Need advice on cutting cable cost.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by NewChief

Okay. I cut my dish network, and I have broadband and wireless on the way to the house.

I was about to pull the trigger on an AppleTV (I really liked being able to airplay music and videos from all of our devices as we're pretty heavily invested in the apple ecosystem). That being said, you seem like an expert and you're suggesting to go the XBMC route. Can I just buy an android box that already has XBMC installed on it?

This one appears to: http://www.amazon.com/G-Box-Midnight.../dp/B009BWC3J4

I'm assuming I can get do netflix through XBMC if I decide to keep it mostly legit?

That's the old unit, and for some reason more expensive.

Here's the shiznit: http://www.amazon.com/G-Box-Midnight.../dp/B00CH643A8

Like I said, the ATV2 is pretty aged and limited in hardware. But it is pretty nice for Airplay purposes. But the most recent iOS for ATV2 is what's called a tethered jailbreak. Meaning you need to hook it up to a computer and do a special tether boot in order to run XBMC. If you kill power to the unit, you'll have to do the tethered boot with your computer to get it working again. It's a PIA in most cases. And any ATV2 you find right now will likely have the newest OS on it. If it has an older OS, you can do an untethered jailbreak and use it as normal. But those are hard to find...

The Android boxes are the way to go now, IMO. You can simply download the Netflix Android app and run it directly from there. There's an XBMC netflix solution, but you'll have better performance running it natively through the Android OS.

Keep in mind that XBMC can access media from any protocol that is shared on the network. So you could simply setup an SMB, AFP, or NFS share from any/all computers, and add it as a source in XBMC and play media that way.

There's always a way...