I’ve been increasingly dissatisfied with my home theater setup.
Primarily, the home theater is designed around the TV and a 5.1 Dolby Digital audio system, so it’s tuned for movies and TV shows and videogames (to a much lesser extent music and photos and web surfing).
In the most recent iteration (which has been crumbling slowly as I’ve lost the will to maintain it), I had:
– Tivo (primary source of TV, mostly recorded, but some live)
– Netflix (running on the XBox 360, for TV and Movies)
– DVDs (embodied in 3 DVD jukeboxes, which should have been the primary source of movies, but which was too brittle to be real useful)
– Mac Mini (10.5, 1gb, 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo) running XBMC (to which I was slowly ripping the DVDs)
To run this, we pay for DirecTV (~$70/mo) and Netflix streaming (~$10/mo).
And when we want to watch a particular show, we have to search several places for it.
When I approached the problem of shutting off DirecTV a couple years ago, I was stymied by 3 hard requirements:
– lack of children’s TV on Netflix
– we watched a handful of shows on “cable” channels (SciFi, Food Net, etc)
– we would still “channel surf” live TV occasionally
In the intervening years, all three of these requirements were mitigated, and we also acquired a free OTA antenna (thanks, Anthony!).
Still, nothing was going to change until something went awry; that happened last week, when the Tivo finally started giving up the ghost.
I sprung into action.