Suck it Indiana Jones. I too have found the holy grail. Well the Holly Grail for me in relation to my media center experience. After searching for a solution that works that includes all my requirements I finally think I have it in one device. My Apple TV 4.
That device in and of itself maybe was 1/3 of the solution. For me a Media Center is not complete without my media library accessible via Plex or Kodi. I prefer Plex since that is what I use as my server however I would have settled for Kodi. Plex turned out to be available on the new Apple TV on day one. It worked great. The main other piece of the puzzle missing was the ability to watch live TV.
To save $20 a month I dropped my TiVo a few months ago. I was just not using it enough to justify the expense. MC loves her live TV thought so I needed a solution. I bought a HDHomeRun Prime. The problem has been I haven’t been able to find a good live TV streaming client that seamlessly worked on any device other than my old Sony Google TV. My home built OSMC didn’t work very well. It was very choppy video. The Kodi setup I built on my Mac Mini worked ok for the live TV however it didn’t play my Plex content very well. It also required switching HDMI inputs to get to my iTunes content. That was a challenge when the HDMI switcher didn’t work and MC couldn’t get the girls their 15 minutes of Seasami Street sometimes in the morning.
I had been using the new Apple TV with the Sony Google TV as an overlay on the Apple TV. I did something similar with the Google TV when I had my TiVo. It still required two devices and two remotes to work. It did work but is not very elegant. I also want to rid myself of all Google devices so having to rely on the old Sony Google TV is an annoyance.
Today however everything seems to have changed for me. Yesterday I got an invite for a beta program of one app that will allow me to use the live TV stream from my HDHome Run natively on my Apple TV. I setup the app today to give it a try. It worked but it is clear that the app is still beta. I am hopeful that this app will flesh out their issues and will work well.
In the mean time however as luck would have it I found another app in the Apple TV App Store that I hadn’t seen the last 3 or 4 times I browsed the store for live TV streaming Apps. This time I found “Channels”. For $15 it claimed to do everything I wanted in live TV native in the Apple TV. I figured I would give it a try. After some drama related to two step authentication and my Apple ID I was able to purchase the app and give it a test drive. From the 15 minutes of playing around with it I am pretty impressed. It doesn’t have the audio / video out of sync issues that have experienced on several platforms.
With this app if it continues to be functional I am able to par down my media center to just my Apple TV the front end, Plex running on my Synolog as my back end along with my Silicone Dust HDHomeRun for TV streaming (using a cable card).
Getting to this setup has been a multi year process of trial and error. If it proves to be reliable I will be very pleased and hopefully the configuration will be simplified enough that MC and soon the girls won’t have any problems using it.
For now I am pleased with the turn of events that gave me my holy grail of media centers!