I’ve said this numerous times, but I’ll say it again – I’m a TV junkie. Reality TV, medical dramas, regular dramas, comedies, movies, cooking shows, you name it, I watch it. For the past several years, I’ve enjoyed these shows from my DirecTV satellite DVR on a huge 65″ RPTV. But one month ago I sold the TV and had DirecTV put a hold on my service for a few months. Did I suddenly decide that TV was rotting my brain and make the choice to disconnect for awhile? Ummmm, no On the contrary, I’m doing a complete remodel of my basement and had to clear everything out in anticipation for the work. At first I didn’t know how I would survive without my shows, but it didn’t take me long to figure out an alternative – one that is working out way better than I expected.

While many houses have multiple TVs, we’ve only ever had the one set at my house. No TV in the kitchen or bedroom. Just the big Mitsubishi in the basement living room. To give you an idea of just how much TV we watch, here’s a list of our must see shows for the week:

Big Bang Theory, How I met your Mother, Good Wife, Amazing Race, Survivor, Mercy, Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Biggest Loser, American Idol, Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters International, Lost, Celebrity Apprentice, Desperate Housewives, Dancing with the Stars, 20/20, Vampire Diaries, Modern Family, Happy Town, and probably a lot more that I can’t remember… Yes, that’s quite a few shows. A waste of time? Some probably think so… but it’s how I like to relax after a stressful day at work.

The first weekend after we sold the TV, I was wondering how we would be able to keep up with our favorite shows and what we’d do in the evenings. My first idea was to use my Macbook Pro sitting on the coffee table to play rented DVDs from Netflix. But then I had a much better idea… I would move my main computer, a 27″ iMac upstairs and would use the MBP as my main computer in the interim. 65″ to 27″ is a big step down, but it’s not nearly as bad as 15″.

The iMac’s display would work perfectly as a TV, but how to get content would be the next hurdle. First I tried a USB TV Tuner connected to my 30 foot TV tower. I had high hopes that I would be able to pull in HDTV network broadcasts over the air from the Indianapolis stations. Unfortunately, that idea fell through. The only station that would come in halfway decently was a CW station and it would pause every 15-20 seconds.

My next idea was to use Hulu. I had played around with Hulu a couple years ago and found it to be fun, but I thought it was mainly for watching older shows and not a way to view the latest and greatest. Boy was I wrong!

If you’ve never heard of Hulu before (do you live under a rock?), it’s a web based video streaming site that has TV shows and Movies that can be watched for free.

When you look up the title of a show, you will see the different episodes that are available to watch.

I figured we could use it to at least watch some old classic shows. But then I discovered that if you create an account, you can subscribe to shows and have the site send you an email when a new episode becomes available. I then did a quick search and it turned out that about 75% of my current favorite shows were available on the site. Jackpot!

Unfortunately Hulu doesn’t have all the major network shows we watch though. It seems like they carry most, if not all ABC shows, but no Fox shows and they only offer links to shows on CBS that then stream from CBS’s website.

You also need to know that you won’t be able to watch the shows live or even the same day. They usually turn up on Hulu within 12hrs or so though.

When you find what you want to watch on Hulu, clicking on the thumbnail will start streaming the show. There’s an even an icon to make it full screen.

Clicking icons and playback controls is the first semi-annoyance I ran into. Using the GlideTV wireless remote helped a lot, but even with the cursor enlarged to the maximum size, it is still hard to click the tiny Play/Pause controls using Hulu’s built in web player when you’re sitting 8-10 feet awhile from the display. I didn’t complain too much though as I was super happy to have a way to watch my favorite TV shows. I actually used this method for 2-3 weeks until I found an even better method…

I had tweeted something about watching shows on my Mac and someone tweeted back that I should check out an OS X app called Plex. I’m very glad that I took his advice!

Plex is a wonderful media center application that will allow you to play video, music and display images. It also has an app store with free add-ons for viewing internet content from Hulu, Netflix, MTV, HGTV and lots more.

It takes full advantage of Apple’s $19 Remote, which I had ordered months ago but had never even opened the packaging. Using this remote with Plex is infinitely more user friendly than using the GlideTV with Hulu’s web interface because the text is large and you are not required to move a cursor around the screen.

The first thing I did was install the Hulu app, which takes almost no time to do. Then you plugin your Hulu user name and password and you’re all set to watch the shows in your queue.

It even shows a large thumbnail for each show as you scroll though your queue list and also displays the length of time for each episode.

Of course it also offers full screen mode.

Pausing and Playing is super easy with the Apple remote and allows you to easily see how far along you are in the program. There are a few caveats though. You can’t (as far as I can tell) skip forwards or backwards in a show. Resuming playback if you exit out of the app and come back in doesn’t work even though it asks if you would like to resume. Also watching Hulu shows through Plex doesn’t mark those shows as watched, which is kind of a bummer. These small annoyances are easy to live with when you don’t really have an alternative though

I have been very happy with the performance of Plex and Hulu. Overall picture and audio quality have been very good… although I do have the volume on the iMac set to maximum. I expected playback (via WiFi) to suffer from start and stop problems like I sometimes see when I watch YouTube videos. Luckily, this has been a very rare occurrence. It might happen a couple of times a week if that. We’ve even been watching a show streaming via WiFi while surfing on two other computers via WiFi at the same time and have not had any issues. That’s pretty impressive if you ask me considering that my T1 line is only 1.500Mbps up/down.

