Legal IPTV?

[Joram]

Hello, for the last 14 years we've been happily using Windows Media Center with a Ceton tuner and CableCARD. But the handwriting is on the wall for CableCARD: our cable provider, Verizon, is no longer offering new or replacement cards and I figure it's just a matter of time before they disable the cards that are out there and try to get us back onto their own boxes.

So I'm weighing our options. We really enjoy and make extensive use of the ability to record as much programming as we want and then to store it for as long as we choose instead of having an arbitrary expiration date on the recordings. I looked at DirecTV Stream and they advertise "unlimited DVR storage," but the recordings expire after nine months. (This past winter during the baseball off-season, I was watching games from spring training 2018.) On the other hand, Verizon FiOS recordings don't seem to get automatically deleted after some set period of time, but then the amount of storage in their boxes is tiny and it looks like there's no way to expand it.

Another idea is to ditch traditional cable-type TV and go all-online for both streaming shows and live and time-shifted TV. This is where NextPVR may come in handy for our situation. But the reading I've been doing around the Web, including on this forum here and here, doesn't sound very hopeful if we want to preserve the ability to record live national news and live national sports and then watch them on our own schedule.

A lot (most?) of the IPTV websites I've found look dubious and we want to use only solid, legit vendors. Is there a way somehow to set NextPVR to (for example) record next Sunday night's MLB game on ESPN that's showing on Hulu Live, YouTube TV, or Fubo? As a cost-free experiment, I opened an account with Pluto TV hoping to record Bloomberg News with NextPVR, but I couldn't find any way to do it.

So, would it be fair to say that we're being wildly unrealistic and need to lower our horizons?

Please be kind! I have experience on WMC, but NextPVR and IPTV are totally new to me.

Thanks for any tips or suggestions.

[mvallevand]

There are some free channels especially news channels searching IPTV.org on GitHub but it is typically pirate IPTV that you will find searching for an alternate to cable. Avoid Pluto TV sense it uses URLs for a custom player.

Martin

[Joram]

Thank you Martin, it does look grim for people looking to keep things close to the way they've been. This thread on Reddit kind of put the final nail in the coffin.

I'm thinking that we'll enjoy our CableCARD setup for as long as it lasts, and then downgrade to Verizon's boxes. I read somewhere that you could get two of their FiOS One boxes and they would work independently of each other as separate "networks," doubling their pitiful amount of storage.

Agree on Pluto live TV, their player doesn't seem to let you pause if you need to go to the bathroom, or rewind if you want to go over something you're not sure you heard right.

[mvallevand]

We never had cablecard in Canada so I've had to depend on HDMI capture from cable STB's for users and have always had great success with NextPVR since the digital transition.. Installation is not plug and play but once installed I have found it can be very stable. Depending on how much your service rents a box for vs renting the cablcecard, it could be only a little more expensive, I got 2 with my service at no charge. DRM channels are available too.

I have several posts on the forum talking about my setup.

Martin

[fla]

I tried once adding some free (boring) IPTV channels to my NextPVR server and was impressed at how easily they appeared on my kodi nextpvr client and with the smooth channel changes. With an STB and a blaster, channel changes are a bit clunky.

Unfortunately legit IPTV setups that include sports and news are very hard to find. The pirates get a better user experience than us. The STB essentially is a clunky anti-piracy licensing hardware dongle giving us a worse user experience than when analog TV's had multiple tuners and PIP.

With streaming prices going up driving many to piracy, hopefully legit IPTV options will become commonplace for the rest of us.

[Joram]

We never had cablecard in Canada so I've had to depend on HDMI capture from cable STB's for users and have always had great success with NextPVR since the digital transition..  Installation is not plug and play but once installed I have found it can be very stable.  Depending on how much your service rents a box for vs renting the cablcecard,  it could be only a little more expensive, I got 2 with my service at no charge.  DRM channels are available too.

I have several posts on the forum talking about my setup. 

Martin

Huh, interesting. Just to make sure I understand: your HDMI capture setup makes it possible to schedule recordings and to store as much programming as you have hard drives for?

If that's the case, I'll be looking around the forum for your posts on that setup!

[Joram]

I tried once adding some free (boring) IPTV channels to my NextPVR server and was impressed at how easily they appeared on my kodi nextpvr client and with the smooth channel changes. With an STB and a blaster, channel changes are a bit clunky.

Unfortunately legit IPTV setups that include sports and news are very hard to find. The pirates get a better user experience than us. The STB essentially is a clunky anti-piracy licensing hardware dongle giving us a worse user experience than when analog TV's had multiple tuners and PIP.

With streaming prices going up driving many to piracy, hopefully legit IPTV options will become commonplace for the rest of us.

Thanks for the info, I'm glad to hear that it works.

Like you said, the key is to find legit IPTV, especially for sports and news. It makes so much sense, it's surprising they haven't jumped on it already. Juggling a bunch of separate apps for different services is such a drag.

[mvallevand]

Yes capture HDMI gives all the NextPVR scheduling capabilities. You can see some HDMI captures here (using Rogers but STB is the same as used on Xfinity) https://streamable.com/x3m4tj I used to use a little delay to not capture the STB OSD but I've grown used it. My tuning script doesn't retune the same channel so the second CNN view is a cleaner. The speeds are probably about as fast as cable card since it is slower than IPTV too.

Martin

[Joram]

Thank you, I'll look more deeply into using HDMI capture. On the surface of it, the idea reminds me of how I used to put a DVD-recorder between the old-style STB and the TV, in order to record the channel that the STB was tuned to. (Or was it that I'd split the signal coming out of the STB, one to the TV and the other to the DVD-R? Can't remember now how I used to do it, it's been a long time.)

Hopefully it wouldn't be too far above my pay grade. I tell people I'm "somewhat" technical rather than "highly" technical.