Cord Cutting is a lot of work

When I left my job at the big telco, they took away the courtesy services that were in place for 7 years. Yes, I enjoyed free internet and every TV channel in existence at no charge.

But when I moved on from said telco giant, the services would cost over $300 a month to retain. No thanks. I kept Internet, bought my own modem to avoid monthly rental fees and away I went. 

That was 2 years ago and I still have not mastered the cord cutter's life. Simply finding content is a gargantuan task up front. After finding as much free content as I could and buying into a few streaming platforms (Netflix, Hulu, etc) I still struggle to find something worthwhile to watch when I get free time (a rarity).

Strangely enough, I found myself missing the convenience of broadcast television. The random nature of televisions' broadcast schedule is full of surprises, which is a big difference from the streaming life. Streaming consists of paging though hundreds of choices, none of which seem all that great. 

At least if I'm gonna waste a bit of my life watching the boob tube, give me some broadcast nonsense like the price is right or a macgyver episode from the 80's. I'll take that over another crappy standup special on Netflix or a Seinfeld episode on Hulu, which I've already seen 5 times.

So I bought an antennae, spent 2 hours installing it in our attic, wall fished the wires down into the basement and bought an hd tuner with network connectivity. It's great except that I'm using plex to "transcode" the media into acceptable forms that my devices can handle and this old PC of mine can't keep up. Lots of spinning yellow circles and 100% CPU utilization. 

I initially bought the silicondust HD Homerun Connect; 2 tuners and its supported by plex. After immediately running into the transcoding issue which pins my old CPU in the plex server, I bought the more expensive silicondust HD homerun extend, which has a built-in transcoder. Though this has alleviated a bit of my pain, my system is still struggling to keep up.

So for this reason and a few more good uses we'll get out of it, I'm building my first PC. I went with the fastest quad core CPU Intel makes and I hope to overclock it to as close to 5 GHZ as I can, without sacrificing system stability. I do a lot of media transcoding and a lot of editing raw photography files in adobe lightroom CC, both of which perform best with the highest possible CPU clock rate you can afford to throw at them. Here's my parts list: My Parts List

So I've overbuilt this system in the hopes of having an incredible home media theatre device which can handle anything I throw at it, including recording my over the air programs on plex's DVR. I bought a plex pass, which unlocks that function. I'll also have an incredibly powerful editing machine to replace my 7 year old MBP, which struggles to keep up with my demands. 

Oh yeah, I also signed up for Verizon's 1 Gig internet service. It's a fiber handoff to my house, which is so much more reliable than Comcast's "hybrid fiber/copper" infrastructure. I won't bore you with the technical specifics, but I spent 5 years as a field tech and fiber is not succeptable to any of the restraints of physics that copper infrastructure suffers from. No noise, no constrained upload speeds and no AGC amplifier modules failing every time it gets hot in all the copper infrastructure. The kicker? It's only $5 more per month than I'm paying Comcast for 200 Mbps down/10 Mbps up. No contract, no termimation fees, no equipment rental. No data caps. Yes, I will take 1000 Mbps download and 1000 Mbps upload speeds for $5 more per month. Yes please.

So 2 years into my cord cutting experience and I'm kind of exhausted by it. If this antennae/plex Dvr running on my new super duper PC doesn't offer a more elegant solution and tie all this disparate streaming nonsense together, I may give up and sign up for TV service once again.

But not without a fight.

Later,

Lap