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I pay $50/month for 50 Mbit unlimited xfer and ~$10 month for a seedbox and usenet. Installed Sonarr,CouchPotato, and SABnzb locally, rtorrent runs on the seedbox. A nice script I wrote rsyncs those in for unraring. SAB even has Pushover notifications, so I get a nice alert when something new is ready to watch.

We play all our home stuff with summaries, ratings, and whatnot with the excellent Infuse app for iOS and AppleTV.

We have an HD antenna on our old satellite mast on the roof. Truth be told, once the whole family was used to TV without commercials, they didn't stand for broadcast. Approximately 17 minutes from every hour stolen from your life. The OTA signal hasn't been used in months.

Front-end is Kodi on OpenElec running on a CuBox-i. Back-ends are several VMs. One VM is running a MythTV Back-end server recording from a roof antenna connected to a couple of HDHomeRun boxes saving to a mounted NFS QNAP 12 TB array. Other VMs run Sonarr, Sabnzbd and Sickbeard. Sorarr is also using a Transmission back-end, while Sabnzbd is using a Usenet subscription. Occasionally I also use Netflix and Vudu on a Roku stick which I turn on only when I need it. I white list every device and every port individually, and all things that could be considered borderline legal go through a permanent VPN link on my pfSense VM. Rock solid setup.

I've got a Dell T410 I bought second hand. I've got 6x1TB WD Black SATA drives attached to a PERC5 in RAID 6. It's got 48GB of RAM and dual Xeon E5504s. It's running Hyper-V 2012R2, and hosts my MS home lab for testing, licensed through the now defunct Technet program. The MS lab is all 2012R2 and consists of an Exchange 2013 server, 2 DCs, and a CA. I use this mostly for testing stuff I'm going to do at work, as well as learning Windows garbage I wouldn't normally get to.

I've also got 8 Linux VMs running on it. 6 are running Ubuntu 14.04, one is running Debian Wheezy and one is running Debian Sid. The 6 Ubuntu boxes run my internet based PVR so that I don't have to deal with building a proper PVR to record my totally current active cable service; internet based Blu-Ray ripper so that I don't have to actually rip the discs I buy all the time; Plex Media Server to connect the aforementioned backups to my Chromecast/mobile devices/whatever; SABNzb to actually perform the backups; a custom WordPress installation running SupportPress so that my wife and roommate can submit tickets to remind me to fix the Roomba; a BitTorrent Sync box so that I don't need to deal with Dropbox. The Wheezy box is a Sendmail server for sending mail and the Sid box is one that I use to mess around with and test Linux compatibility with some Python stuff I have.

I've got a file server which has been running OpenIndiana, but I had to move that back to Ubuntu because OI doesn't currently support my motherboard. It's got an 80GB Intel 520 SSD as the OS drive, and a janky ZFS setup which works well enough for home use. The zpools are setup across 3 RAIDZ pools, each cnsists of a 4x1TB, 4x2TB or 4x3TB RAIDZ array. Each array also has a 20GB slice of a 120GB Vertex 3 as cache drives, with the last slice going to the smallest zpool as a slog. The smallest zpool gets the slog since it's running dedup as it houses backups for the Hyper-V box, my desktop and laptop and my wife and roommate's computers. It's got an i3 and 32GB of ECC RAM.

I'm currently in the process of waiting for a server to configure off-site replication of all my important/irreplaceable data to a hosted server through So You Start, formerly OVH. $42 a month for 2TB of off-site storage seems like a pretty great deal to me. It'll be running FreeBSD I suppose, since they don't offer Solaris.

I *want* to pay for a service like that. I'm eager to pay to watch what I like when I want it. But with decisions like that, they leave people like me NO choice but using "alternative" methods like Sickbeard + SABnzbd, forcing me into the underground. These guys are so far behind the times it's like watching a 1950s movie. Term limits!

Or do like I do. Pay them for service and download most everything anyway. I'm paying for it. How I choose delivery is my business.

SABnzbd + SickBeard + AstraWeb = FU and your silly games

Stop copying me!!! That combo is for MY enjoyment. Well, other than using Astraweb.
SO:
sabnzbd + sickbeard + ( giganews OR astraweb ) = JOY!!!!

So I have completely gotten rid of cable/satellite by going the Pirate way (arrr...). I've got a subscription to Usenet, coupled with sabnzbd, Sick Beard, Couch Potato and Media Browser on Windows Media Center. It takes a while to setup and get working, but it's really the best solution I've found. A nice bonus is that there are no commercials...

Did you forget about the first rule of usenet? It has already been declared dead and is good thing but thanks to you now the MPAA will know still alive :)

$10/month will get you unlimited Astraweb. Or a 180GB chunk for $25 should last you at least a year if all you want it for is TV shows.

