Episode: 963
Title: HPR0963: How I cut the cord part 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0963/hpr0963.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:40:13

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Hello Hacker Public Radio.
Brockton Bob here again with Todd III of my series on how I cut the cable cord.
In this episode I'll talk about how I use my external western digital high drive to
save all my favorite TV episodes of the shows I like.
Now in episode 2 I told you that I have the Net Gear digital entertain alive as my second
set top box with the Roku 2 XD being my first set top box.
Now the great thing about the Net Gear box is that it has two USB ports.
By the way the Roku box has one USB port but it doesn't support many video codecs so
I don't really use it.
I stick with the Net Gear box.
The Roku box only supports MP4 video whereas the Net Gear box supports almost every video
codec around.
I like the AVI codec because it saves a lot of space on my hard drive and the picture quality
is pretty good.
Now how do I get my favorite programs on my box?
Well I go to a website called easytv.it.
So that's www.easytv.it.
Now this site has only television series and some documentaries for download.
On this site you scroll through the shows by the day that they are uploaded or you can
click on the search bar that has a drop down list of all the shows that are offered.
If you click on the show and hit the enter key you are presented with a list of all the
episodes for the current and past seasons.
So I like dirty jobs so I download the episodes and put them in a folder that is labeled
what season they are.
I have all the episodes starting with season 1 all the way up to the current episodes.
Now these episodes are all uploaded by members as soon as the new episode is released.
So if you cut the cable cord and most of the shows are on easytv for download in minutes
after they air.
Using this website you can create a vast library of tv and cable tv series.
One thing you do need to have is a bit torrent quiet.
I use transmission myself on a Linux Mint laptop.
On all the episodes I download it all I do is plug my hard drive into my laptop and
copy them to the hard drive putting them in their respective folders.
Then the next step is to plug into your Net Gear box and start it up.
When you plug it in and start it up you will see your USB drive listed and all you have
to do is click on the browse button of all your folders and pick an episode to play.
By the way all the episodes from easytv have the commercials removed which is I like
that.
That's nice.
A side note on some of the episodes.
Some of the episodes you might want were not uploaded in the codec you want.
So how would you fix them?
Well I use Linux so I use the program ffmpag.
This is a terminal program meaning you run it from the terminal.
I know a lot of people don't like to use the terminal especially new uses.
I use this program in the terminal to convert everything to the avi codec.
If you don't use the terminal or if you don't run Linux have no fear there is a GUI
program that runs on Linux and Windows.
It's called Winff.
You can download that and it will easily convert everything you want to any format you want.
It's got presets all you do is click on the presets and hit go.
So hopefully this short series will help you out.
I hope you give it a try.
If you need help just google anything I've talked about you'll find it on the web.
In a future episode I plan on telling you how to get ffmpag on your Linux computer and
I plan on doing a few easy commands to convert videos to the codec you want.
So thanks for listening.
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