XBMC was what first drove me to get all of our DVDs onto a computer and it also drove me to softmod our Xbox following a guide on Lifehacker. When the DVD drive stopped working in our Xbox, I decided to repurpose it as a device that would play movies and TV episodes, and it does a great job at that. After we finally bought a DVD remote for five bucks, it worked really well. This setup doesn’t do everything, but it’s pretty good at playing back DVDs.

Goals:

• Play back our media collection – Check.
• Ability to watch and record TV – Nope.
• Watch Netflix from any TV – Sort of, through PlayOn

Other Parts of Cutting the Cord:

Cutting the Cord: Introduction
Backend: Desktop Computer (acting as file server) and TV Tuner
Master Bedroom: Roku streaming
Living Room: HTPC and TV w/ built-in Netflix
Basement: Original Xbox with XBMC

HTPC

When we cancelled our satellite dish subscription, we knew that we wanted some way to record our favorite TV shows. With kids it’s hard to watch TV on a schedule (like if our favorite show is on Thursday nights at the same time our kids go to bed, for example).

The first thing that we bought after cancelling satellite was a little computer (it’s an Acer Aspire Revo). It’s powerful enough to do almost everything we want it to (it’s not very good for watching Netflix streaming).

Although the computer came with a wireless keyboard and mouse, we knew we needed a remote control. We bought the Gyration Air Music Remote, which was $40 after a rebate. Lots of remotes would do, but we’ve liked this one pretty good since it can also act as a mouse (you use it kind of like a Wii Remote) for those times when the computer just isn’t acting right.

Windows Media Center

Windows Media Center comes built-in with recent versions of Windows. It does a pretty good job when we want to watch TV, schedule recordings, or play back shows it has recorded. We haven’t got this to work very well over the network yet, but the little Acer Aspire Revo has no problems recording two HD shows at once, even if it’s playing back another. Windows Media Center is pretty easy to use with a good remote – just press the big green button to get it running!

XBMC

XBMC is a great, free program for playing media from local or network sources. It’s similar to Plex (which was actually split off from XBMC a few years back) in that it shows all your media with posters and other artwork. Using it with the Media Center remote has worked pretty well, but there’s a little more learning curve to the interface than Media Center, in my opinion. To run XBMC, we have a little launcher app that opens it from inside Media Center. We could do some more fiddling with the remote to make this easier, but that’s been a bit tricky to figure out.

Hulu Desktop

Hulu Desktop is the best way to watch Hulu. It’s pretty easy to navigate, especially if you’ve set up an account with your favorite shows to watch. We’ve done a free trial of Hulu Plus, and while that works great with Hulu Desktop and also allows you to access the Roku Channel or view on other streaming media players, we came back to Hulu Desktop after we found that almost all of what we watch was here, as long as we don’t get too far behind in watching new series that come out. Psych is one of our favorite shows, and it was easy to watch here. We definitely don’t mind the few commercials that we have to watch to get TV that we can’t watch in other places.

TV w/ Built-in Streaming

Lots of TVs these days have built-in Netflix streaming (and other channels, too), and that’s how we watch Netflix in our living room. Our Sony TV doesn’t seem to be able to provide a consistent stream all the time (sometimes during the day it has to buffer quite a bit), but the quality is pretty good, and it’s pretty easy to navigate. If we have too many problems streaming Netflix through the TV, we usually watch it through the Wii’s Netflix player.

Goals:

• Play back our media collection – Check. It’s not as easy jumping around between things, but it works great once you’re in XBMC.
• Ability to watch and record TV – Check. It’s the only way to do that with our current setup.
• Watch Netflix from – Check. It works great about 75% of the time, and it works pretty good the rest of the time if you let it buffer the show you want to watch before you sit down.

