[don-code]

My "stack" for watching TV consists of:

* A Hauppage WinTV HVR-950 tuner, connected to a Kubernetes cluster in the basement.

* NextPVR, scheduled on the appropriate node in the cluster (yes, it's non-redundant, even though I have three nodes). This handles DVR scheduling, and transcoding should I want to watch TV off-network.

* Kodi Media Center, running on a PC in the living room, and a Raspberry Pi 3A in the kitchen. Both pass through the full MPEG-2 stream. I additionally have an XSPF playlist link on my laptop and phone that open VLC to the transcoding-capable playback URLs for NextPVR.

* FreeNAS with a _significant_ amount of buffer available (at least for my one-hour-daily recording schedule), backing the DVR capability over NFS.

I'd argue this setup is actually _better_ than what I'd be able to do with a simple VCR/DVR. It's like having a robotic tape library, but without the physical space required.

[swader999]

Is OTA better quality than streaming services? Several years ago when I looked into this OTA was there highest quality, especially close to a big city.

[JKCalhoun]

Initial roll-out of OTA digital was amazing. I remember watching Tori Amos on PBS ("Austin City Limits"?) and I was almost crying for how beautiful it looked.

Fast forward and OTA started instead using their bandwidth to instead run 4 or 5 lower-bitrate channels. Bummer.

[JKCalhoun]

^ Looks like the show might have been Soundstage in 2003: https://youtu.be/iHESs5TxC1Q

[mrweasel]

Not sure, but I've noticed that especially sports are way better on cable, compared to streaming. It doesn't seem like streaming can keep up in sports like soccer or hockey.

Even Tour de France just looks better on cable. It might just be me, but in terms of specs I should have the better TV between me and my dad, but the details just gets lost somehow in many sports. Only difference I can think of is cable vs. streaming.

[90s_dev]

You're making an even stronger case for poverty level minimalism than I think I ever could. The freedom you lose by having to maintain all of that... No thanks.

[Dylan16807]

Oh the suffering of... running one program in the basement with the usb thing, and running a different program to view everything?

If it caused any difficulty at all to use different viewing programs on their different boxes, it would be trivial to cut down to one. If using NAS network storage caused problems, it would be trivial to remove it. And they're running kubernetes entirely for fun, making it the opposite of "have to maintain".

The part that actually makes this system tick is quite low maintenance.

[JKCalhoun]

To your point though, a simple box you plug in that "just works" would be nice for the rest of us. (Yeah, not an Apple TV though and nothing with a subscription.) Perhaps someone has already done something like that on GitHub.

[ThinkingGuy]

I've been very happy with Kaffeine, installed on my regular desktop PC, for recording shows.

https://apps.kde.org/kaffeine/

[scuff3d]

Jesus. When I was a kid using torrents was high tech. Now people are running K8s clusters as part of their TV setups...