I would have no problems saying good bye to DirecTV for good, if Hulu or some other service had live network streaming. But I really miss being able to watch shows like Survivor and American Idol live. Watching delayed broadcasts of reality shows can be a pain because I don’t want to accidentally hear who was voted off before I see the show

Anyone else ditch cable or satellite service for Hulu?

Filed in categories: Articles, Audio, Video, TV Gear

Tagged: Hulu, iMac, TV

How I’m using my iMac as my only TV originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on May 6, 2010 at 12:50 pm.

It’s Christmas afternoon and Santa didn’t bring me any gadgets But, I’m going to show him and make my own new toy by installing the Boxee Media Center on my AppleTV. Even though I have mainly been using the WD TV HD Media Player to watch video that I have um… uh… obtained, I’ve been wanting a way to watch Hulu content on my 65″ TV. I’m hoping Boxee on my AppleTV will easily do that for me. Follow along as I journal the experience.

4:30pm The first step is to download two pieces of software to my Mac: atvusb-creator and Boxee. Boxee requires that you sign up for an account.

atvusb-creator software is 33.4mb
boxee software is 49.2mb

4:45pm While I was downloading the software, I decided to make an article about the adventure. I’m now in the process of creating a USB stick that I can plug into the AppleTV to install Boxee…

The interface for ATV USB Creator is pretty simple and easy. The only part that might confuse some people is finding the BSD name of the USB stick that you want to install the software on. Luckily the System Profiler in OS X can give you this info.

4:59pm ATV USB Creator is downloading software and installing it on a 4GB USB stick. Hmmmm, this might take awhile from the speed that it’s progressing… I think I’ll play a game on my iPhone while I wait

5:07pm Ugh… only halfway through downloading the image for the USB stick… Yeah, I know… a watched image never boils. I mean downloads

5:13pm Now playing Christmas songs on my ukulele to kill time.

5:16pm Download is finished! It’s now reformatting the USB stick and installing the image.

5:18pm The stick is ready, heading for the living room.

5:32pm After unplugging the AppleTV, I inserted the USB stick in the USB port on the back of the AppleTV and then plugged it back into power. After a few seconds, a splash screen with Tux (the Linux penguin) sitting on an AppleTV appears and then a bunch of info starts scrolling down the screen. If you’ve ever seen a unix box boot up, it looks similar.

5:37pm Hmmmm, the scrolling stopped about 5 minutes ago and the light on the front of the AppleTV is blinking Yellow. Hope the install hasn’t crashed – that would really put a crimp in this article

5:41pm The screen on the TV went Black, but the AppleTV power light is still blinking Yellow.

5:47pm Doh! My bad… I wasn’t able to see the last line of text on the screen which told me to remove the USB stick from the AppleTV and reboot. Yay Google! You’re still my friend Rebooting now.

5:53pm We have a Boxee pick on the AppleTV main menu now!

5:55pm Oops, I didn’t need to download that original Boxee software on my Mac. You have to do this through the AppleTV Boxee Update menu. That menu gives you some download choices for the Boxee application and launcher. I’m downloading the app right now through the AppleTV. More waiting…

6:03pm We now have Boxee running on the AppleTV. After adding your Boxee user id and password, you are shown this menu. Looks like I need to do some configuring as the text is cut off at the top and sides (which explains why I didn’t see the message about removing the USB stick and rebooting after the initial install).

The whole install took about 90 minutes. It would probably be a lot faster had I not being snapping pix and writing commentary. I’m now going to play around with the app and report back later with a thumbs up or thumbs down for Hulu access.

8:30pm I’ve been playing around with Boxee and Hulu off and on for a couple hours now and I have to say that it’s pretty cool. I love that I might be able to find some new shows to watch that I’ve never heard of, or just never tried before.

Boxee has a whole lot of features, but keep in mind that for this article, I have been focusing only on Hulu. In case you’ve not heard of Hulu before, it streams old and current TV shows and Movies. The interface is pretty simple…

You get a running list of shows. In the example above, I’m scrolling through a list of available TV shows. The first one that caught my eye was 24. Can you believe that I’ve never watched even one episode of this really popular show? Sad but true! So I thought it would be really cool to watch the first episode and was very happy to see season one listed along with episode one. So I selected it and waited for it to queue up…

I was immediately disappointed to see the screen shown above. It kind of sucks that they show an episode as available, only to then be not be. That’s the thing with Hulu, you can’t really count on it to have entire seasons of  your fave shows. It might have season one and four and skip the others. And then not all episodes in a season are available either. But, for a free service, we can’t really complain that much can we?

I ended up watching the first episode of the Dresden Files and the first episode of The Dick Van Dyke show Fun stuff. Video quality is ok. It’s definitely not super crisp HD. But it’s fine for watching free shows.

Installing Boxee on my AppleTV was a good move and I’m glad I did it. I did want to mention that installing Boxee does not remove the original functionality of the AppleTV. I know that I have a lot more to explore with Boxee, but so far I’m impressed.

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: AppleTV, Boxee, Gear Diary, Hulu

I’m spending the afternoon installing Boxee on my AppleTV originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on December 25, 2008 at 3:39 pm.