So, What Now?

While Canada is still behind the times when it comes to internet based media consumption, we at least have some options now. Netflix finally jumped the border, the iTunes catalog has greatly improved, and many of the top broadcasters have at least the most recent episodes of their primetime shows available online. Not to mention, there’s always BitTorrent and Usenet (my preferred method of acquiring media).

But What About Those Pesky Bandwidth Caps?

Bah, don’t get me started! Since I’m ridding myself of a $165 monthly expense, I decided to suck-up the bandwidth overage fee and download/stream to my heart’s content. The plan I’m on gives me 125GB/month, which can go quickly when you’re viewing HD content. Netflix estimates an hour of HD viewing at 2.3GB, which works out to about 54 hours per month. That’s not a lot, considering I have a family of four, and that’s not counting any other internet usage from browsing, phone (VoIP), work, video games, etc. The overage fees are ridiculous, but my ISP caps it at $50. An extra $50/month as opposed to $165 is fine by me.

Viewing Downloaded Media

As I mentioned, many of the popular network shows are available to stream online. The quality isn’t HD (or even SD, for that matter), and not every show is available. There will always be shows we have to download. Getting episodes from Usenet to a watchable format on the living room TV used to be a hassle. My lovely wife gave me a Boxee Box for Christmas, and I can’t express how much I love that ugly little device! I have a networked hard drive attached to it via CAT-6, and it streams 720p/1080p MKV files beautifully. I recently beefed up my internet service to 25MB/s down, and since I no longer have to convert videos for the Boxee Box, I can have an hour long HD episode ready to watch in about 10 minutes.

Hopping the Border

While Canada is in better shape now than ever in terms of availability of online content, the US is still totally kicking our asses. There are even shows available via cable/satellite in Canada that we can’t view online, which throws a bit of a wrench in my plan. But all is not lost – enter VPN. I signed up for an inexpensive VPN service to give it a test run, and am quite pleased with the result. I can now watch videos on Hulu, and other sites that are typically blocked in Canada. Boxee Box even has a VPN setting, so I can easily hop onto some of those US sites from there. Hulu is the big exception at the moment, as they target and block Boxee Box all together. There is still promise of an official Hulu Plus app, but we’re yet to see it materialize. This is where a HTPC would surpass Boxee Box, which I’ve definitely considered.

Let’s Not Forget About the Kids

Addison and Shiznit, watching TV together

Perhaps surprising to some, my daughters were the hold up when it came to making this decision. Children’s programming isn’t exactly in abundance when it comes to online services. Netflix has a good amount, but it’s lacking many of the pre-teen shows my eldest watches. Thankfully, the American networks are doing a great job of putting and keeping children’s shows online. When I mentioned to my eldest daughter that we could access US sites now, she was ecstatic! I didn’t realize it, but she had actually tried to watch many shows online, only to be hit with regional disclaimers. Meanwhile, my youngest has been enjoying episodes of the new Peter Pan spin-off on the Disney Junior website, which hasn’t even started airing in Canada yet.

The Grand Total

Once the final cable bill is paid, here’s what I’m looking at each month…

1. Internet Service – $69.99
2. Maximum Bandwidth Overage Fee – $50
3. Netflix – $7.99
4. Usenet – $9.99
5. VPN – $6.99

Total: $144.96 (plus tax)

Previously, I was paying for everything minus the bandwidth overage fee and VPN. That’s an extra $57 each month, but once again, I’m no longer paying $165 for TV service. I’m chalking this up as a win, possibly prematurely. But I’ll be sure to report back once I have a few months under my belt.

Working With What I Have

I looked at many of the set-top solutions that are out there at the moment. There are many relatively inexpensive devices that will play just about anything you can throw at them, but adding another device to my entertainment setup isn’t something I’m thrilled about. Recently, my wife has been watching a few of her own shows and I thought it would be great if she didn’t rely so much on me and had a bit more flexibility in terms of when and where she could watch them. This is when I started looking into network storage solutions.

My router, an Apple AirPort Extreme supports hard drive sharing via USB. I had an old 200GB drive in a NexStar 3 enclosure kicking around from my PC days, which made for a perfect test candidate. Sure enough, it was as simple as plugging the drive into the router and enabling disk sharing via AirPort Utility. Now, not only can I access the drive from my iMac in the basement office, but Deanna’s MacBook can as well, along with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in the living room.

