Review of USTV Now Roku Channel

You may have heard of USTVnow, the streaming service that offers cable television packages that range in price from free to over $100.
USTVnow is ostensibly designed for Americans living abroad (military service members, for instance). The idea is that Americans would normally have access to these channels (perhaps even free over the air), but no longer can. However, USTVnow doesn’t do anything to verify that you are American or living outside of the United States, so it’s effectively a free-for-all.
That means you can get USTVnow no matter where you live. But should you? Here’s our review.

 

The user experience

Device support is fairly weak on USTVnow. There is a Roku private channel that is pretty good, and USTVnow works on your phone, tablet, computer, and smartphone. That’s about it, though – don’t expect support for Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, or Apple TV. The unlimited DVR feature is a nice touch (you can only get it with the paid account, though).

USTVnow’s browser interface

We weren’t that impressed with USTVnow’s UI. USTVnow’s interface isn’t bad, exactly, but it’s also a constant reminder that the service exists on the fringe of legality. It’s pretty basic, with stock photos, blue links, grey tones, and right angles galore. Using it was pretty painless, though it occasionally hit us with strange error dialogue boxes upon login. The USTVnow logo in the upper left corner of the screen indicated that the service is in Beta, and it shows.
All of this is no big deal for the free plan – you don’t expect luxury when you’re using a quasi-legal service and netting a bunch of free TV. But USTVnow’s paid customers probably deserve better.

The content

USTVnow’s paid version includes more than 25 channels. That’s not a bad selection, especially considering the big names that are included: you’ll get the four major networks, plus AMC, CNN, ESPN, FX, TBS, and TNT, to name just a few. The free version includes six channels: ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, NBC, and PBS (those are free because they’re the ones that Americans could theoretically get free over the air at home). Here’s a quick breakdown of the pricing for the paid version:

There’s also a “premium plan” with over 200 channels, including HBO and Showtime. That will run you more than $99 and uses a different system.
It’s hard to find reasons to complain about USTVnow’s content. The only strange thing about the content is that it comes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Since the major networks, PBS, and the rest have regionally-specific content, this can make for kind of weird moments. Local news, NFL games, and other programming will be based on whatever Harrisburg gets. There are also lots of local Harrisburg commercials, which is amusing. It’s a little bootleg, for lack of a better word.
We mentioned the NFL up there. NFL games are a big boost to USTVnow’s content selection, especially since most games are on the channels that you can get for free (the Monday night games on ESPN are the ones that will cost you extra). NFL games are really hard to get ahold of, so it’s nice to be able to catch them. Note that the local broadcasts for Harrisburg cover the Steelers and Eagles, so you’ll have to hope that your favorite team isn’t playing in the same time slot.

Streaming quality

Streaming through USTVnow is solid but unspectacular. The quality is determined largely by your internet bandwidth, but you can choose between low, medium, high, and HD quality at will. We experienced occasional pixelation and poor picture quality. Streaming on low quality was very consistent and smooth; at higher picture quality levels, we dealt with more freezes and choppiness. Internet bandwidth determines streaming success, so your milage may vary. For what it’s worth, the low quality stream wasn’t that blurry, so this wasn’t the end of the world.

Low quality streaming worked best for us – here’s what it looks like

One annoying thing about the stream is that it re-loads every time you change the quality (understandable) or picture size (less understandable), and it takes a fair amount of time to do it. You’ll miss 10+ seconds of your program if you make a switch from one video quality to another.
We did have some issues streaming content on Sunday, when NFL games were airing. This could have been because a high volume of users were streaming at once. Once again, it seemed like something you’d expect from a free illegal stream, but would be hard to swallow as a paying customer.

Our conclusion

You can’t beat the price of USTVnow’s free plan. Even if USTVnow is eventually shut down, individual users will almost certainly never be prosecuted, so you might as well make a free account.
USTVnow’s monthly rate of $29 for a paid plan is much tougher for us to justify based on our experience. Sling TV has fewer channels and a weaker content selection, but it’s also $9 less, features more device support, and isn’t illegal. That said, USTVnow’s day passes are a very attractive option for appointment viewing like sports events and TV specials.

Stephen Lovely

Stephen Lovely is a freelance writer and a longtime cord cutter with a passion for technology and entertainment. You can find his work on Cordcutting.com and his tweets at @stephenlovely.

Source: https://cordcutting.com/review-of-ustv-now/

The Hassle-Free Guide to Ripping Your Blu-Ray Collection

Blu-Ray may be majestic, but it also has more copy protection than any other format around, and playing it on your computer can be difficult to impossible. Here’s how to rip those movies for glorious HD movies, anywhere you want them.

