[cwconway]

I know this is my first post on these forums and Im already asking for help. No doubt frustrating for some given the amount of info these forums contain. Please rest assured I have not been lazy in my research on these topics. Call it overload if you will.
I came to these forums based on advice from a friend of mine who is a cable cutter and uses a media cube as his streamer. I don't believe he uses Kodi but he did say that the Kodi developers do amazing things with software to access online TV etc. So I did and he was correct. I downloaded Kodi 16.1 on my gaming desktop to get a feel for what it is and Im sold. Utterly amazing.

For the past weeks I have spent countless hours, to my wife's aggravation, trying to come up with a solution to cutting cable TV and go full force into streaming. Im done with paying 100+ dollars a month for basic cable TV service. Im over it. I feel like my situation is unique but probably not in retrospect.

My situation as follows:
I live the Midwest USA.
I have a 100meg internet service
I want to connect at least 4 or 5 non-4k plasma/led TV's all having access to Kodi.
I don't have and don't plan in the near future to have an AV receiver, sound bar or 4k TV, just using TV speakers.
I want to have my main, living room TV on a box, but the others will have to stream through wifi. I have no basement or crawl space. I might be able to get away with 2 boxes and 3 streaming sticks.
I do have a wifi router that atm runs a network of 3 phones, 2 tablets, and has hardwired 2 desktops. I does have the multi band 2 and 5 hertz. It works great.
I want access to live TV that will play well on both a box and stick.
My budget is, well, I don't know. I don't want to spend stupidly.

My research as follows:
I, at the beginning, went down the big box retailer route for media streamers. Amazon, Roku, Chrome, Nvidia etc.....I feel, based on research that there may be better options out there and by reading these forums. Thanks to wrxtasy for making the "mid season review 2016" post/sticky.
Currently Im leaning toward the following possibilities:

Wetek Core( Out of Stock)
Minix U1
Wetek Play2
chromebox
Himedia q10 or q5

I need direction an avenue to further go down. I know this post is long but wanted to provide as much info as I felt was needed to simplify any responses.

Thank you all for doing what you do and how you do it. Thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

[natethomas]

I should give a quick warning before you go to far. This forum doesn't support discussion of pirate streams, so if your plan is to use those to get live team, we can't help. With that said, since you live in the midwest you should have access to a fair amount of OTA tv. If so, I highly recommend starting with an HDHomeRun Extend, which will give your whole home live over the air tv.

[nickr]

See also free content (wiki)

[cwconway]

Well, I now learned even more than I did before posting. My ignorance abounds. I sincerely didn't realize that addons to stream content was/is considered unethical/illegal. I guess I don't understand what a "live" stream is. I was going to purchase a couple of HD antenna's for local OTA broadcasts. So if I understand you correctly, I don't own a DVR or NAS, there is no reason for me to purchase a box/sticks to stream anything and therefore no need for Kodi?

I sincerely apologize if I put anyone in a bad lite other than myself. Im embarrassed to say the least.

[cwconway]

Are addons and apps two different things? I thought some of the above boxes I mentioned came with pre-installed apps or addons. So people only buy these boxes to play pre-recorded movies. I clearly have much more to learn.

[Tinwarble]

For reference, an add-on is anything that works inside an app. An app is anything that runs by itself and does require launching another app to use it.

Kodi, Netfilix, Hulu, iBBC Player, etc. are all apps, if it comes from the Google Play Store it's an app as it comes to Android.

As for "Live Streams' that would be, as it indicates, anything that is streamed live either OTA, cable or satellite would be a live stream, there are also paid apps that allow for live streams like Sling TV and Playstation Vue.

For live streams (not the apps) you will need a TV tuner like a HDHomeRun or Tablo (which is for OTA, US & Canada, and has DVR function built in) and a antenna or cable/sat subscription.

[cwconway]

Thank you for that response.

[teki4u]

So all you want to do is watch OTA Live TV? you don't have/own Movies, TV Shows, etc content that would like to watch using Kodi?
If the former then go to YouTube and search for : hdhomerun lon
... To watch related videos to HDHomeRun DVR by Lon Seidman, the guy uses the service and is nice. If after watching his videos you have any question you can contact him (there are many ways to do so) and he'll be able to help you.


Addons (kodi specific) are small applications that can only be executed within Kodi to add functionalities, thus making Kodi more compatible and complete than other players.
So an add-on is an aditional application that runs or gets executed by a MAIN application (in this case Kodi).
Eg: YouTube add-on runs from Kodi app

Apps is more like software that runs at the OS (operative system) level. Eg: Android/iOS/Windows apps, in Ubuntu are known as packages not as "apps".
Eg: Kodi is an "app".

Enviado desde mi Moto X vía Tapatalk!

[cwconway]

Yea. We have DVDs but I have a player for that and that's it. Im assuming then an android box would allow for things like youtube etc.....so why the need to have Kodi then unless it runs better with Kodi. Im definitely looking into HDHomerun. Thank you for the response.

