Cordcutters, free TV and Kodi tips to get rid of sat and cable!

In the San Francisco area there are over 100 free broadcast TV channels, including all the local stations and their sub channels, many free movie channels, home shopping, best shows/classic TV channels (MeTV) and lots of sports.  All totally free.  Just plug in an antenna.  If you're paying $100+ for cable/sat just for local channels and mostly watching tv via the internet (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Sling) there's no reason at all to pay for local tv.

Some problems you'll have using TV via antenna are you can't get clear reception on all channels unless you keep repostioning the antenna, free TV has lots of ads, and you can't pause/record with just an antenna plugged into the TV.  There's a simple solution to all these problems, don't plug the antenna into the TV!  Get an over the air ATSC Digital TV DVR box.  These only cost around $30, they record to SD cards (so you have infinite space, SD cards are cheap and you can record on one TV and playback on another just by moving the card), and you have a free channel guide which is broadcast along with the digital TV signal.  You don't even need an internet connection to use these boxes.  Picture quality is better than cable/sat (because cable/sat recompresses the signal before uploading) at 1080p/HDMI.

Mediasonic HW-150PVR HomeWorx ATSC Digital TV DVR

Now the real trick - buy two units!  Today's TVs all have multiple inputs so there's no need to do everything on 1 connection.  Just buy 2 ATSC Digital TV DVRs and point the antennas in different directions.  So now you don't need to buy one big antenna, you can get by with 2 smaller antennas and 2 smaller SD cards.  And you can watch/record two programs at once, it's great to pause one DVR while the ads are being shown and watch something else on the other DVR, it's similar to what you get from a dual turner Tivo, without any monthly fee!

I've used 3 of these Digital TV DVRs and the Mediasonic was the best, but there's a dozen other models on Amazon, go with the one with the highest number and best reviews.

You need an antenna too, in some areas the $10 Amazon basic Antenna works fine, but I use this:

Solid Signal High Definition Indoor/Outdoor 2-Bay Antenna


BUT - I still have satellite TV too, for "free".  After we switched from DirecTv to DVR/antenna, I kept the DirecTv box and dish, but I don't pay anything for it!  Here's the trick:

1) Disconnect your satellite receiver from both the internet and coax/dish inputs.
2) Call DirecTv and tell them you're going on vacation and want to suspend service.
3) When they ask for how long say 6 months.

What the above does is it stops billing for 6 months so you pay nothing, however you can still watch everything you have stored on the satellite receiver DVR.  In 6 months the service will come back on and you can recorded a bunch of new shows and then just suspend again for 6 months!  The important step is to unplug the inputs before you suspend service or otherwise they will remotely disable your DVR.

Next time I'll talk about Kodi, internet TV and Netflix.

Kodi crashes! Why? Every couple of years my kodi process just dies on startup for no apparent reason.
Nothing useful in the log files. What I've found that fixes it is go to .kodi on your home directory and remove or rename the "addons" directory.