Other Parts of Cutting the Cord:

Cutting the Cord: Introduction
Backend: Desktop Computer (acting as file server) and TV Tuner
Master Bedroom: Roku streaming
Living Room: HTPC and TV w/ built-in Netflix
Basement: Original Xbox with XBMC

Roku Streaming Player

The Roku was the first device that streamed Netflix movies. I think it’s still one of the best. This little box is fairly cheap ($60-100, depending on the model) and it can do a lot via its channels and it’s pretty easy to pick up and use. Aside from Netflix, here are some of the other channels that we use frequently:

MLB.tv

I’m a huge baseball fan, and without cable TV I don’t get many games. I subscribe to MLB.tv, which I can watch through the Roku’s MLB.tv Channel or via the computer. This lets me watch all the games, except the local teams, which I can listen to live but not watch (I’m in New Mexico, so that means I can’t watch the Rockies or Diamondbacks games until after they’re over).

Amazon Video On Demand

We’ve had a few coupons from Amazon to their Video On Demand store, which lets you rent or buy movies that can be watched through a computer or other internet device (including the Roku and lots of TVs, Blu-Ray players, etc.)

Plex Channel

The Plex channel has been great for watching movies on our computer. Basically, I don’t have to worry about the format of the file, Plex handles it (it can transcode and/or remux as needed). The best part about this is that I can see the movie poster or other artwork, which makes it much easier for my kids to find their favorite shows. I’ve seen other channels that let you play files from your local network, but none of them were free and none of them were even close to this channel in quality.

Goals:

How well does the Roku box meet the goals stated in the introduction?

• Play back our media collection? Check. It’s pretty easy, too.
• Ability to watch and record TV? Not yet.
• Watch Netflix from any TV? Check. It’s probably the best device we own for that.

Other Parts of Cutting the Cord:

Cutting the Cord: Introduction
Backend: Desktop Computer (acting as file server) and TV Tuner
Master Bedroom: Roku streaming
Living Room: HTPC and TV w/ built-in Netflix
Basement: Original Xbox with XBMC

Gigabit Ethernet Network (LAN)

We’re lucky enough to live in a fairly new house (it’s less than 10 years old) that has Cat-5e cabling to many rooms in the house. Most of this cabling was originally used for telephone jacks, but it was easy to change those to RJ45 connections that can more easily support data. We lost a few telephone jacks, but there are still plenty around the house, and we only use one of those jacks anyway since we have cordless phones that all run off the same base station. Most of this would work OK with an 802.11n wireless router setup, but it’s much more reliable having it all wired.

Desktop File Server

We have a desktop computer in our upstairs loft that is plenty powerful enough to stream videos across the network. On that computer, we ripped most of our DVD collection with MakeMKV, which takes the disc and puts each disc title (each movie or TV episode is one title, so there can be multiple titles per disc). Those files (both movies and TV episodes) are then organized for use with XBMC or Plex. We don’t keep the bonus content from the DVDs on the file server, but that’s just a personal preference. If we wanted an exact copy of the disc, that could work with XBMC, too. This takes a fair amount of storage, but we haven’t come very close to filling our two 2 TB hard drives on this computer.

Plex Media Server

Plex Media Server is piece of software that runs on our desktop computer. It’s available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it makes it so that we can watch movies from our file server easily from our Roku box. If we had a Mac, an iOS device (iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple TV 2) or an Android device, Plex would let us watch from there, too. Plex can help you watch online sources, too, but we haven’t used it for that yet.

Network TV Tuner

Since we have a bunch of computers that might want to watch TV, we use a network TV tuner. Basically, this means that we can connect it to a source (our antenna) and watch TV from any of the computers on our network. We use the HDHomeRun, which has two tuners built-in, meaning that two channels can be watched (and/or recorded) anywhere in our home at once. If we wanted to increase that to four, it would be just as easy as buying a new HDHomeRun.

Future Plans

If something were to happen to a hard drive on our computer, we would have to re-rip those DVDs again. Since that takes quite a while, I’d like to set something up that has some redundancy. Right now it’s looking like that will be an unRAID server. I have quite a few old computer parts that I can use to build a new computer, and the unRAID server has protection against one drive failure, which should be plenty of redundancy for home use. There are a few pros and cons about unRAID vs. other backup systems, but for my use I think unRAID fits best at a small cost.

