Just realized the first step in cutting the cord is to get an antenna and test the signals in my ...

[G+_Rud Dog]

Another question popping up; how long can you string the cable between the antenna and end point? Also what is being used today 50 Ohm or 75 Ohm?

[G+_Rud Dog]

Brent Vrieze looked at both antennas and neither has much surface area would never have deduced which had more wind problem by looking at the picture. Thank you. BTW didn't see reference to UHF/VHF on the advertisement for the ExtremeTenna80. Is it suited for both?

[G+_John Sullivan]

As far as lightning protection goes, if it's a concern you should use a well-grounded "lightning arrestor" in the line between your antenna and where the cable enters your house, whether your antenna pole is grounded or not.

Whether wind is a damaging factor depends on how large the antenna is, how windy it gets in your area and how far above the highest support your antenna is mounted. As example, if you had a large antenna that mounts more than about six feet above the support, and live in a stormy area, you might want to consider adding "guy wires" below where the antenna mounts to the pole. Each installation is different, so you need to decide for yourself if the extra expense is worth it.

[G+_Brent Vrieze]

Your TV is going to work with 75 ohm. You need to use RG6 cable as it has better electronic characteristics that the cheaper stuff. As far as the flat antenna I showed above again that is not the antenna I have. It is similar. My antenna is no longer sold.

[G+_Bob Buchanan]

Rud Dog 94043. In a multistory condo, surrounded by other condos. I do have it attached to the side of our chimney, on the side facing most of the signals, so it's 30-40 feet off the ground. But still level with many of the condos around us.

 

If you look at the antennaweb.org list for your location, it will show the 'RF' channel. 13 and under are VHF. 14 and above are UHF. That will inform you whether you need a VHF antenna.

[G+_Frederick Kassebaum]

Try dennysantennaservice.com - Outdoor TV Antennas & Accessories - Denny's TV Antenna I have bought two of the HD Stacker antennae and they work great. I cut the cord two years ago and started with this antenna. I bought another for my son.

[G+_Rud Dog]

After more reading than I ever wanted to do on antennas, I decided to buy a cheap 10.00 dollar unit. The channels needed for this antenna were the CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX. To my amazement, it pulled them all in and with great clarity. Next step purchase first box.

[G+_Robert Hafer]

From personal experience; if you use HDHomeRun products, you’ll want to use a wired Ethernet connection. WiFi doesn’t cut it for uncompressed video. Plex is nice in that adjust outgoing video for wireless devices.

[G+_Rud Dog]

Robert Hafer My HDHR Extender arrives the day after tomorrow. The first step will be to connect the antenna and of course, connect to my LAN. This is going to be the try it and understand it better, method. And will use only wired flat screen units to connect. One interesting point I am anxious to test is what happens if two people are watching shows and the third person tries to connect? In the Tivo world, you are given a choice either to stop recording and watch your selected channel or watch what is being recorded. Since the HDHR is shared would be interested in seeing how this is handled. Also, I am told you can add HDHR Extend and add two more available viewing channels.

[G+_Michael Larson]

Rud Dog mine just gives me a message that I don’t have a tuner availble. I’m probably gonna add another tuner if it gets too annoying.

[G+_Robert Hafer]

Rud Dog My current situation is I’m still paying for cable for family viewing, and my HDHR Connect + antenna is for experimentation; so I’ve never made more requests than I have tuners. I would imagine that how that request is handled would depend on the software on the receiving end. When I try to schedule too many recordings on Plex, it asks me to choose a preference.

[G+_Rud Dog]

Michael Larson Thank you that is good to know. Sent an email to mfg and they replied if I wanted to add tuners for more viewers just split the incoming cable and connect one to each Extender box. I am sure if this test reduces the signal quality I will look to get some sort of video amplifier.

[G+_Rud Dog]

Robert Hafer This is what we are doing as well. I will test to my heart's content and make the final decision down the road.

As for plex and watching your recorded media not sure how that works, I will soon. When you say "try to schedule too many recordings". What are too many recordings on Plex?

[G+_Robert Hafer]

Rud Dog Plex is paired with my Connect as so knows it has 2 tuners, if I try to record 3 channels that overlap, Plex posts a warning and makes me choose which to record. For me, my Plex runs on my media server and so the shows are saved there.

[G+_Rud Dog]

I have my HDHR Extend box and was able to test it using the HDHR software on my computer. Now the question is: If I load Plex on my PC as a test and purchase the lifetime guide service will it be tied to my PC or can I later move Plex Pass and my shows to a NAS?

[G+_Michael Larson]

Rud Dog I recommend installing Plex and paying for one month of service and seeing if you can work out the bugs in a month. If you are happy with the results moving everything over to a NAS is as simple as installing the NAS software on an appropriate PC* or buying a pre-made NAS and then loading Plex in a container, verifying the new server on your account, maybe waiting for a sale on the Plex pass, and kicking back and watching that sweet freedom in the comfort of your own couch.

 

*gonna need some horsepower and storage to playback an uncompressed 1080p MPEG file from OTA programming. I am building the following: reddit.com - r/PleX - Plex Server Build Recommendation: NAS KILLER v2.0 - The $145 TERMINATOR - dual socket, 18 DIMMS, LSI SAS2 integrated, 8+ bays, FreeNAS / unRAID ready - the best deal you'll see all year!