[PatK]

Im done with paying 100+ dollars a month

You've made a great decision from my perspective, kudos for that. But don't think of Kodi as the vehicle to steal what you used to pay for. These illegally loaded boxes are killing the best open source free project in the world. https://kodi.tv/the-piracy-box-sellers-a...ling-kodi/ and some the general public has taken to these add-ons without regard to content providers. No point in the moralizing, this battle will rage on past my lifetime. Kodi must be protected, so we have rules in the forum that distances the project from forces that would lean towards legal confrontation.

Why use Kodi? If you have a media collection (just about any kind) Kodi offers a library structure that works, it can associate your media with meta-data offered from large web databases, image content that enhances the performance, background information, links to trailers, artist, audio experience and a way of cataloguing that is superior to the competition. Not to mention the weather reports, games, and well I could go on... but I'll leave you this link as a reminder. https://kodi.tv/about/

I think when you said I'm done paying, we all hope that is a 'C' change in your media habits, refusing to be led by the nose into media content; not merely.... I'll steal what I used to pay for! Free content (wiki) Living within the bounds of what Kodi offers, is not in anyway 'doing without', it's more of a better informed and wiser choices. Looking at the hundreds of add-on that are in the official repository, it's not like you'll have time for all of it. Look at how Kodi functions, and building a media library isn't going to be over night, but I'll bet you've got disks close at hand. Then there's over the air, and pvr content and at the end of the day if you have time for all this you're a better man than me.

I forgot to mention, it will play just about any media you can throw at it, all this with multiple platforms.

[natethomas]

Well, I now learned even more than I did before posting. My ignorance abounds. I sincerely didn't realize that addons to stream content was/is considered unethical/illegal. I guess I don't understand what a "live" stream is. I was going to purchase a couple of HD antenna's for local OTA broadcasts. So if I understand you correctly, I don't own a DVR or NAS, there is no reason for me to purchase a box/sticks to stream anything and therefore no need for Kodi?

I sincerely apologize if I put anyone in a bad lite other than myself. Im embarrassed to say the least.

There may be a bit of a miscommunication here. I apologize if someone else already cleared it up.

At its heart, Kodi is ultimately just a video player that let's you connect to an incredible number of video sources. Such sources can include DVDs, ripped DVDs on harddrives, online streams (both legal, such as Youtube, and illegal, such as not-gonna-say-it-here), and much more.

One if its main uses is to act as a front end for your live over the air TV. The way that works is, you get an antenna, you plug that antenna into a "tv tuner/server," and then you install Kodi throughout your house, and each instance of Kodi can tune in TV from that one single antenna.

If you are in the US, the easiest way to do this is to get an HDHomerun, which is the server you plug your antenna into, because the people behind HDHomerun provide you with all the important information you need to really make it work, including all the info for a top quality program guide, just like you'd find on a cable box. Then, once you've hooked up your HDHomerun, you plug your Kodi box into your TV and stream all the live tv you want from your HDHomerun onto your Kodi boxes.

[RockerC]

Receiving unencrypted television over-the-air with a TV-tuner connected to an antenna is legal and good enough for most.

Kodi supports this as a PVR frontend, but you first need a PVR backend (which can also act as a DVR). Checkout:

http://kodi.wiki/view/PVR
http://kodi.wiki/view/PVR_backend
http://forum.kodi.tv/forumdisplay.php?fid=167

The whole PVR install and setup could still be made easier in Kodi, but it have made a lot of progress the last few years.

Note that the "PVR" concept in Kodi at its core does not mean streaming video from the internet, even though IPTV exist.

If you are in the US, the easiest way to do this is to get an HDHomerun, which is the server you plug your antenna into, because the people behind HDHomerun provide you with all the important information you need to really make it work, including all the info for a top quality program guide, just like you'd find on a cable box. Then, once you've hooked up your HDHomerun, you plug your Kodi box into your TV and stream all the live tv you want from your HDHomerun onto your Kodi boxes.

That is not quite true in the context of Kodi's PVR concept, even though it is technically true when not talking PVR in Kodi.

Major downside to only using a HDHomeRun tuner and not connecting it to a PVR backend is that you loose DVR capability.

[Ned Scott]

For now. It's probably possible for an HDHomeRun add-on to trigger a recording, since recordings are as easy as a specially crafted HTTP URL with the channel number and duration. Sometimes I paste such a URL right in my browser (but a download manager would be better, so it can auto-resume if there's ever a network burp) and I end up with a nice little mpeg file.

Surely that's possible in either a python-based add-on or a PVR binary-based add-on. And it would be awesome. mmmm, backend-less recording...

(is what she said)

[RockerC]

For now. It's probably possible for an HDHomeRun add-on to trigger a recording, since recordings are as easy as a specially crafted HTTP URL with the channel number and duration. Sometimes I paste such a URL right in my browser (but a download manager would be better, so it can auto-resume if there's ever a network burp) and I end up with a nice little mpeg file.

Surely that's possible in either a python-based add-on or a PVR binary-based add-on. And it would be awesome. mmmm, backend-less recording...

Backend-less recording has been requested and discussed for the HDHomeRun PVR native addon here:

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2193341

A lot of people liked the idea but original developer zcsizmadia has since seems to have disappeared.