Other Parts of Cutting the Cord:

Cutting the Cord: Introduction
Backend: Desktop Computer (acting as file server) and TV Tuner
Master Bedroom: Roku streaming
Living Room: HTPC and TV w/ built-in Netflix
Basement: Original Xbox with XBMC

For our cord-cutting experiment, we’ve tried three different solutions. This has been fun for me to be able to try out different options, but it also means that it’s been hard for Julia since she’s had to learn how to use three different TV setups. Luckily, though, she’s pretty smart and has picked it up really well, but it’s not always easy to teach new visitors how to use our new setup. There’s certainly a lot of room for improvement in that category, but hopefully it won’t be too tough.

Goals:

• Play back our media collection from any TV
• Ability to watch and record TV
• Watch Netflix from any TV

Other Parts of Cutting the Cord:

Cutting the Cord: Introduction
Backend: Desktop Computer (acting as file server) and TV Tuner
Master Bedroom: Roku streaming
Living Room: HTPC and TV w/ built-in Netflix
Basement: Original Xbox with XBMC

I think I find myself at that medium still today. I still really enjoy building computers, but I don’t want to overclock my system because I’m pretty much required to keep the computer in working order for a long, long time. I’m adventurous enough to run Linux 90% of the time at home, but I’m not going to compile all my own software from source. I guess a better motto would be “don’t be afraid to break it any more than what you can fix”. No, that doesn’t sound quite right either. Here it is: “Don’t be afraid to break it any more than what you’re motivated to fix.”

I ended up building a computer myself, and overall I’m quite happy with the decision. I don’t have anything against the Mac, but it just wasn’t for me this time around. Here are a few reasons why not the iMac:

• Cost. For the money of a 24″ iMac (I wanted the larger screen because anything smaller than 22″ felt really tiny after my dual 24″ setup at work) I found that I could get a pretty good system.
• Building a computer is fun! I’ve built four computers myself now (and helped in the building of several others), and it has always been fun. I found myself window shopping quite a bit for computer parts, and building my own computer was a great release for that.
• Customization. I find myself being picky about my computers sometimes. I like to choose a monitor and peripherals that fit me, and I didn’t feel that an iMac met my needs here.
• Future Upgrades. I can open up my new computer and upgrade anything I want. That just doesn’t happen with an iMac.
• Learning. This fits in with several of the above reasons, but I think it’s a reason in itself. By building my own computer, I learned a lot. By using Linux daily, I’m learning a lot, too. I already have a place to learn the Mac better (I have a Mac Pro at work), but most of my studies have involved Linux or other UNIX systems, so it has helped me a lot to play around with a real Linux system. I could have just virtualized Linux like I do at work, but I was ready to take off the training wheels and really use Linux almost full-time at home.
• Free software upgrades. Note that this really only applies to the Linux side of things, not the Windows side (which is OK, since I’m using Linux 95% of the time). I love that I can get the new features of a new release of Ubuntu without any extra dollar cost. I also love many open source programs like the GIMP more than their paid alternatives. (Note: I’m not trying to hate on Photoshop, but the GIMP fits in much better with what I need it to do. Using the Mac version of the GIMP is just not fun.) There are plenty of free Mac programs, but almost everything is free on Linux.

If I had decided (and I was really close) to buy an iMac, I needed to justify it to myself. Here’s why the iMac:

• Mac OS and Apple Software. This is a pretty big plus in my book. I like iPhoto and iMovie a lot compared to their Linux counterparts. I’ve found out that I have to deal with Vista a bit if I want to make a movie on my computer. The one drawback here is Finder. Just let it be known that I really don’t like Finder and all the Save dialogs in Mac OS – there are just too many ways to interface with it, and it’s really tricky to figure them all out. I’ll probably have it all figured out by the time they redo the interface. If iPhoto and iMovie updates were cheaper or free, I might have gone with the iMac.
• Wife Acceptance Factor: I didn’t make this term up, but the iMac’s form factor fit really well into a family setting. The fact that everything is integrated means fewer cords, which is a big plus in this respect. I made my way around this one by getting a monitor with integrated everything and doing a better job of cord management up front.

