You regular readers (all three of you) know that this blog bounces back and forth between theology and nerd stuff with frightening regularity. This is going to be a nerdy post. You have been warned.

Nearly 5 years ago we got rid of our Dish Network satellite TV service and just went to watching what we could get over the air. We’ve evolved the setup slightly over the last 5 years, primarily by adding Netflix as a video source (our kids were 4, 3, and newborn back then, and have slightly more demands as 9, 8, and 5 now) and by adding a 27" iMac in our living room that gets used as a video-watching device on a regular basis.

The Basic Setup

Basement Family Room: Big LCD TV. HTPC running Windows 7. HDHomeRun networked tuner (still the 5-year-old original version) hooked up to it. 5 TB of hard drive space in that PC for storing recorded TV and other video. Running Plex Media Server to serve files to the rest of the house. Using Windows Media Center to record TV shows and playback video down there. Works like a charm. That’s the most stable, reliable bit of the system.

My bedroom: Ancient Mac Mini running some old version of OS X hooked up to a 20" monitor, running an older version of Plex’s Mac desktop app. Great for watching recorded TV shows. Not so great for everything else; the Plex Netflix plugin broke months ago, so if we want to watch Netflix most of the time we have to get up and open a browser and watch it that way. The Plex HDHomeRun plugin broke years ago, so if we want to watch live TV we open up the HDHomeRun app and play the video through VLC. Not integrated very well, but it works.

Living room: 27" iMac running OS X Mavericks. Here’s where the real frustration begins. Playback of HDHomeRun live video streams through VLC is broken in Mavericks. It’s a reported issue between VLC and Mavericks that hasn’t gotten fixed yet. I can get HDHomeRun to work acceptably through the older Plex app if I manually tune the HDHomeRun device first and then kick up Plex to play the video stream.

However, the old Plex app is now causing serious lockups on the iMac when I ping Plex Media Server to watch recorded shows. As in the only way to recover is to do a hard reboot on the iMac. The new version of Plex’s app (Plex Home Theater, they call it) seems to work OK. Which is great, however, as far as I can tell there’s no good way to view the HDHomeRun video in Plex Home Theater. Grrrr.

So at the moment it would appear that for the iMac I’m going to need to juggle multiple versions of the Plex app depending on what I want to watch. Annoying.

At least I’m saving money

When I remember that we were previously spending something like $60/month on satellite, and now we’re paying $8/mo for Netflix, we’ve been saving around $600 a year for 5 years… maybe we should invest a little bit of that savings on improving the infrastructure. (Do you think my wife will buy that argument? Heh.) But what should I do to improve things?

Where do I go from here?

The home media server solution is working really well, and Windows 7 recording the TV shows is reliable, pretty much seamless. Gonna keep it going as long as I can.

I know the HDHomeRun hardware has been upgraded 3 or 4 times since I bought my original device. Don’t know if I’d get any significant improvements from buying a new one, but it’s hard to be motivated to drop $100 on a new one when the old one still works so well.

I think in the living room I’ve basically locked myself into the iMac solution since we don’t have the room for (or the desire for) a big real TV in the living room. If we move to a new house in the next year or two, we’ll re-evaluate.

Back in our bedroom I think the solution that would get us closest is to replace the Mac Mini and monitor with a real TV and some version of set-top box - maybe a Roku or the new Amazon FireTv. FireTV is new, but it looks like it would get us Netflix, Amazon Video, ESPN video, and even integrate with Plex. About the only thing it wouldn’t support is the HDHomeRun integration; but I suppose I could always split off a signal from the antenna in the attic and run a TV signal down to the TV and use its tuners natively.

That’s all great, but…

While a nerd can dream, in reality we’ll likely be trying to sell our current house and buy a larger one (3 daughters and only one upstairs bathroom!) in the next year or two. So in reality I suppose we’ll hang on with what we’ve got until we make a move, and then re-assess the entire setup at that point.

A little bit of perspective

Just so I don’t sound like a totally self-absorbed idiot for the entire post, let me note that I remember moving from a black-and-white TV to our first color TV back when I was a kid, and in going to a video rental store for the first time when you had to choose between VHS and Betamax versions of the videos. Compared to those days… I guess our expectations have gone up a bit in 30 years.