moved upstairs. To go with it, I found a Dell 22″ 1920×1080 LCD display on sale cheap. While we do have EyeTV installed, and could record from upstairs, the limited HDD space on the Mini (100GB) has me recording downstairs instead. (Yeah, I could do some fun AppleScripting to move files to a different machine once they are done recording… but that’s more work than I wanted right now.) The Mini is running XBMC for playback, and in the event we want to watch something live upstairs, we switch over to EyeTV. Not as elegant as I’d like, but it works pretty well.

What We Ended Up With: The Headaches

The biggest challenge in this setup is that I’m the idiot who’s running three different OSs among my three computers. Oh, and also running a beta OS on the Windows box. So Windows 7 Media Center records OTA TV into a new file format (.wtv). WTV files aren’t yet supported by the FFmpeg codec, which means XBMC won’t play them. Fortunately, W7 provides a WTV-to-DVRMS converter, and FFmpeg does support DVRMS. So, I’ve got a little nightly batch file that runs to convert all of the day’s WTV recordings to DVRMS and file them off in appropriate directories in the shared library area.

Sooner or later the available toolset will catch up with the Windows 7 WTV format, at which point things like commercial skipping and direct playback in XBMC will be available, smoothing things out a bit. For now, though, we’ve got a workable solution that records the shows we want to watch and lets us watch them in either of our two desired locations, and the ability to get rid of a monthly bill from Dish for a bunch of channels we never watch.

I haven’t enjoyed a single episode of TV quite so much in a while. I’m a couple weeks behind on Dr. Who, but finally watched the episode called “Blink” tonight. A very, very good episode. [Spoilers ahead, so if you're going to watch it and want to be surprised, don't read on.]

First of all, the idea of weeping stone angels as quantum-locked beings who are only alive when no one is looking at them? Awesome. Now, the whole time-travel plot device of having someone send messages to themself in the past is far from new – Phillip K. Dick wrote a short story with that premise, which got adapted into a so-so movie called Paycheck a few years back. But it was really well done here. And the whole final scene where the human has one-up on the Doctor, because she knows what’s gonna happen, and he doesn’t yet? Brilliant. And so well done.

Dr. Who can be really cheesy at times, but this season has done well. And Blink is definitely the best episode to date.