In the end, I will say that the things I miss out on the most by not having a Mac at home is the software – particularly the iLife suite. iMovie and iPhoto are really easy-to-use applications, and that’s probably what I need. I’ve found myself using F-Spot on Linux, which is just OK, and Windows MovieMaker on Vista, which again, is OK. I like Vista quite a bit as a part-time operating system, but it’s way too annoying to use every day. If you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Vista’s annoying UAC “are you sure you want to do that” dialogs, trust me, you’ll hate them if you ever meet them.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I worked with elementary-age children who were at an age of exploration. They were often seeking of ways to test their boundaries, and it was obvious which ones had structured limits at home in the things they were allowed to do. This lack of parental responsibility was a frequent topic on our drives home, and we realized that proper boundaries could help children learn much faster than if they were given free reign to explore boundaries for which they weren’t prepared. It’s up to all us – parents, siblings, friends, whatever – to help raise future generations, so let’s never think it’s someone else’s problem.

• Convention over Configuration – Each framework tries to follow a set of standards in filenames, controller names, and so on so on. When I work on a site someone else designed using a framework, I know where things go and I can familiarize myself with that application much more quickly.
• Don’t Repeat Yourself – Specifying code in one place means that you only have to change it once should it need updating.
• MVC and a focus on “Fat Models” – Separate models, views, and controllers make life easier down the road when it comes time to switch to a new system that has a new database or when you want to make a fancy interface for an iPhone or the next new thing.

There are many other advantages to each, but let’s move on to the differences and disadvantages of these frameworks (keep in mind that this is from a somewhat unexperienced perspective, please let me know if these don’t convey the whole truth):

• CakePHP isn’t as mature as Ruby on Rails. Migrations aren’t fully integrated and the feature set seems to be a few steps behind Rails.
• CakePHP isn’t as easy to deploy as Ruby on Rails. This might matter more for larger applications, but I haven’t seen anything like Capistrano in Rails.
• Documentation is somewhat lacking in both. I had a hard time getting going using only tutorials that I found online. Rails has some great books, but I haven’t found any for CakePHP (although the tutorials and my familiarity with PHP made things easier).
• Ruby is new to me. In my opinion, it has a higher learning curve than PHP (possibly because I already knew Java before learning PHP).
• There are far fewer hosting solutions that provide good Ruby on Rails support. Although it’s pretty easy to get both up and running (especially for the lucky users of Mac OS 10.5), good hosting is pricier for Rails applications.

With all that said, there’s no way I’d like to go back to plain old PHP for developing a website. Things have come a long way even in just the past year for both of these frameworks, so I hope to keep learning them both. In the meantime, though, I’m devoting more of my time to Ruby on Rails, simply because I’m actually finding it fun to code in Ruby (and the Ruby Quiz is something I wish my programming classes had been) while PHP never had me quite as excited.

I enjoy the structure that Rails offers, and that way it has of making web programming fun again. I’ve used PHP for several years now, and I find myself rewriting things continuously just to make things better. While this has certainly made me a better programmer, the steeper learning curve of Rails lets me do more in a shorter period of time although the degree of difficulty is higher. Rails brings a common framework with it, and one that seems to be more accepted in my experience than any PHP framework that I’ve worked with.

So far, the major drawback has been the availability of free resources for the Rails newbie, although this is a problem that is increasingly getting smaller. My initial impetus to take that first step toward learning Ruby on Rails was an offer for a free PDF book from Sitepoint, a deal that has since expired but is still definitely worth paying money for. That book was a great resource for me, and I’ve since gone on to buy a similar book, Agile Web Development with Rails. Those two books provide a lot of the same information, but reading through them both helped me pick up on things that I would have missed otherwise. From here I may not have a lot of time to devote to learning Ruby on Rails, but I definitely plan on continuing that effort.