Yup, i hear ya. My return window to Amazon expired a day after my issues became apparent. With my job I travel a lot at times and was in for the arrival and then out for 2 weeks so didn’t really have time to do much testing. I know no excuse and bad planning on my part but I fell for the hype and assurances that it would do what it was supposed to. Oh well, I got a work around and i’m happy and the cord is cut to DirecTV. Passed the wife test with the help of SurLaTablo (kudos @cjcox).
R:
I agree totally - return the thing.
Yeah with @cjcox 's script, this is workable if it’s not purposely made difficult to record shows with out the sub. It looks like that’s the case on the “series” record part of the not included.
Correct, my understanding is that you can’t set series recordings.
I am not sure if you can do like the old first gen Tivo units (or VCRs for us older folks) where you could say record from Time A to Time B on a recurring basis.
That’s what the tutorial I found a few days ago looked like. Time A to Time B on a recurring basis but only being able to see today on the schedule. It was really vague.
Thank You! The endless “if you just try this” or “have you tried this” has worn me down. I got so wrapped into this thing I forgot the basics - Shouldn’t I just have to plug this thing in and it works?
That’s what all the hype says. That’s what sold me on it. A friend of mine at work cut his cord a few months before me and said this was the unit to get. I did the research and loved the fact that it “was supposed” to drop right in to my environment. I wasn’t expecting to have to reinvent my environment just to get this to work. Lucky for me I had Plex up and working and thanks (super big thanks to @cjcox) for SurLaTablo. Otherwise I would have been out the cash for this thing and in the dog house with the wife!
That’s just silly! Didn’t ya read that you where supposed to find that one blog post & know that chromecast only works at low bitrats aka… doesn’t work? I’m sure there’s a rare post for each problem that was clearly our fault for not finding. 
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Here’s my work around -
http://www.garnerproducts.com/products/hard-drive-destroyers/pd-4-hard-drive-destroyer
JK, actually I was thinking something more like this https://emby.media/
I already installed it on my QNAP, just haven’t decided if I want to tackle it or not yet. I’d have to buy some homerun tuners or something. Works with Chromecast so I would think Riffy would be all over this.
Plex is better than Emby. Plex is more fleshed out & stable. I used Emby for a year before I switched to Plex. The bigest reason I like Plex is it’s webui. It’s crazy useful! Edit, delete, update with little effort. I like their software so much I do the PlexPass $5 a month sub.
I was going to go the homerun route but it’s just a really expensive tuner on the network so you have to do all the rest. Has no DVR built for it, but works with pretty much all of the DVR software around since it’s so popular & been around for awhile now. But it also doesn’t claim to do things it can’t either. hehe
The problem I have with homerun is you can buy USB tuners for dirt cheap & do the same things with software, free software. I have 2 $40 ones that work just fine & have for years. I just don’t like keeping the DVR software up to date & running. It’s mostly all pretty easy to set up, specially on windows. Like, it’s so easy to set up NextPVR on windows, like crazy easy. Live TV is the only iffy part. Plex, Emby, Kodi, ect… all have tv addons, and live TV is their not so great part.
Why I bought the Tablo… get it all off my server & all by it’s self. That way it’s just some device & not a whole project to manage. Of course here I am now, & it’s a whole project to manage cuz it doesn’t work as it was advertised.
So… that’s my 2 cents about that. :-p
I agree, Emby was something I was looking into but the more I looked at it the more it looks like a science project like this thing. Emby is really like Plex and I’m very happy with Plex. I’ve been using that for 3 years now and it has done nothing but got better over the years. I was a BeyondTV user for years. That software was awesome. I use to record shows and it would automatically rip to a DVD R/W and eject. I would come home and pop the DVD in my player and watch it on TV. I could watch live TV on my laptop over Wireless G and this was 12 years ago. Guide was nice too. Snapstream has moved WAY beyond that now. They stopped selling the consumer products and their new boxes now are more server based. They do have an entry level box but the guide will kill you at $100/mo. It’s more for Companies now and Educational institutes.
I’m with you though. I just wanted a box that worked. I do have a NAS and if there was something available that ran on that without headaches I would consider that since all my media sits on there as well.
I was comfortable with MythTV but my wife wanted something simpler that she could work with. That’s why we went the Tablo route.
Yep, I think those were the top 2 back then depending on the platform you were running. I don’t think Myth TV initially ran on Windows did it?
overview type comparison plex/ emby/ kodi
Plex vs Emby Chromecast focused comparison
I see it as a ford/ chevy/ dodge difference, pick the one that speaks to you…
MythTV has always been Linux focused, and you can only get it on windows via “building your own binary”…
From the MythTV to windows wiki: The “HOWTO” section below is LONG, painful, and easy to get wrong (and definitely quite a bit out of date! ).
I could never get MythTV to work with the tuners I have. Beyond TV lol that’s a blast from the past! I used that too.
Wow, this thread just went so retro. 
Most of these (Beyond TV, MythTV) where always such science projects to me. Never really polished and well grounded IMO. They were just never able to pass the wife test for me.
It is. Not many among my peers was doing anything like that. That was back when you could buy DVRs in the big box stores and manually schedule your recordings. They weren’t cheap either. That’s why I went Beyond TV.
BeyondTV came bundled with something I bought a long time ago. I want to say a Snapstream FireFly Remote & it worked really well way back then.
Gesh that was over 10 years ago now I think!! How little it’s all progressed compared to other things. I’m sure cable companies throw money at keeping it that way tho.
I still have that remote. 
Snapstream actually still has the Guide up, they never abandoned their users on that. I wonder how many people might still be using it?