So, the master plan here was to cancel our cable television service, at least for the summer. With me working 10 hour days and Paula spending more time outside (or at least wanting to) there’s not a lot of sense in paying $80 for cable television that we’re not using. So I decided to find a way to lose that cost but still maintain some level of video entertainment for those rainy nights.
Phase 1 was the Roku Netflix Box. I hooked it all up and the only problem was some distortion and video noise, which I had first thought was the cheap component cables I used. Turned out that I saw the same problem on my XBOX 360, so I swapped the new remote controlled switch box back for the old manual one, and now things work really well. Paula’s been watching a lot of Masterpiece Theater-type movies on it, and I was watching some Justice League, Superman, and old Buck Rogers episodes. Great picture, you can’t even tell it’s being streamed off the Interwebz. The only “problem” would be the amount of bandwidth it uses – if Paula is watching something, it takes up all available bandwidth so I can’t play World of Warcraft. Not sure if bumping our cable Internet speed from 6M to 8 will help, as the Netflix box might just take the additional 2M as well.
Phase 2 went in today. I picked up a 40G Apple TV box. Not only can we rent iTunes movies and television shows with it, but anything I have on my laptop can be streamed as well. Any movie iTunes supports can be played on Apple TV. I can also stream my music and any pictures I have on my system. (To be fair, this was already possible with my XBOX 360 and nullriver’s Connect360 program. The main difference between the two is that the XBOX360 can play AVI and Windows Media Format, while the Apple TV does not.)
This gives us three ways to watch stuff. The Roku box to watch stuff from Netflix – costs us $14.95 a month for unlimited streaming. The Apple TV movie and television episode rentals from iTunes Store, which ranges from $2 – $5 depending on what it is (High Def costs more, naturally.) Finally, I can use the Elgato EyeTV on my laptop to record television off cable, convert it to Apple TV format, and sync that to the Apple TV. I have already tested this, and the only hitch is how long it takes to convert from Elgato’s EyeTV format to Apple TV format. (And a fourth method would be DVD rentals from Netflix, but that’s not exactly On Demand. Takes two days to get a disc to us, assuming we remembered to send the old ones back.) I still have the XBOX360 to play DVD’s, which I have been using since our Toshiba DVD player is having issues with color balance. I used the Surround Sound link from that for the Apple TV, so it’s kind of a convaluted setup at the moment. Hopefully I’ll be able to make better sense out of it once we lose the Comcast box – that frees up a connection. Plus, I plan on adding a Blu-Ray player at some point. More research to be done…