This is how it starts

My good friend John was in town this week, and we were talking about our respective Home Theater setups. I already knew he did a lot of torrents and was using a server (Vista based) to transfer over his TV shows to an MVIX , which then played on his TV. What I didn't know about, was that he had this system automated. I had wrongfully assumed that he was manually searching and downloading these torrents and I was being very slick with my Tivo setup. Clearly, I was wrong lol.

Basically, he has Mico set up as his torrent client and he has it setup with RSS feeds of tv shows he gets from TVRSS and he has it set to auto download new episodes. The more we talked the more I started thinking this was the way to go, and that my Apple TV isn't going to cut it.

My current set up is:

Samsung 46" 720 DLP
Tivo Series 3 HD
Onkyo Surround Amp with 4 HDMI inputs.
Apple TV
Sony BlueRay (ver 2.0)
Mac Pro desktop in a different room
Airport Wireless N router
Netgear XAV101 plug in ethernet adaptors (for making an internet hardline connection out of a wall plug)

For movies, my system was to take the DVDs and use MactheRipper (which is excellent) to rip into Video TS folders and save them onto an external drive as backup. Then I would use handbrake to convert them to Apple TV format and insert them into iTunes. After that, I would do a quick grab of the cover art, and copy paste the movie info into the meta for movie in iTunes and I could access the movies remotely from iTunes via the Apple TV and be good to go.

It was nice because now you can scan a ton of movies, see the cover art and read about it and decide if you want to watch or whatever - people loved it. But, it was a bit of work and one that you might miss is that you just have the movie and not the actual DVD - which means no subtitle access, or extra features.

So the Tivo is pretty obvious, and works great. And now they have Watch it Now for Netflix, which is is nice so you don't need a Roku box or Xbox.

So why am I changing? A few reasons.

1. The Apple TV system is not perfect. Its good, but could be better. To many steps to get the DVDs formatted properly, missing all of the DVD, etc..

2. The money - I am paying $80/month for Digital Cable and the basic HD package which has the major networks and a few other things like HDNet. Plus, $13/mo for Tivo. Which works out to $93/month or $1,116 per year. Over $1,000 a year for TV?!?! DAMN! Yes, that's crazy when you look at it like that. Especially when you consider I pretty much never watch TV unless it has been Tivo'd. I don't like to, nor have time to, just sit around and surf channels for no reason, plus I have grown to HATE commercials and like everyone already knows, there is never anything on TV anyway. So why am I paying $1,000 a year to watch Lost, 24, BSG, Top Chef and a few other shows? Especially when you can watch any of them for FREE the next day on Hulu or the network web sites.

I'll tell you why - because no one wants to huddle around a computer monitor with a bunch of friends. Although I have a nice 24 inch HD monitor, the 46 inch DLP is still nicer and with better sound.

Yeah, from time to time my GF and I have hooked up her macbook to the TV and it works great, but still, yo uhave to go through the process.

Which leaves me at the 2009 mac mini - and which is where I'll pick up next time :)