I may go with the roku, after some googling, looks like the way to go for me.

By the way, my understanding is that for over the air free digital tv, any antenna should work--HD and digital claims about antennas are marketing gimmicks I think...This HD antenna from Best Buy looks suspiciously like a TV antenna from the 70s or so.Also, don't spend $80 on an HDMI cable (you can get highly rated ones for less than $10). It'd be interesting to have a double-blind test comparing this $8 cable with this $695 one.

Auntie Ovipositor wrote:joelb wrote:If you don't care about getting an Apple product, the Roku box has scads more content and is cheaper except for the most expensive one-and the only reason to get that one is if you want to use a wireless-N connection. We just got one a month ago and it's like crack, unfortunately.The Roku seems to be the way to go. I know people with both the Apple TV and the Roku, and the Roku is far and away the more popular with said friends. Cheap, too.Yes. Some friends of mine swear by the Roku box. It's relatively inexpensive--maybe $100--and the only monthly fee you'd have to pay is the $8 or whatever for Netflix streaming.We use our Wii to stream Netflix movies and it rules.Bradley R. Weissenberger wrote:I also stream Netflix movies via Wii, which is great, but, goddam it, I now own a Wii.I knew the business about hating video games was a ruse! What are you playing right now?

I'm streaming the bears/packers game from http:/channelsurfing.net right now. I probably put a virus on the wife's windows box with a supposed 'plugin' from vshare. Fuggit tho. I gotta watch this game and a windows box sans virus is downright unamerican. Go Pack!

The netflix app on boxee for windows is total garbage. Looks like shit. Not sure what it'd be like on the boxee box, but no reason to believe it wouldn't also be garbage.Roku is great. Someone bought us one of those for a wedding present about 2 and a half years ago, and it has provided countless hours of entertainment. We moved it to the bedroom when I bought the HTPC, but it's still goin' strong in there.For HDMI cables or basically any cables ever, check out monoprice.com. Super cheap and perfectly fine cables and adapters and all that bullshit. Only time I ever got anything subpar from them was when I bought instrument cables. They were horrible, would crackle whenever I touched the cable, sounded bad. Luckily their customer service was great, and refunded my purchase without even having me send the cables back to them, though, so I still buy stuff from them and am otherwise perfectly happy with spreading the word.

Tree wrote:Verge of Light wrote:Yeah, I really like my little Netflix box.Which box do you have? I am looking up Roku right now.I have an older model non-HD Roku box. I need to get better audio and video cables but even using crap RCA cables suits me fine.

Since last week I got a cool set-up together. I dumped the WD box: too clunky and limited in abilities.I own Mac computers but had been avoiding the Apple Tv because I hate itunes and from what I could tell unless you use Netflix or itunes there wasn't much you could do with it.I found some hack forums and read about jailbreaking it to run either XBMC or Plex, along with other applications for web surfing and podcasts.So I bought one after returning the WD box and set it up. It works fine right out of the box if all you want to do is access your itunes account or use netflix and youtube but I wanted something to watch downloaded movies/shows or whatever and web stuff. I hacked it with a free program called season pass. The season pass thing jailbreaks the aptv so that it adds a spot on the firmware to add shit on. I then got it to tether boot and tried like hell to download xbmc on my own but couldn't make it work. I decided to break down and buy a program called firecore that does the dirty work for you, it was $19.99 so not too bad. Once I got that installed the real fun began. Plex ended up being the best platform for me because I'm a mac guy but if you have a pc xbmc works better. Now, anything on my computer or external drive goes on my TV flawlessly. It plays every video format I've thrown at it with ease.There is also a bunch of good add ons like podcasts from all over the world, news feeds, rss feeds, weather, radio stations and couch surfer pro which allows you to browse the web on your tv.This is a very good set-up.

I dropped comcast this summer completely after spending 5 hours on the phone with them to figure out why my bill went from $60 to $130. We now have internet from a locally owned provider and no cable tv. We have the netflix through the xbox (which, you do not need an additional HD for. every xbox has a little hard drive for saving games and such. That's what netflix uses).It works just fine. Additionally, if you are really itching to watch a specific TV show, you can buy a season from microsoft streamed. It's kind of a ripoff at around $20, but if there is only like one show you'd really miss, it's an option.Hulu plus is supposedly coming to xbox soon.Finally, you can actually buy a normal remote control for an xbox. Ours controls our TV, and stereo.

It's been month since we've had TV. The Netflix on my son's Xbox is great for spur of the moment viewing and the dvds cover the other needs. I recently went to my mom's house where she almost constantly has the TV on to some news station and man, it's really offensive: the commercials, the sensationalism, the sheer volume. It was really a trip.