 

Read the comments to see what type of processors and memory requirements you’ll need if you go down that road. For example I am using dual Xeon 5670s and 32 GB ram. Total cost of my build not counting HDDs is about $300.

[G+_Rud Dog]

Michael Larson After playing around with Plex and HDHR software found it lacking setup information when it comes to plex. But that might because I have held off purchasing and installing the Plex Pass as I do not want to be stuck with it on my PC but rather on the end game would be to have it on the NAS server.

I do like the links you provided discussing the power consumption as that was one item of interest for my setup. The other is the noise factor. I have an older Drobo and it makes a lot of noise doing nothing. Some has to do with the fans but in the early morning hours can hear the drives.

So now the next step is to read up on the NAS choice(thank you for your suggestions) and take that next step.

There is one thing puzzling me and that is if you are going to your Plex server software for the shows you wish to watch how does this use up one tuner? It would seem the file on the Plex server would just be sent over the ethernet cable to the smart tv bypassing the Extend box? Or is the tuner used only during record and not during play back?

[G+_Michael Larson]

Rud Dog Let's see if I can describe this properly. The two tuners are only used when live OTA TV is being consumed. Example 1: I am watching live TV in the bedroom and my wife is watching live TV in the living room. If I wanted to record another live show on a third channel, I'd be out of luck.

Example 2: I am watching live TV in the bedroom and recording a live show on another channel. My wife then turns on the TV in the living room to watch live TV and she is out of luck. (I then have to turn off what I am watching because you know...)

Example 3: I am watching a recorded show, my wife is watching another recorded show. My daughter then starts watching live TV on her phone in her room, and I start recording another live show. Nobody is out of luck. To conclude, the tuners are only used up when either being watched live, or used for recording. You may watch as many recorded shows as you like, as long as your server and network can handle the transcode work and the network can handle the bandwidth. So, you are correct, once the show has been recorded, the HDHR has no part in the signal chain. But I user the tuner to watch live tv simultaneously with recording, and sometimes recording two shows at the same time. Hope that clarifies things a bit.

 

[G+_Rud Dog]

Michael Larson Great that cleared up my concerns and confusion thank you.

[G+_Michael Larson]

Rud Dog additionally I forgot to mention that you can run as many servers as you want. Your Plex pass will be applied to all your servers. I run 2, one as a backup all feeding off the same NAS.

[G+_Rud Dog]

Michael Larson Really grateful for you clearing up confusion on my part. Now I must ask another; You say you have two servers both feeding off the NAS. First off where is the Plex Pass loaded? Secondly how does having two servers work? I understand backup server but not sure how this would work.

The background for my confusion is not on the surface to your setup but more concerning the Plex Pass. There was some reading on selecting a location of the Plex Pass to be preplanned as moving it is not so easy. I hope my question is somewhat clear as it is getting late. I should have waiting til morning to ask but want to get my video storage purchased and setup.

[G+_Michael Larson]

Rud Dog when you purchase a Plex Pass, it is tied to your account, essentially an email address. Your Plex servers, all of them, that are registered to your account take advantage of the fact that you have registered said servers on your account. Here’s my example: I started my first server - a media server without an antenna or DVR on a Raspberry Pi that was acting as my NAS as well. I had no Plex Pass at that time. I then added a new Plex server (an old core 2 duo Sony laptop) and decided I would experiment with OTA television programming and DVR. I purchased a Plex Pass on a month to month basis while experimenting. So I now have two servers, one doing double duty as a NAS. It worked ok, but I was running into horsepower problems with playback of my recorded material. So, I built a new server (the one I linked to in an earlier reply), kept my laptop server as a backup and I can watch my media, and my recorded videos off either server (although my new server does all of the recording and pre-transcodes in order to save disk space and relieve network congestion when watching DVR material as the MPEG stream OTA uses a lot of bandwidth). So, I technically still have 3 Plex servers but only use 2 of them. So, the Plex Pass isn’t actually “loaded” anywhere. My Plex account has a Plex Pass, and my servers are registered under my account, and voilà, I have the extended features available to my servers. No worrying about moving the Plex Pass from one machine to another. The reading you’ve done might be issues with moving a Plex Pass to another email address, as your pass is stuck to the one you register with and I don’t think you can change it.

[G+_Rud Dog]

Michael Larson found the response from Plex on my concerns.

The main concern is where they say "moves between running the same operating system" As we know NAS OS and PC Windows 8.1 OS is not the same OS. Maybe I should wait till I acutually have the NAS in hand?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Plex We have an article about moving a Plex Media Server installation (https://support.plex.tv/.../201370363-move-an-install-to.../), though it's geared toward moves between systems running the same operating system. It's still possible to move between operating systems, but copying all the server settings takes more effort (and is not directly covered in the article). You can use the same Plex account to sign in to multiple servers at the same time (so each server gets the subscription benefits).

 

If you run into issues, please post specific details in our support forums at forums.plex.tv - Plex Forum if you haven't done so already. Our staff or friendly community should be able to help you out. Thanks for your interest in Plex!

[G+_Michael Larson]

Rud Dog I don’t worry about duplicating the server at all. I just spin up a new server, name it something new, point the media folders towards my NAS and let it index all the media overnight. Then I connect to the new server with my front end players (Apple Tv, Fire Stick, Roku, iPad, and iPhones). Of course on the new server it doesn’t see what I’ve already played, so that is the only thing that might be bothersome. I say experiment with what you have, and then refine as you go. I’ve learned quite a bit that way.