Hey everybody it's Lon Seidman and welcome back to my
2017 cord-cutting guide where we look at ways to bring in over-the-air TV, or ways to get rid of all of the cable boxes
You're renting and find a more affordable way to consume your cable subscription
And I wanted to go back to the Raspberry Pi that we looked at in the last video
Now in that last video, which I definitely suggest you watch before you go too much farther into this one. We took out this
$35 Raspberry Pi computer and turned it into a little cable box
Using some free software called Kodi, and it was loading up through another piece of free software called Libre elec basically
What happens is when this Raspberry Pi gets power it boots up into Kodi?
And then you had to go and navigate to an add-on
And then you could get into the HD home run TV tuner as well as its
DVR and once you got in there it was great
but there was a
good amount of digging to get to that add-on to load it up which might be a problem for people in your house who are
Just accustomed to turning on the TV and getting their favorite shows to show up so I think I found a way to
Alleviate that issue because a bunch of you wrote in
Asking if there was a way to simplify this even further so I'm gonna plug this Raspberry Pi in and check this out
So it's going to boot up like it did before it's going to load up Kodi here, but once it is done loading Kodi
What's going to happen next is that it's going to load up the
HD homerun and on to begin tuning live TV without having to have any intervention on my part so here you go
You can see it went into Kodi and that it immediately loaded up that add-on
And now we are watching live TV
Without having to touch anything so if you ever lost power or something and your family member comes back to the TV this thing is
Just gonna work. Just like a cable box would in that it will load that thing right up here
You can start navigating to all of your channels with the remote control and really get yourself a true cable box experience here
That is rather difficult to leave without a really determined effort to get out of the plug-in here
So I think this might pass the test for some households where there's one holdout in the family
that doesn't want to click on an app or anything they just want to turn the thing on and watch TV
This will do that for you
There's a little bit of command line stuff to get this working which we're going to do in this video
But it's really not all that difficult
Think this might actually tip the balance towards your project in your house
If it means you could get one more family member to adopt your crazy cord cutting project now
I do want to mention in the interest of full disclosure that HD home run
Which is made by a company called silicon dust is an occasional sponsor here on the channel however all the opinions
You're about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review
And no one is reviewing this content before it is posted
So let's dig into this and see how all of this works
And how you can get it set up on your Raspberry Pi now
I still have the add-on loaded up here because I did want to show you that it's very difficult to get out of it
Without a real determined effort as I mentioned before so they actually have to go over to this menu here and click
Exit to even back out of it to go over to the kodi interface, so generally I don't think they will be
Accidentally exiting the app like they might be able to do on an Android box for example, so this might be pretty safe for
Getting your family in there without having to get too many calls for help now. We're gonna
do now is set up Kodi so that we can go in here and
Configure everything and there's a few steps that we have to take to make that configuration happen
I'm gonna go up here to the gear icon
And then I'm going to go over to libre elec
settings because I need to get the network address for this and I also have to set up a little server on here
So that I can connect in with a laptop to do some of the command line stuff that we need to do to get working
Here so the first thing. I'm going to do is go over to
Connections and what you want to do is write down the IP address of your Raspberry Pi
I've got mine connected to Ethernet, but if you were on one of the wireless networks
You would see that address here
So I'm going to
Just write down that IP address because we're going to need that in a few minutes now next we need to enable the SSH
server on this little
Raspberry Pi so that we can log in and do all of our command line stuff and the way you get to that is over
In the services tab here, and you're going to see a thing that says enable
SSH so I'm going to click that on right now and now our little Raspberry Pi will be listening
For our incoming connection now on the Mac this is pretty simple
You can just load up a terminal window you type in SSH space root at and then you type in the IP
Address that you wrote down in our last step there on Windows you need to get a utility to make all of this work
and I recommend something called putty Which you can see up on the screen here
I'll put a link to this down below in the video description
All you need to do is grab one of these two installers if you have a more recent computer. There's a good chance
It's the 64-bit version that you want if you're on an older computer
You can grab the 32-bit version when you click on this it'll download this MSI file to your downloads folder
You just double click on that and the software will install so now that we have the software installed
Let's connect to our Raspberry Pi and start our work to get it to boot up HD homerun automatically all right
So I have loaded up our putty session here
And I just want to double check and make sure that the SSH option is selected
I'm going to type in the IP address that we wrote down earlier which in my case is
192.168.1.88 hit enter now and what I should get on screen here is a warning message
And this just means that we haven't connected to this host before so I'm going to click on yes to move forward
You'll also get a similar warning on the Mac
You actually need to type in yes and hit enter to get past that warning. It's a standard warning
You'll see with these SSH connections now on the windows side I log in through the client here, so I'm going to type in our
root to log into this thing and the password is libreelec
and that will get us into our