Having a network drive eliminates the need to manually move files around via USB thumbdrives, but there’s still the issue of compatible file formats and the hardware used to play them. Obviously, there’s no issue when it comes to our Macs, but the game consoles are limited in the codecs they support. As I mentioned previously, I download videos at 720p which are typically encoded in MKV format, which as you may have assumed, is not supported by the consoles. This is where I haven’t been able to shave any steps off. I still have to re-encode the files to AVI so the consoles can play them, which isn’t a huge deal, really.

Expanding the Reach

From time-to-time, my wife, daughter and I find ourselves all into games at the same time. And usually all of them being Xbox 360 titles. Picking up a second console is something I have thought about many times over the past year, but justifying the hefty purchase wasn’t the easiest task. But now we found ourselves with another reason for an additional Xbox 360 – watching TV shows. Having a second Xbox 360 in the bedroom means we can stream video over the network not only to our Macs and the TV in the living room, but to our bedroom as well. Suddenly, the whole house has access to all of our downloaded shows at any given time, and we’re no longer restricted by the limited storage capacity (8GB) of the USB thumbdrive.

When I put all of this together in my head, I had a feeling it was one of those “too good to be true” moments. But to my surprise, streaming 720p video to the bedroom worked like a charm right off the bat. The only catch, is that things get ugly when more than one device is tapping into the network storage drive.

New Hardware

Once the tests proved successful, I invested in a new NexStar 3 enclosure with SATA support (my previous one was IDE) and a Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB hard drive. The next step will be to move to a RAID setup for peice of mind, but I wanted to ensure this was going to be a long term solution for us before going all out.

Ruling Out Options

BitTorrent

BitTorrent seems like the obvious choice, given that there’s no additional cost. Unfortunately, my ISP (Rogers) throttles BitTorrent traffic something awful, which renders it almost entirely useless. I’ve found grabbing music via BitTorrent is acceptable, but still takes longer than it should. Downloading a 1GB+ TV show episode would take a couple days, at best. The season premiere episode of Battlestar Galactica had over 3000 people seeding it, and I managed to connect to 2 of them, which resulted in an embarrassing 6kbps transfer.

PVR

When I bought my first HDTV, the first thing I did after setting it up was trade in my old cable box for an HD PVR. This seemed like a great option, not only for myself, but for Hannah as well. She’s always missing shows she likes while she’s doing homework, or eating dinner, etc. This gave her a chance to schedule some shows to record and watch at a later date. Unfortunately, the hardware was less than stellar and proved to be more of a source of frustration than anything else. Scheduled recordings were regularly missed, the last couple minutes of certain shows chopped off, and managing recorded shows couldn’t have been more tedious. I’m not sure if I lasted the month before trading the PVR in for a standard HD cable box.

On Demand Cable Services

Our cable TV provider (Rogers) offers their own On Demand channel, as well as The Movie Network On Demand, and a few other specialty channels. Aside having a horrible out-dated and terribly slow interface, the service is completely unreliable. At peak times, it will crash, stall, or be unavailable all together. On rare occasions where I’ve been able to get a show or movie to actually play, I’ve experienced problems such as audio cutting out momentarily or all together, or not being able to resume after pausing. Not to mention, there is still a great deal of content that’s not available in HD, despite it airing in HD initially.

iTunes via Apple TV

When Apple announced TV shows finally coming to iTunes Canada, I couldn’t have been more excited. That was, until I saw the line-up of supported channels and shows. Even now, a year after its introduction, there isn’t a single show I would pay to watch. The iTunes movie service is much better, but with rentals only being made available a month after their release, there isn’t much of a reason to consider it. To be able to watch content downloaded via iTunes, I would need to pick up an Apple TV, or buy the necessary cables to hook Deanna’s MacBook up to the entertainment system.

Xbox Live Marketplace

Xbox Live Marketplace now offers movies in Canada, but no TV shows. I already own the hardware and the service is fantastic – very fast downloads, you can start watching after only a few minutes of downloading, and the quality is great. Problem being – it’s the most expensive of the bunch. With HD movie rentals coming in at over $9, I would much rather drive out to the video store and pay under $6 for the same movie on Blu-ray. But again, there are no TV shows here, which is the main concern.

Why not just watch TV shows when the air like normal people?

• Commercial breaks are out of hand in some shows (LOST, I’m looking at you), and completely dampen the experience.
• Some shows run over their time slot (LOST, you son of a bitch!) which means you miss the beginning of another show if it happens to air directly after.
• With having children in the house (and a baby to boot), it’s really hard to plan times for Deanna and I to both sit down and watch. Normally, we’re not able to until after 9pm and some shows air earlier.
• Still no way of obtaining episodes if we happen to miss them, for whatever reason.
• Being in Canada, we’re behind in the times on many levels. There are still a number of shows that don’t air in HD here. Battlestar Galactica is a good example. Since it airs in HD on other channels in the US, we get a letter-boxed version within the 4:3 frame of our 16:9 TV = gross.

