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Cable-Free TV
After nearly forty years of being off the mainstream media grid, I’ve finally decided to re-connect: but this time it’s on my terms.
by Lee H Goldberg
With the exception of the dozen-odd nights I spend in hotels each year and the year or so when I lived in the condo that my wife Catherine had bought, I’ve lived a cable-free life. My decision to limit the amount of available video in the house to what we could pull off an antenna and rent from the video store (now supplanted by Netflix) has, for the most part, been a good one, even if it has earned us the nickname of The Amish Family in our neighborhood. That’s not to say we live by the light of kerosene lamps here in the wilds of New Jersey. The 10 Mbit/s fiber connection that comes to our house lets us watch lots of interesting Web content on our computers and allows our Roku streaming video box to deliver whatever Netflix has in its Watch Instantly library to the single TV we keep in the family room. This has provided enough entertainment to keep everyone relatively happy but my family is now pressuring me to get a bit more television into the house. I’ve agreed to do it, as long as it does not involve paying another monthly fee to some damned cable, phone or satellite provider.
Our plan to expand the family’s media horizons involves both capturing the broadcast TV available to us via a rooftop antenna and building up a media server to sit next to the 32-inch HDTV we acquired recently when our 20-year old Sony finally died. The antenna part of the scheme is relatively simple, except for the fact that, due to our distance from most local transmitters, we’ll need a good rooftop unit with a rotating mast to get more than a handful of stations. The media server I’ll be building up promises to be a bit more complicated.
I’m hoping to use a small, power-efficient computer to manage and serve our modest music and video collection as well as provide convenient access to web-based video services like Hulu, LiveStation, and all the content listed in the Online Video Guide. The hardware portion of the media server should be pretty straightforward, an HDMI-capable microATX motherboard, a hard drive, case, and Blu-Ray reader, pulled together from the many bargains available from Fry’s Electronics or Tiger Direct should do just fine. The real source of confusion for this project is selecting an operating system and a media server application from the rich set of choices that have emerged over the past couple of years.
For a non-hacker like myself, it’s a tough choice between a Linux-based operating system and Windows. While Linux is more efficient and less prone to security problems and crashes, using it on my server would mean a smaller selection of applications available to me and that I’d have to march up a steep learning curve to become proficient enough to do a proper installation. Windows, on the other hand, is a known quantity...but I’m not sure I want my media appliance to suffer from the same instabilities, security issues, and bloatware syndrome that I’m forced to deal with on my damned laptop. If I do go with Windows XP (no Vista or 7 for me please), I’ll still have to figure out whether their Media Center version gives me enough functionality or, more likely, I’ll simply load XP Pro and put the applications of my choice on top of it.
Regardless of which OS I choose, there is enough media player software out there that finding the right one (and installing it properly) may be one of the toughest parts of the project. If I do go with Linux, my current options include the MythTV open-source DVR package that’s been well-documented by Mathew Gast in his blog at O’Reilly Media. I’m also looking into XMBC, a complete media center that claims to run equally well on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Xbox platforms.
Now that the first phase of the custom LED lighting system I built is installed and running on my scooter (see my April 2009 Editorial for details), I’ll probably start my cable-free TV project by installing the antenna and rotor system on our roof. This will give me a bit more time to figure out which PC hardware I want to buy and which software to load onto it. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to draw inspiration from other folks in the cable-free community like the DIY Linux DVR blog and the intrepid soul who is documenting his recent conversion to IPTV on his blog. Of course I’ll also look forward to your suggestions – both for which technologies to use and for what content to run on my new system.
Comments? Questions? Suggestions for my media server project? Write me at lhg at en-genius dot net.
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