Cord-Cutting, Or How to Stream your Way to Success

Great thing about YouTube tv is the family sharing. My parents and I split the cost of YouTube tv and we both it get it.

You can share with up to 5 people, that is supposed to be in the same household. We're in the general location of St Louis so it hasn't been a problem.

The lack of sport on YouTube tv isn't a problem since we use the crew plugin for Kodi. Can get live sports from anywhere.

I have a friend that put me on his, but I'm a state away. I watched a few live F1 races and then they cut me off. Youtube+ works though! I use the hell out of that.

Kharzette said:

I have a friend that put me on his, but I'm a state away. I watched a few live F1 races and then they cut me off. Youtube+ works though! I use the hell out of that.

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YouTube+? I haven't heard of that one yet.

LiquidDeath said:

YouTube+? I haven't heard of that one yet.

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Oops, I mean premium. Basically just get no ads.

I'm trying to figure out how to build something to run nothing but Kodi and Netflix. I have an Nvidia Shield and a Firestick, but they're bloating to hell. Any suggestions? I'm not sure LibreElec can run Netflix which might rule out Raspberry Pi.

Rabbit_Games said:

I'm trying to figure out how to build something to run nothing but Kodi and Netflix. I have an Nvidia Shield and a Firestick, but they're bloating to hell. Any suggestions? I'm not sure LibreElec can run Netflix which might rule out Raspberry Pi.

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You could try a Android TV box and then see if you can load a custom Android rom with everything but the bare essentials cut out. It's been some years since I messed with custom roms, and that was on my phone, but the XDA Developers forum was the place where people talked and posted about all that.

It seems that love the shield though:

Void said:

What is bloating about the Shield? Yeah, the ads taking up half the screen when you load in are super fucking annoying, and I bitched about that endlessly when it happened, but since they all have that now, the Shield is still far superior for doing what you want. And you can use a custom loader if you are already considering building something from scratch, I'm sure that is much less work. Unless I'm somehow missing it, it isn't like it is suddenly adding all kinds of apps to "bloat" how much is running at any given time. Do a factory reset or something if you're that worried about it?

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I'm using the wolf launcher on my shields to get rid of all that ad shit that google is promoting. It's worked flawlessly for me.

Rabbit_Games said:

I'm trying to figure out how to build something to run nothing but Kodi and Netflix. I have an Nvidia Shield and a Firestick, but they're bloating to hell. Any suggestions? I'm not sure LibreElec can run Netflix which might rule out Raspberry Pi.

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I went that way. LibreElec on a le potato. It was not easy. Seems like most of it is sort of half working and abandoned.

The video playback is flawless but the UI is a bit sluggish. There can be a bit of delay in remote button presses.

Youtube works about 10% of the time. Some stuff will play with no audio, some not at all, and the setup for it is a huge nightmare.

Plex doesn't work at all and is likely sabotaged because plex is trying hard to go legit. There's an alternative plugin called Composite I think? That works pretty well but if you feed it a big library it will crash (I have some friends that are bigtime collectors). Also subtitle support is spotty.

The discovery + plugin works well but the ui is not great.

Twitch plugin doesn't work at all that I can tell.

For antenna TV I started out using tvheadend, which is very... German. There's probably posts of me here in the past talking about it. I think I turned this thread into my failblog for a few weeks. This one has good channel changing, but the guide tends to break after a few days, and the setup for it is almost completely luck / random and it won't save. You have to go through painful setup every time the machine loses power.

If you have a hd homerun, that works fairly well. The guide stays good mostly forever (though there are a few channels here that don't have any guide info). Changing channels without using the guide is dangerous though. If it hits a channel that has a weak signal it often freezes the machine hard and it has to just be unplugged. The homerun tends to detect about twice the channels it can actually play.

One thing I almost forgot that tvheadend could do vs the homerun is channel renaming. Old people do not like channels like 7.3, or 3.5 or whatever. The remote I have doesn't even have a period. So with headend I could rename channels and remove entirely the ones she never watched (telemundo etc). So like nbc on 3, cbs on 6, abc on 7 like it was back in 69.

The tater does pretty well with home libraries too, though I've rarely used this. It is for my mom and she's not really into racing or anime or scifi tv shows so my vast bank of nerd stuff doesn't appeal.

Well I got the new remote. It was a really simple NEC style protocol. It's got channelup/down volumeUp/down power, AV, and mute.

I mapped AV to tv guide and the big red power button to select for the guide. Then when in full screen tv I mapped power and channel both to just jump back to the guide. That gets around the problem where channel changing can sometimes freeze the machine.

Volume works too! My old remote had no dedicted volume so I had to have another remote for volume which was annoying.

