Hey dudes and dudettes,
We're cutting the cord. The cost of big cable is ridiculous in Canada.
So, I need some help. I've got this fancy new NVIDIA Shield, but I have no idea what the hell I'm doing. I keep googling ways to use this thing, but all the apps/services that are suggested aren't available in the play store.
Does anyone here have any experience with cord cutting and Android boxes? How the heck do I get myself setup on this thing so I can utilize more than Netflix and Prime?
Thanks in advance,
Owl.
Welcome to a cable free world! It's absolutely amazing. We cut the cable a couple years ago and never looked back. Streaming sites offer such a massively better service at much less cost. To be honest, I just dont think cable tv has a place in this world anymore. It's an archaic service that refuses to change with the times.
For our equipment though, it's pretty basic. We have a media pc that pipes hdmi to various TV's around the house (via ethernet adaptors). We also use a logitech k400 for the "tv remote". So the media pc can be controlled from anywhere.
The biggest hurdle for us was popups. They're freaking everywhere. Sites have even started blocking IPs that use add blockers. Its ridiculous. We solved that issue with the installation of a "pi hole". Its a raspberry pi based DNS server. It has a constantly updated blacklist of add sites. It's basically a hardware level add blocker that simply doesn't allow a connection for the ads. As such, the add block detection doesn't detect it.
Also, since it works as a DNS server, all local traffic through our router runs through it. So any wireless devices are passively covered by this ad blocking. So even a friend that hooks into our guest network wont see any ads. It will just register as an incomplete connection in the little add windows on sites.
The rest is just finding which sites to use. Netflix and hulu are a must (hulu just dumped crunchyroll in favor of a funimation partnership btw). Most tv shows also offer streaming episodes from their network site. There are also about 10,000 free streaming sites that rotate in and out of relevance (actually only a half dozen are worth your time, look to reddit for the most recent and relevant).
The end result, once you get the hang of it, is that you can stream anything you want whenever you want. Feeling nostalgic for some Top Gun? It's just a few clicks away. Want to go back and marathon Firefly? Look it up on your favorite site and less than a minute later you're streaming episode one.
The world is a magical place for nerds right now.
EDIT: My media pc is nothing special. It's just an old i3 workstation that I bought from a local office sale for $50. I added a $50 graphics card, a 50gb ssd and loaded up an old copy of win7. Since I only stream (and never store media on my drive) it is more than enough for my purposes.
