Well...I know your on the upper end of audio/video stuff, so I'm sure you have a pretty expensive/crazy setup, but I'd still like to hear about it.
Its not really expensive, Im a pretty frugal kinda guy when it comes to most of this stuff :lol:. There are a few ways you can go about it. First off, it depends on what shows you watch and if the stations are local or cable. Do you usually DVR something and watch it, or do you plop your ass in front of the TV at 8PM every night when all the good shit starts coming on? The easiest way to do it would be just to grab a Netflix or Hulu+ account, but in that event, youll still need front ends (media players) to play it on your TV. Apple TVs come with Netflix support out of the box, and Im pretty sure it does Hulu too. Im not positive on how many concurrent connections Hulu will let you have, but Netflix will give you 4 of them for $12 per month. The main issue with said services, when is the show available to watch? You may be days or weeks off from watching something airing tonight. Its easy to set up and simple to use, the main drawback being about content availability. For the general population, this is the route I recommend. Nearly anybody can do it.
...and now, my way. I have a Usenet account, and get unlimited bandwidth for $8 per month. That $8 gets me every TV show and movie Im looking for. I have the fully automatic Usenet reader, Sabnzbd handling all of the RSS feeds received from Sickbeard, the self proclaimed internet DVR. Sickbeard searches for all of my TV shows and Sabnzbd retrieves them, renames them, and categorizes them by title and season. Im also running Couchpotato, which is essentially like Sickbeard but for movies. I type in what I want in Couchpotato, and it goes out and finds it. All of this is set up at my house, with the front ends being little Android media players that have been modified to run XBMC. I usually have my shows within an hour or 2 of it airing, in 720p mkv files. Sometimes, Ill backlog a season, and set it to grab Web-DLs, which are usually iTunes rips and of top notch quality. Way better quality than any service provider. To my knowledge, no cable service providers offer a 1080p signal. The advantages here are quality and how quickly you receive a show. The big gotcha, you need to set some shit up. I run all of that stuff on my home server, which is nothing but a pile of parts from off-lease servers of days gone by. Any old desktop computer can be used as a media server, all it has to do is provide the services mentioned above as well as store and share the files. Those services need to be set up, which isnt too bad, depending on if youre that kind of person. The other part is the media players, there isnt any off the shelf stuff that offers the XBMC experience. It really blows away any interface you can get with any consumer product. There are many small Android media players out there, such as the CuBox, XIOS DS, Ouya, and a host of others. 2nd generation Apple TVs also make fine candidates, but everything needs to be set up. The beauty of it is once its all set up, its fairly easy to use. Sickbeard and Sabnzbd are pretty much set it and forget it type programs, the only required interaction being searching for new TV series or movies. The positives here; faster content delivery, user defined quality, cheaper monthly service. The negatives; higher up front cost, requires some technical know how. Your average computer geek should have no trouble setting up that sort of thing. If thats not you, proceed to option 1 :lol:
