Replacing subscription TV with a HTPC
Posted by creining | Filed under Uncategorized
I got rid of my subscription to DirecTV on 12/22/2010. It has been a bit over three months without television. Granted I still own a television just no more programming (or monthly bill!). After that fateful day in late December, I found not having television was uncomfortable for only a few days, maybe a week. Cutting the cord to subscription television had been on my mind for awhile yet I was still apprehensive about doing it. I was in the habit of turning the television on when I got home from work or the gym and found myself a lot of times not even watching it. It was functioning as a pacifier. So when I couldn’t flip on the television on anymore, I found myself doing the things I had always done just more of them. I would listen to music and to Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) more, I would spend a bit longer at the gym doing yoga after the workout, I would cook from scratch another night a week and bake more, I would finish books quicker. This was all very good because those are the things I clearly love to do and now I got to do more of them! Over the weeks I felt more relaxed and at ease not having television noise blaring at me and filling space. I feel that having it on (when I’m around one) emits a lot of negative energy. If I were to ever have television programming again I would only turn it on for a specific program that I wanted to watch and then turn it off. However, I don’t think that will ever happen as I discovered and started using an awesome HTPC (Home Theater PC) solution called Plex. Here’s what happened.
Sometime in the third month being subscription television free I thought I should be utilizing that plasma hanging over the fireplace for other entertainment besides the one or maybe two DVDs I watch per week from Netflix. This thought coincided with a recent purchase of mine, a new MacBook Pro to replace my five year old Macbook. With this new MacBook Pro I knew I could easily drive that plasma. There were only two things I needed to decide – what exactly did I need my MacBook Pro to do and how would I do it? Well, I figured that I would need these functions at a minimum:
-Ability to play DVD/Blu-ray discs. I could get rid of my standalone DVD player then! I’m a minimalist…
-Hulu support in order to watch The Daily Show
-Netflix support for streaming movies and television shows
-Native Apple Remote support so I didn’t have to have a keyboard and mouse
And these things would be nice to have:
-iTunes integration for music
-iPhoto integration for photos
-Ability to stream music from Pandora
Now how would I do all this? I had no idea what HTPC software was out there let alone written to run on Mac. Researching this I quickly found out that HTPC users were primarily using three things – XBMC (the original), Plex (an XBMC fork) or Boxee (also an XBMC fork). XBMC I didn’t look at because it doesn’t support Hulu or Netflix natively. Boxee I didn’t look at because I got the impression most users didn’t like it compared to Plex, which seemed to provide all the things I needed, plus the nice to haves and ran on Mac.
Now that I had to decided to run Plex on my MacBook Pro I needed to order a couple things to connect it to my plasma and receiver. I went to MonoPrice and ordered a 3ft Toslink to Mini M/M 5.0mm OD Molded Cable and a Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter for about $10 total. The cable is to provide digital audio to my receiver. The MacBook Pro analog headphone jack can output digital 5.1 audio using the S/PDIF protocol if you plug in a Toslink to Mini cable which is pretty neat. The adapter is to provide video to my plasma via HDMI by simply plugging one end into the Thunderbolt port (it doubles as the Mini DisplayPort) and the other to the HDMI cable that was already run to the plasma.
I had already installed Plex on my MacBook Pro and had been playing around with it but I was excited to try it on the plasma. Once I got my order from MonoPrice I got everything hooked up and made sure my MacBook was in clamshell mode. That means it can be closed on my shelf but stays powered on and usable. A really nice behavior is that by using the Apple Remote – from the couch of course – I can go from having the MacBook Pro sleeping on the shelf to waking it and launching Plex. I am really happy with the way Plex looks on the plasma, the interface is gorgeous and watching content via Hulu or Netflix or Youtube is the same quality as DirecTV was.
Plex is a great application. It can have quite a bit of tweaking – I enjoy doing that though – and I’ve run into various bugs but overall it has done everything I have wanted it to do. I could warrant writing a whole post on my Plex configuration and perhaps I will do that next. I can watch DVDs, use Hulu, Netflix, Youtube, Pandora, iPhoto, iTunes plus there are literally hundreds of other plugins that can be installed.
Right now this set up works for me. In the future though I could see making two improvements. One, purchasing a separate system to use as a HTPC like a Mac Mini. Two, the Apple Remote works okay but using programs like Remote Buddy or Sofa Control offer a lot more functionality and flexibility.
