Time to ditch cable in 2010 (and how to do it)

2010 is the year when you don’t have to fork over 100 plus dollars to your cable or satellite company. The only thing you need to do this is a dedicated computer and an internet connection. Now there are several ways of doing this but I will cover a Mac Mini and a Windows Desktop/netbook solution. Now depending on the content you consume, I’ll cover most of the software solutions that will maximize all of the content on the internet.

Mac Hardware:
I’ll start with the Mac Mini. If you are really serious about making a HTPC to connect to your nice LCD or Plasma television and you want a no fuss machine then the Mac Mini is the way to go. I would go and get the $599 model and buy 4GB of ram online, from a company like OWC. You can find 4GB of ram for your Mac Mini for under 110$.

Connecting your Mac Mini up to your TV is easy if you know how your going to connect it. Apple supplies you with a mini-dvi to dvi connector. All you need to do is buy a DVI to HDMI cable. You can pick these cable up at MonoPrice for $4. Whatever you do buy your cables at MonoPrice and never buy a $100 HDMI cable. The digital signal are just 1’s or 0’s and they are just as happy going down a 1 cent HDMI cable vs a $150 HDMI cable.

For audio you can either do two things. If you have a receiver or TV that will accept an optical connection then do it that way because you will get full 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound out. You can buy a Toslink to mini plug cable at MonoPrice for $2.50. The mini plug will go right into the audio connection in back of the Mac Mini. If you don’t then you can pick up a 3.5mm stereo to a 2 RCA cable at MonoPrice for $3.50.

What is nice about the Mac Mini is that Apple supplies it with a Apple Remote. If you are using a programmable all-in-one remote like the Logitech Harmony remotes, they will work just as fine in controlling the Mac Mini.

If you are going to have an extensive library of movies, TV shows, and music, then I would consider buying an external hard drive. Hard drives are very cheap and you can get a 1TB drive for just over $100. That’s enough to store a good amount of media. If you are very serious then I would suggest a Drobo from Data Robotics. The Drobo allows you to connect up to 4 hard drives and up to 16TB of data. All of the drives are combined together in a secure RAID. If one drive fails then you can replace it without any loss of data. Since it has FireWire800, you are getting data speeds that are twice as fast as USB 2.0. Now using a Drobo is extreme but there are a lot of people using it to, for example, rip their DVD collection and music collection to a digital format. You don’t want to loose all of that work you did so you put it on a Drobo to protect it.

Mac Software:
Now if you have a antenna and you want to watch and record your shows from over the air then I would get the EyeTV from Elgato. You can record full over the air HD shows and play them back either on the Mac Mini or watch them on your iPhone or iPod Touch when your out.

Next up is being able to control your Mac from your couch for favorite chair. To do that requires getting either 2 applications. One is RemoteBuddy from IOSpirit and the other is SofaControl from Gravity. Both applications will get the job done but it comes down to how much you are willing to pay for quality and extra features. RemoteBuddy is $30 and has a nicer looking interface, more features and easy to use. SofaControl is $15. It has enough features but not like RemoteBuddy does. SofaControl allows you to make scripts to work with applications that it doesn’t originally work with.

Now you can control your Mac a good front-end media application is what’s next. Applications like Boxee, Xbox Media Center (XMBC) and Plex are the major applications that are released. Now I’ve used XMBC and Plex but they are not that non-geeky friendly. Boxee has been in Alpha for about a year and a half and it is going to be out of alpha into beta at the start of 2010. Boxee is the most friendliest and easiest to use media application. What nice about Boxee is that it’s social enabled too, which means when you watch a movie or something on their YouTube app, you can tell people about what you are watching through twitter. You can also track other users and have a much more interactive experience. Boxee also has a ton of applications inside of Boxee that expand the features. Applications like Last.fm, Pandora, Netflix, Flickr, Twitter and many more. It does have Hulu support but it’s limited. Speaking about Hulu, you can also install Hulu Desktop. This application comes from Hulu and allows you to watch Hulu content by just using your remote on your computer.

For torrents, I suggest using Transmission. Transmission is the best BitTorrent client for OS X because its easy to use, very minimalistic but powerful and light weight. One downside is that it doesn’t have RSS support (yet). It’s nice to have RSS support because it allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds of TV Shows and that allows the BitTorrent client to start downloading torrents when a new show gets added to the RSS Feed. One way around this problem is to download an application called Automatic. Automatic fills in Transmissions RSS gap. You simply give Automatic an RSS feed and tell it to open up Transmission when it see’s a new torrent listed, couldn’t be any simpler.

Now here is a tip if you decide to go the torrent route and you have an iPhone. Download and install Growl on your Mac Mini and set it up to use Prowl for the iPhone. When a new torrent (TV Show) is finished downloading, Prowl will send the completed Growl message to your iPhone telling you that you can now watch your show. If your away when you got the Push Notification and you wanna watch that show immediately on your iPhone, download AirVideo for $2.99. AirVideo will allow you to stream content from your Mac or PC to your iPhone. If your iPhone can’t play a certain video file format or its encoded differently, no problem, AirVideo will transcode it on the fly and stream the video to your iPhone. AirVideo works best with a WiFi connect but it will work on 3G if you set the quality lower, but even at a lower quality it still looks great.

So with a Mac Mini connected to your TV, running all of the applications i mentioned above you can sever your ties with cable. I’ve been doing it for about 9 months now and I’m so happy that I’ve done it. I get all of the television shows that I’ve watched on cable for free and I have a vast library of content from places like Hulu and Netflix. I’m very happy what you can do with a Mac Mini but what about if you don’t want to spend $700 for a HTPC? You can buy a very inexpensive Desktop PC with Netbook parts.

Windows Hardware:
For the Windows device I’m picking the Acer Aspire Revo. You can pick up one of these for $200. It comes with 1GB of memory and I would suggest that you upgrade it to 2GB. The Revo has HDMI already built in but it doesn’t carry the audio channel. To connect the audio up you can use the 3.5mm Audio connect to RCA that you can pick up from MonoPrice for $3.50. There are a few downsides to the Aspire Revo. First there is no DVD-ROM drive. So no ripping, burning or playing back DVD’s. Second the weak processor and graphics. I’m not saying the the Nvidia ION chipset is weak but if you want to watch full HD content, you’re going to have playback problems. Third, no WiFi. You’re going to have to go wired with the network connection or get a USB Wireless adapter. Forth, no IR for a remote. That can easily be fixed for $25 by getting a Remote and USB IR adapter.

A plus with the Revo that you don’t get with the Mac Mini is a eSATA port so you can connect external hard drives and not have a slow speeds that USB and FireWire have.

Windows Software:
The software you can use in Windows doesn’t differ all to much from the Mac. Boxee is used for the front-end. For BitTorrent you can use uTorrent. What is nice with uTorrent is it does everything Transmission does but it has RSS support built in, so you don’t need another program to deal with RSS. If you have another computer you can use uTorrents web client to feed and monitor uTorrent remotely. This comes in handy if you wanna dedicate the Revo to Boxee, XBMC or Plex and still have access to your BitTorrent client without closing those programs just to get to uTorrent.

If you can deal with the hardware, the Acer Aspire Revo is a great HTPC that doesn’t cost too much. If you want more power, features and ease of use then I would go with the Mac Mini. Either choice will pay for itself when you don’t have to pay for cable anymore.

If you have any suggestions, comments, or if I left anything out please speak up because we should all help each other break the chains from the cable company.