Kajiimagi said:

I'm guessing this would be a good place to ask this question. I also did a general search for 'Digibox' that turned up nadda.

What do you all know/think about this product?

Digibox D3 Plus | The Most Cost-Effective TV Box in 2024

Experience Digibox D3 Plus — Android 12.0 TV Box. Smart voice commands and mobile control. Enjoy fast quad-core A53 processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage, WIFI6 technology. Includes 4 USBs.

digiboxtv.co

My mother-in-law asked me about it today. I've never heard of it but it looks like the grey market 'kodi' boxes that pop up every now and again. The FAQS / Website pretty much say outright that's it's illegal as hell. I'm not so much worried about that (and I'm going to make sure my Mum knows that up front) but I don't want her to spend a lot of cash and have this thing not work one day if the feds take notice of it.

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I've seen those boxes before that come preloaded with Kodi and a bunch of addons. I'd be leery of them. The other issue that you might run into is that it is android 12.0, not android tv OS, so apps you download from the play store may not look correct on a TV and may not work correctly either.

Kajiimagi said:

I'm guessing this would be a good place to ask this question. I also did a general search for 'Digibox' that turned up nadda.

What do you all know/think about this product?

Digibox D3 Plus | The Most Cost-Effective TV Box in 2024

Experience Digibox D3 Plus — Android 12.0 TV Box. Smart voice commands and mobile control. Enjoy fast quad-core A53 processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage, WIFI6 technology. Includes 4 USBs.

digiboxtv.co

My mother-in-law asked me about it today. I've never heard of it but it looks like the grey market 'kodi' boxes that pop up every now and again. The FAQS / Website pretty much say outright that's it's illegal as hell. I'm not so much worried about that (and I'm going to make sure my Mum knows that up front) but I don't want her to spend a lot of cash and have this thing not work one day if the feds take notice of it.

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My experience is similar to Arative .

A few years ago I had my parents ask me about something similar being sold at a home show, down at the convention center, or some such place. I think it was an Android 10 box loaded with a custom Kodi UI. While I never had in-person experience with the item they asked me about, I did buy a highly rated Android box to play with. I could never get it functional enough that my parents would be able or happy to use it.

Surfing for live pirate channels took a long time because, at least at that time, there were a bunch of dead links you had to sift through. The guide functions were not all that great either, but that could have been due to the particular UIs I tried. I also had to update the custom Kodi stuff every month or so to keep it working.

I haven't spent much time on it recently, because the older my parents get, the more difficult new tech is for them to learn. Also my mom doesn't really like the whole pirate situation of it.

These days I think the best pirate option for live TV is "IPTV" where you pay some dude to basically share his full package of live channels. I've fiddles around with it, but not for more than an hour or two and I just used some legit IPTV channels to experiment with it (a lot of foreign language and 480p channels).

The addon the Crew for kodi is great for live sports. I use it to watch Cardinals and Blues games all the time with no issues.

Kajiimagi said:

Thanks Guys ! I read their whole website last night and did not get the warm / fuzzies. In fact it felt like a giant honey trap. I advised her not to mess with it. Partially because I'm the one that will get all the headaches when the damn thing inevitably doesn't work.

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What are they looking for, as far as usage?
An Nvidia shield is probably the best on the market for streaming and live tv.
A firestick or chromecast would be good too and cheap.
Or they could just buy a TV with something built in

Burns said:

My experience is similar to Arative .

A few years ago I had my parents ask me about something similar being sold at a home show, down at the convention center, or some such place. I think it was an Android 10 box loaded with a custom Kodi UI. While I never had in-person experience with the item they asked me about, I did buy a highly rated Android box to play with. I could never get it functional enough that my parents would be able or happy to use it.

Surfing for live pirate channels took a long time because, at least at that time, there were a bunch of dead links you had to sift through. The guide functions were not all that great either, but that could have been due to the particular UIs I tried. I also had to update the custom Kodi stuff every month or so to keep it working.

I haven't spent much time on it recently, because the older my parents get, the more difficult new tech is for them to learn. Also my mom doesn't really like the whole pirate situation of it.

These days I think the best pirate option for live TV is "IPTV" where you pay some dude to basically share his full package of live channels. I've fiddles around with it, but not for more than an hour or two and I just used some legit IPTV channels to experiment with it (a lot of foreign language and 480p channels).

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Private IPTV is the shit for your live TV needs.

I currently have 3 families on a single account with 3 feeds available across all houses, full HD, channels from multiple countries. Costs me $60 every 6 months. The only annoyance is the host only accepts crypto, but even that is worth the hassle for the savings.