Andrew Jorgensen
It's better than bad, it's good!

OTA

My brother Eric hooked me up with a UHF antenna which we installed in my attic and I have finally dropped cable. I get all the TV I need Over-The-Air in beautiful, clean, HDTV. No premium content (I'll miss Good Eats) but I just can't justify even the small fee I was paying when I can get 19 channels for free and most of what I really want to watch is on the broadcast networks anyway. Just to give you a whiff of what I'm getting: I can see a couple dozen movies in the schedule and many of them are decent and / or recent.

I have a box in the closet that records for me, which with HD is extremely easy -- it just streams it straight to the disk. Then I watch TV over wireless on my laptop. Setting up MythTV for this was surprisingly easy but I've heard mixed reviews from others.

My laptop can't decode HD so I've got it set up to scale the resolution down and transcode it. This is good though as it reduces the file size to something much more manageable. 2 hours of HD is about 16GB before it's transcoded and about 1.6GB after.