re: Kodi gone to crap

quote:

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Anyone know of a way to put my cable box through to Plex so I can watch cable tv anywhere? I assume it can't be done.

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There are a few options. The first and easiest is a Sling box. You should probably look at the Slingbox m2 (component) or 500 (HDMI) and stop reading. Production was halted, but they continue to support the product and the streaming service is still working without planned stoppage of support. They even dropped the fee for the mobile app a year or so ago in favor of using some ads.


More complicated:
You say "cable" box. Assuming you have cable (and not Google Fiber, AT&T u-verse, LUS fiber in Lafayette...), you can buy an HDHomerun Prime and rent a cable card directly from your cable company for <$5m. They must give it to you- it's an FCC violation for them not to. There are a few options for live streaming the channels. I think Plex may allow this, but Emby has been doing this a while pretty well-being you need a computer with it installed (it's essentially the same idea as Plex, but it's a different open-source community's product). It's free. They offer a "plus" version with monthly, annual, and lifetime contributions similar to PlexPass.
A bit more in-depth, some to all channels will be copy protected. You may not be able to access them through the streaming software. You can view them all anywhere in the house with a computer running Windows Media Center. There's even a crowd focused on making Media Center compatible with Win10. Silicondust (the people who make HDHomerun) are working to get their software Cablelabs certified. Their community has held their breath something near or over 2 years now. I don't believe it natively allows out of network access.
I can confirm that using this with a CableCard works with Emby to be able to stream at pretty good quality remotely on nonprotected channels. Without the "premium" Emby, you must find your computer's public IP to access it, but it's available in the free version, and this is a fairly easy thing to get around (one quick example would be a free remote software like TeamViewer and googling "what is my IP?" when your last known public IP stops working.


A little bit even more complicated- and I'm actually going to be attempting this in the next week-
Hauppauge makes a piece of hardware which comes in PCIe (Colossus 2) and USB (hd-PVR2) forms. It has HDMI and component input. It supports 1080p @30hz (I believe) inputs. It also has Toslink input if you're using the component input so you can still get 5.1 channel sound.
Support is tricky, but theoretically you should be able to use a handful of (free) programs to use it as an input for, again, Emby (my choice...may look into Plex before this is all done) to view the input of your cable box. The card has an IR in/out port which will allow you to 1) control the computer functions 2) have the card tell the cable box to change the channel

There are a few problems with these last two. Namely, you need guide data for it to be really useful. Easy way to get it: Windows Media center. It's free. Problem: Colossus 2 isn't really supported under WMC. So you're stuck with actually writing a little code to download from your provider's website or Zap2it and transform it to a usable input (difficult) or paying $30/yr for Schedules Direct. I believe there is an additional pay-for-data service that isn't pricey and, in my opinion, totally worth it.


There are a ton of people using Colossus and WMC to view their DirecTV boxes on their computer. There are fewer instances looking online of people posting about the Colossus 2. What I've never found was someone actually using this input to broadcast to themselves on Emby (or Plex. Again. Not certain if this is supported) and posting about it.


I'll be happy to update once I've tried if you're interested.