Any techies figure out how to record home TV to a drive and leverage that to RV Roku?

[Carnac]

We ditched all of this Roku and Dish stuff and went with You-Tube TV for $70 a month which we use at home and on the road in our grand design 2600 rear bath... I installed YouTube TV app on iPhone 12 pro max and when we want to watch on large screen in camper I plug a lightning port cable from the phone with HDMI into TV and control everything from iPhone. It is amazing and you get unlimited DVR capability it keeps all recordings for up to a year. All you have to do is have a decent cell signal. Another plus is you can share with up to five other friends or family members at no extra charge. Check it out I love it. Plus you get all the locals when home or the locals when you’re in a major area when traveling. If you have a 2018 smart TV or newer the YouTube TV app will be on the TV then for traveling just install the app on your phone you must have a Gmail account. Good Luck!

P.S. we also watch Netflix and Amazon prime through the lightning port HDMI cable to TV

[Overtaxed]

How technical are you? We have an amazing system, using Plex on a Shield as the server/playback device (for one TV) that's distributed to the rest of the TVs on WiFi. To get the shows, at home, I use UnRAID running a few containers, Sonnar, Jacket, Nzbget, and a Torrent system.

The end result is amazing, I copy the shows before we leave to portable 4TB hard drive, plug it into the Shield in the rig (on the main TV) and have 1000's of hours of HD/4K TV available anywhere we go, no Internet required at all. For live TV, when we have Internet, we use YoutubeTV, we went through a few of them and Youtube was the best for us.

It's a big lift if you're not very technical, but I'm happy to go through it if anyone cares at an overview level. The system, when it's finished, is jaw dropping good, everyone who's ever seen our setup has said the same thing "How do I get this". Step 1, be or marry a nerd.

[Piggy413]

Apple sells a dongle, the Lightning Digital AV Adapter, that I have used with my iPad. I have tried the cheaper knock-offs with no luck.

[richardtc17]

I try to avoid using hotspot data if I don't have to. So, before a trip I simply rip/backup DVDs to a flash drive using Handbrake. I then plug the drive into the USB on the TV. The Handbrake program needs a DLL file placed in it directory to be able to rip DVDs to MP4.

At other times I have also put the files on my laptop and played them on VLC a free media player. I run an HDMI cable from the laptop to the TV HDMI 1 or 2, this would be using the TV as a screen.

Here is a link to the Handbrake download: https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php
Here is how to make Handbrake able to rip your DVDs (it is very easy): https://www.howtogeek.com/102886/how...-can-rip-them/
Download the VLC media player: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[Overtaxed]

If you want to rip DVDs and BluRays easily for playback, I highly recommend MakeMKV. It's dead simple to use, has all the keys (for copy protected content) and spits out a very compatible file (plays on lots of devices). The downside, it's a full resolution/audio rip, which means a BluRay is 30-50GB and a DVD is 6-7GB. But dead simple, and reliable, I ripped 100's of discs with it and never had an issue.

If you want to transcode, that's where tools like Handbrake are the best, they will take a 50GB rip and turn it into a 10GB file with minimal loss of quality. My thinking, drives are so cheap now, I can get an 8TB drive for a little over 100 bucks if I shop hard for it, why try to make it smaller. Can already fit close to 200 full resolution rips on a single drive, do I really need more than that?!

[BobinICT]

Wow. A lot of info here. Man do I feel old now. Coming from a guy that did his DIY networking server and all in a small real estate office.

Windows server 2003. I’d remote in from from across the country and Germany. Like I never left the office.

Times are changing.

[CWSWine]

I didn't read the entire thread but I use PlayON from www.playon.tv to record movies from HBOMax, Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and others to the hard drive. Can use Playon to view them but I think Plex does a lot better job. We use a Synology NAS with 4 ea 6 TB drives.

[Gibson]

I didn't read the entire thread but I use PlayON from www.playon.tv to record movies from HBOMax, Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and others to the hard drive. Can use Playon to view them but I think Plex does a lot better job. We use a Synology NAS with 4 ea 6 TB drives.

"I also use PlayOn software to record TV and movies to my laptop. I save the files to a large hard drive and then copy a bunch of content to a thumb drive that I plug into the Roku Ultra.

I've also hooked up a blu-ray player to the main TV and bring a pile of DVD's/Blu-Rays. The new blu-ray players are small and light and can be gorilla tape mounted to the cabinet above so you don't have to secure it when traveling. The two wires can be hidden with a drill hole.

The TV antenna works great when you are camping near civilization.

Just a note - large terabyte hard drives require a powered USB port when plugging into a Roku."

[MachWun]

I have Roku on every TV in the rig. I stream Netflix and others, including content from my Plex server at home. But, I also have Plex server on my laptop as a backup, load some "goto" movies and shows on it, and beam it to the rokus via the router I keep in the rig. Works great when no Internet.

I do the same, but once in awhile, Plex requires me to login when I have no Internet. How do you get around that?

[Soundsailor]

I do the same, but once in awhile, Plex requires me to login when I have no Internet. How do you get around that?

I run my Plex locally inside my coach using a Raspberry Pi and a 3 TB hard drive (both work fine powered by a 12-volt connection). As long as the Roku TV and the Plex server are on the same network (we use a travel router powered by USB), there's a setting in Plex to trust local clients. My system overcomes the lack of an internet connection that way. We frequently camp where there's little or no internet connectivity. We have hundreds of movies and TV show episodes on our little server.