Political Crossfire Forums

Trying to build dat epic home theater system but I refuse to pay for cable.* XBMC seems live a very sweet alternative but requires some customization and computer knowledge and such. To start off with though, I'm not worried about hardware. Going to use a 2 yr old acer laptop as the HTPC, hook it up to TV via HDMI. I'm more concerned with getting the most out of this XBMC thing. It's open source or whatever so it should be completly customizable.




*It's literally bullshit that I pay $120 a month for what amounts to video when I have a high speed connection. I only watch sports** and news anyway. It's not like I need to see wolf blitzers mug in HD. I'm cutting the cable and investing that money in a home bar.

**That said, sports MUST be in HD. Anyone know of any streaming sites where I can stream HD Sports (Soccer/Football are priority, Basketball/Baseball huge plus). I'll pay.

I played around with it when building my media PC. Originally I installed the boot-able version (uses a linux kernel), but I quickly found it to be a pain to transfer things to and from the machine. So I installed windows along with the XBMC windows application. That helped somewhat, but I find myself generally using the DVD software that came with the blu-ray drive and a web browser for streaming.

It was becoming a pain to get XBMC to recognize my media files and get it configured. The android-app remote control looked very promising for it, but it was pretty squirrley.

Apparently, it's able to download and then categorize stuff for you automatically. Like if you want breaking bad you set it as an autodownload show, then when a reliable torrent comes out for the next episode, it is downloaded and put in your xbmc media library automatically.

Just wondering here. It seems that you are OK with not watching live TV, and are content to wait for stuff via internet. Why not use Netflix on your Xbox? I don't think that I've watched live cable in a month. Either watch things on Netflix a few days late (and without commercials), or find it on my computer and use the Xbox pairing mechanism and watch it that way.

Frankly, I think it's even easier to just hook up the HDMI cable to the front of my receiver and use the whole shebang as an extra monitor.

If you have time/patience to tinker with XBMC, knock your bad self out. I have never had a smooth experience with it. I'm also not a huge media guy, so it's not really that relevant to my needs.