System here and the commands on the Mac will now be the same as what you're about to see here on my Windows machine
Just the login is a little different so on the Mac
You're actually putting in the username before you connect on Windows you type it in along with the password
During the connection process, so just a slightly different way of getting in between the two platforms here
But otherwise it'll be the same thing from here on out so now that we're inside of this Raspberry Pi
We do need to now create a script to tell the Kodi installation how to load up that HD homerun add-on
So I'm going to type in CD
forward slash storage
And then we're going to do another forward slash we're going to type in period KODI
And then we're going to do another forward slash and type in user data
and that's going to drop us into the user data folder the next thing we're going to do is spawn up a
Text editor I like to use one called nano. That's already built into this little installation
I'm going to type in nano Auto
Exec dot py and what this is going to do is create this file for us in this directory
So I'm going to hit enter here
And that's going to pull up a terminal editing window and what I'm going to do here is just go to
Some code that I have already
put into
notepad here on the windows side and just paste it in and I will put the text of this script in the video description so
You can grab it out of there to paste it in yourself and on the Mac of course
This is really easy because you have a bunch of menu options above the app on Windows
It's not as intuitive, but just as easy so I'm going to go up here to edit and copy in notepad
Just because that's where I have my code
I'm going to switch back over to the putty window here inside of Nano
And I'm going to just right click and that will
Automatically drop this code in and what this does is it basically tells Kodi which used to be called XBMC
To execute the script that is the plug-in to load up the HD home run
So we are done now and to get out of here
We're going to do is hit ctrl o and that's going to write the file to the disk on the little Raspberry Pi
And then I'm going to hit control X and that's going to drop us out to the last screen that we were on and
We do need to issue one more command and that is this one. It's going to be chmod
755 Auto exec dot py what we need to do is basically instruct this file to be
Executable as a script when Kodi loads up. We're gonna hit enter here
It's not going to tell you anything
but if it doesn't give you an error that means you are good to go and
That is all we have to do on the command line
But we do need now to shift gears back to our
Raspberry Pi here to turn some things off and then reboot it, so let's go back over here to the Raspberry Pi
It's pretty much right where I left it off and what I'm going to do now is turn off the SSH server
So let me switch that off now and what's going to happen here on my windows screen here
is it will have this connected me and the reason why I recommend turning this off when you're not needing it is because
You're logging in as root onto this device. It's a super user
It's almost like got godlike powers inside of this little box
And there's definitely some security considerations to think
about if you have that
SSH server always running especially because the root password and username are out there for everybody in the world because that is part of
The manual for Libre elec and it's not very easy to change the password so the best thing you can do is
just shut it off and that will disconnect your users here as you can see and
Nobody else can connect to it unless you turn it back on again
So we're done with that and now what I'm gonna
Do here is just back out and we're going to restart this and hopefully when it comes back up
We will have this booting up like you saw at the beginning of the video here
So let me click on reboot and that will just take a second for it to come off there
And it will then reboot itself and hopefully we will get our HD homerun loading up for us automatically
So let's see what happens here there We go just like we saw before the next thing we should see is the Kodi screen and
There we go we are back to where we were so pretty simple process here for getting Kody to load up and then
automatically handing things off to the HD homerun add-on to really have this thing work like a cable box and
Unlike a cable box these little raspberry PI's consume next to nothing for power
They use about as much power as your tablet computer might be using when it's charging so really low powered device
It'll cost you less to operate
Than that cable box you're renting and paying for the electricity bill for so I think it's a pretty good solution and again
It's really hard to get out of this
Accidentally so I think for people that just want to have something that boots up and works like a cable box
This will definitely do it for you
And as you saw in our previous videos about the HD homerun they have over-the-air
Versions as well as versions that work over your cable system
I have the cable version just because I can't really get much over-the-air here
But this would work exactly the same as you just saw here with one of their over-the-air tuners
And if you don't want the DVR service
Then this will work for free without a monthly fee the fee on the DVR is pretty reasonable
Just a couple of bucks a month for the channel guide, but you do get again a very functional device here
You can check out my other videos to see how all of this works the other video
I did with the Raspberry Pi here will also show you how to get Cody and Libre alike running on it in the first place
Very simple process and here we go
We've got ourselves a $35 cable box that boots us right up to the TV
So we can make sure that those few holdouts in the family that are preventing us from saving a lot of money
Will finally be happy and that is the most important thing so let me know if there's other videos
You'd like for me to produce about this topic. I really enjoy covering this thing
I know a lot of you have been following my progress here getting everything up and running in fact I
Disabled my Windows Media Center server yesterday, so I'm completely on this new system that I've been documenting here
And everything's been running great now for almost two months
And I am quite pleased with how it all turned out keep those questions and comments coming and this is Lon Seidman
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