Current Process

I don’t really have any major beefs with the steps I take to bring TV episodes to my living room television. While there are quite a few of them, the end result is exactly what I’m after – HD quality episodes that I can watch at my leisure. What I’m doing now, is this…

1. Download recent episodes via Usenet. I subscribe to Giganews, which costs me $12.95 per month which allows up to 35GB worth of downloads. Given that most episodes at 720p weigh in between 1.1GB and 1.6GB, that allows for a fair amount of downloading each month. Best of all, download speeds are maintained at 1mbps to 1.4mbps, so it really doesn’t take long to download a single episode.
2. Unpacking and repairing files. A single-click process which takes a couple minutes, at most.
3. Rename and move unpacked file.
4. Re-encode file via Visual Hub. MKV seems to be the codec of choice for high definition video, which looks fantastic, but is limited as far as where you can play the files. Obviously, my desktop iMac has no problems, but my Xbox 360 and PS3 don’t support MKV, and as such, I’m left with having to re-encode. Cooking an AVI from the MKV takes about half an hour and is a very CPU intensive process.
5. Transfer file to USB thumbdrive. Streaming HD files over a wireless network just isn’t feasible. Even from my N compatible iMac to my wired Xbox 360 – the result is a choppy file that ends up stopping to buffer every few minutes. Moving files via USB thumbdrive has proved to be the easiest and quickest way to get files from my iMac to the consoles in the living room.
6. Watch file on console via USB thumbdrive. For a while, I was moving and copying several files to the PS3′s harddrive, but that just proved to be an extra unnecessary step. Watching the files straight from the thumbdrive works just fine.

What Are My Options?

I’m looking for suggestions here. I know there are many devices similar to Apple TV, that allow you to stream video files of many formats over a wireless network, or transfer files directly to the device. I would love something like this where I didn’t have to convert the MKV files and could transfer files to the HDD over the network. I would like more than anything to make use of the hardware I already have, but I realize that’s likely not an option if I’m looking to cut down on steps without sacrificing quality or flexibility. Here are a few requirements I have if I were to get a new device, and some that need to be met for my current setup.

• I have an Intel iMac and MacBook in the house, both running Leopard. No Windows machines.
• Wireless N compatible network. The router is actually in the living room very close the entertainment system, so wired connection is do-able.
• New device should have on-board harddrive of 160GB or more. Preferably very large (500GB+) or ability to upgrade.
• Supports MKV file format, or allows for installation of new codecs.
• Network connectivity which allows transferring files directly to the device.

So, what do you think? What are you doing to get TV shows from your download queue to your television?

When season 2 ended, I was upset, angry, disappointed, frustrated… I couldn’t believe they would leave off with the human race being beat down so badly when it finally seemed like they were going to find a way out. I thought for sure they would back-pedal and find a way to ensure Baltar doesn’t become president. But season 3 picked up right where they left off. With 40,000-odd under Cylon control on New Caprica and a couple thousand scattered across the fleet who had jumped away. Just when it looked like all of season 3 would take place on the concentration camp that is New Caprica, a plan was set in motion to evac the barren planet and rescue the entire population.

I really had no idea what was going to go down, but I knew it was going to be a great episode. There were so many incredible moments I don’t even know where to start. But when I saw Galactica jump into the atmosphere, barreling toward the ground while deploying Vipers, I nearly shat myself. I think that could have been the single greatest moment in the show’s history. And then to see the damage they took because of it and the pounding they received from the Base Ships, man… it was just beyond anything I could have imagined.

I absolutely love the emotional, tear-jerker endings as well. They’re few and far between, but they always seem so well deserved. Like when Lee returned his grandfather’s lighter and Starbuck just grabbed the President and hugged her after the Tillium Refinery assault mission. Or the unveiling of the Blackbird stealth ship. I just wish they hadn’t focused so much on Tigh. I hate that man and really enjoyed seeing him suffer. Having to kill his own wife was something that seemed so appropriate, for both of them.

I’ve never been into any TV/film series as I am with BSG. I’m super glad that my faith has been restored so quickly (I was actually hooked again after episode 3×01 aired) and BSG is back to it’s old greatness… not that it ever departed from it for long. There were a couple obvious “filler” episodes in season 2, but aside from them…

Now that I’ve laid my inner-geek on the table for you all to poke and prod, anyone else want to share their love for BSG? I know I’m not alone.