SickBeard +
SABnzbd +
XBMC

Is damn near the best DVR solution I've ever seen or used. Only downside is you can't watch stuff "live" or catch up like you can with current DVRs.

And depending on your ethics and federal law you can:
feel bad about it, even though it's legal.
not feel bad about it because it's legal.
feel bad about it, because it's illegal.
not feel bad about it, even though it's illegal.

$10 one time payment to NZBMatrix has suited me well over a year. There are also other free providers. And if you're a risk taker (in the US) then you can also use it for torrents. But Torrents don't give me near the speed, plus you're technically uploading with them, so you could get nasty grams.

rss feed for torrent here:
http://eztv.it/shows/67/the-daily-show/
http://eztv.it/shows/53/the-colbert-report/

Or perhaps you rather want them in HD from newsgroups?
1) set up a free acount with a throwaway email here: http://www.nzbs.org/
2) Subscribe to a newsgroup service
3) download and install sabnzbd+ http://sabnzbd.org/
4) Configure sabnzbd+ to fetch rss feed from step one, and make wildcard search to get the shows you want.
It is actually a low maintainance solution after having configured it and tweaked your wildcard searches.

$10/month will get you unlimited Astraweb. Or a 180GB chunk for $25 should last you at least a year if all you want it for is TV shows.

SickBeard +
SABnzbd +
XBMC

Is damn near the best DVR solution I've ever seen or used. Only downside is you can't watch stuff "live" or catch up like you can with current DVRs.

And depending on your ethics and federal law you can:
feel bad about it, even though it's legal.
not feel bad about it because it's legal.
feel bad about it, because it's illegal.
not feel bad about it, even though it's illegal.

$10 one time payment to NZBMatrix has suited me well over a year. There are also other free providers. And if you're a risk taker (in the US) then you can also use it for torrents. But Torrents don't give me near the speed, plus you're technically uploading with them, so you could get nasty grams.

Sickbeard makes one hell of a DVR program. (When paired with sabnzbd or a torrent program).

$25 for a 180GB block from Astraweb ...

Since I never heard of Sickbeard, sabnzbd, or Astraweb, I figured I'd do a little research, and post my (Score: 5 Informative?) findings here. Please correct me if I made any mistakes....

Sickbeard is an open source, GPL licensed Python application (so runs on Windows and Linux and other platforms), that watches newsgroups, looking for announcements of TV shows whose torrents have been put on the web. In Sickbeard, the user can specify which shows he is interested in, and it keeps an eye out for those shows. Once it finds shows that the user has specified, it can queue up a retrieval program, but Sickbeard doesn't retrieve them itself.

Sickbeard will request the show from sabnzbd. Sabnzbd is also open source, Python. Its function is to go retrieve binaries from newsgroups. So it seems to me that the newsgroups have both the announcement of the availability of a TV program (like a torrent tracker), and the actual program. Sickbeard is watching the announcements, and Sabnzbd is grabbing the program.

Astraweb is a newsgroup website that apparently allows you to download newsgroup posts. This is a paid service, and the parent post signed up for a $25 service for 180GB of downloads. Based on my MythTV experience, I'm guessing this might be 180 half hours of TV (please correct this number if I am off!).

So for $25 plus 2 free open source programs, I can have almost 200 half-hour programs that I can watch anytime (starting a few minutes after they air). Interesting!

----

I'm looking for a "to go" solution for watching TV at a cottage (where we have no cable, and no internet). We've been getting by with taking Netflix with us each time we go to the cottage (combined with a small DVD collection), but this might be an interesting supplement! (Other suggestions welcome!!)

Sickbeard makes one hell of a DVR program. (When paired with sabnzbd or a torrent program).

$25 for a 180GB block from Astraweb has lasted me since August and I haven't even burned through 1/2 of it yet. (I used to have the $10/month unlimited until I realized how much I really didn't use it). Programs available within a few minutes of the show ending. 30 minute TV shows take 2-3 minutes. Hour long never take longer than 10. (Heck when I saturate my cable I can have a movie in 8 minutes).

XBMC makes one hell of a nice front end. I come home from school or work and just browse to the 'latest episodes' and watch something.

SABnzbd + SickBeard + XBMC + $10/month to a server of your choice.

The whole process is nothing short of magic, plus you can get back episodes if available.

For TV shows I don't understand why anyone wastes time torrenting - use Usenet. Your ISP probably already provides a news feed, just set up SABNZBD with MyTVNZB and TV shows will be downloaded automatically as soon as they're available and you don't have to waste your bandwidth seeding unneccesarily.