SpiceWare's Blog

Congrats! Some day I'll attempt a similar set-up...

Thanks! Next thing I'll be looking at is replacing my 10+ year old Pronto Pro. Possibly with a Logictech Harmony.

 

I found this blog entry (odd color choices on that site though, links are invisible unless you highlight the text ) about using a Harmony with the Mac's built in IR port. It's a rather clever trick - the Mac's Remote only has 6 buttons, but each Mac Remote is assigned a random ID from 0-255, and that ID is sent with each button press. By default a Mac will listen to any Mac Remote, but you can configure them to listen for a specific ID in case you have multiple Macs in the same room. The Harmony can be configured to use all those IDs, so you end up with 1,536 (6*256) possible commands you could send.

If I didn't have cable or something similar, I'd probably get three channels or less.

Turned out to be a good thing that I waited until after I cleared out my DVR to cancel the service. Just for grins, I recorded a show yesterday. Today the DirecTV box won't let me access it.

Cord-cutting here in upstate New York means getting everything over the net... we have five broadcast stations. Hard to believe that Houston has a hundred. Unless you're talking "antenna" as in "wireless cable" over microwave, or something delivered via LTE.

 

Edit: Just found your spreadsheet. That's crazy, I had no idea subchannels had taken off like that. One of our stations had 24-hour loops of news and weather, but as far as I know they discontinued them a few years back. I should look into it again... not that we watch more than half an hour a week of broadcast television.

Digital broadcasts brought along subchannels. The main channel is on subchannel 1. NBC in Houston's on channel 2, which is denoted by 2-1 by the TV tuner. This TV broadcasts on the same frequency as subchannel 2, which the TV tuner shows as 2-2. PBS on channel 8 has 4 subchannels, PBS on 8-1, PBS Create on 8-2, PBS Vme (Spansh) on 8-3 and an audio only feed on 8-4.

 

If I counted correctly we have 26 channels that with subchannels ends up being 101 channels, that blog entry has a breakdown of what I can receive - though it's already obsolete as new channels like The Cool TV (a music video channel) have since come online. Less than half the channels are in English - we have channels broadcast in Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc.

 

As mentioned in that prior blog entry, the EyeTV software lets me filter out channels I don't watch. When I posted that I had 20 channels active in my TV Guide, it's now at 23.

That's crazy, I had no idea subchannels had taken off like that. One of our stations had 24-hour loops of news and weather, but as far as I know they discontinued them a few years back.

We used to have those here too, I was disappointed to discover that they replaced them with other things as it would have been nice to be able to see the weather radar whenever I wanted(of course, I can call that up on the Mac's web browser). The main problem with subchannels is they sometimes get carried away and then the picture and audio quality suffers quite a bit - the ones with 8 subchannels are pretty bad, but they're not channels I'd have watched anyway.

Just keep an eye on your bandwidth usage versus your bandwidth caps.

I work at home and have a Comcast Business Class account. I don't believe it has a bandwidth cap.