Apart from its very heavy copy protection, you can only play Blu-Ray discs in a few choice desktop computer programs, most of which cost a lot of money. If you use a Mac, it becomes even more difficult, and it’s pretty much impossible on Linux. Luckily, video encoding has come a long way since the days of grainy, 700MB DVD rips, and you can get high quality Blu-Ray rips that can weigh in anywhere between 4 and 12 GB each, depending on how close to the original source you want them to be. Best of all is that even a 4GB file looks a ton better than those DVD rips, so by ripping your Blu-Rays, you can still get that amazing HD quality on any computer you want—no Blu-Ray drive or expensive software required (you’ll need a Blu-Ray drive to rip them though, of course—but then you’ll be able to play those files anywhere).
Five Best Blu-Ray Playback Suites

There are a lot of different methods for ripping and encoding Blu-Rays, several different encoding programs, and more than a few ripping solutions. We combed through the options to pull together the simplest, working method using the best free programs we could find. In addition, everyone’s preferences on quality and method of encoding are different, so you may prefer some advanced options we do not cover here, but this is intended to be a fairly simple, hassle-free guide for people who want to get the job done. It makes a compromise between being easy to execute without sacrificing too much quality. Also, this method is 100% cross-platform, as both programs are available on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
What You’ll Need

Unlike a lot of the Blu-Ray guides I’ve stumbled onto, you’ll only need a few things for ours:

    A Blu-Ray Drive. This is pretty obvious; you won’t get far if your computer can’t read Blu-Ray discs. You can get them for as low as $60 now on Newegg if you don’t already have one.

    Previously mentioned MakeMKV for the initial Blu-Ray rip. It’s about the simplest ripper on the market, rips your movie to a high quality MKV file for easy encoding, and is free while in beta (which, so far, has been a very long time). If you have another ripper that just rips the disc in its original format, like AnyDVD HD, that should work just as well, but if you don’t have a program on hand, MakeMKV will do the job brilliantly.
    Handbrake, our favorite (and your favorite) cross platform, open source video encoder. There are a few other programs out there that will encode HD video, and some of them are a bit easier to navigate, most notably Ripbot264. However, I and many others have had problems running this on 64-bit versions of Windows 7, so I decided to go with Handbrake instead. Make sure you’re using the latest version.
    Anywhere from 30 to 60 GB of hard disk space, depending on what you’re ripping. Blu-Rays are big, and we’re going to rip the whole thing to our drive first, so depending on the movie you’re ripping and the quality you want in your final movie file, you’ll need a good amount of space. An external hard drive will work just fine if you have one and don’t have the space on your PC.

That’s it. Unlike using RipBot or other similar methods, you won’t need AviSynth, ffdshow, or any of the other many installations such programs often require. Just download and install MakeMKV and Handbrake (if you don’t have them already) and you’ll be good to go.


Step One: Rip the Movie with MakeMKV

The first thing we’re going to do is rip our movie to our hard drive, which will produce a very large MKV file of your movie at full, 1080p, Blu-Ray quality. It’ll be very large, but we’ll slim it down later, so for right now, don’t worry about how big it is.

Open up MakeMKV and hit the bit “Open Disc” button. It will scan through your disc, which will take a few minutes. When it’s done, it’ll give you a list of the chapters on the disc. Find your movie (usually the longest title) and uncheck all the other boxes. Then, just choose your Output Folder and hit the “Make MKV” button. Usually this’ll take a half hour or so, depending on the size of your disc, but once it’s done you should have a big MKV file waiting for you in the folder you chose.




Step Two: Choose Your Resolution in Handbrake

Now comes the more complicated (but also more fun) part of the process. There are a lot of settings available in Handbrake, and while we won’t delve into all the advanced features it has, you still have some choices to make and some settings to tweak. Most of it is personal preference, but we’ll outline what we recommend for getting the best compromise between quality and space savings on a movie-by-movie basis, so you can fit as many of those HD movies on your hard drive as possible.



The first thing you want to think about (which will affect your output size pretty heavily) is resolution. Blu-Rays are 1080p natively, and by default, Handbrake will keep that resolution. However, you may want to consider toning it down to 720p for some movies. 720p is still HD, but takes up quite a bit less space—in fact, by bringing our test movies down to 720p, I nearly halved the size of the final file. And, if we’re being honest, certain movies just don’t need all those pixels—I love Anchorman as much as anybody, but I don’t need to see Will Ferrel running around cracking jokes in magnificent 1080p. The Dark Knight, on the other hand, probably deserves all the pixels 1080p can offer. It’s up to you to decide which movies you’d like to dedicate an extra few gigs to, but toning the less visually interesting ones down is something I’d highly recommend.

If you’re ripping a movie that deserves 1080p, you can skip this step, because 1080p is the already the default resolution. If you want to change it to 720p, then click on the Picture tab (or the “Picture Settings” button along the top of the HandBrake window, depending on your platform). Set the “Anamorphic” box to “loose” and change the width to 1280. Note that Handbrake crops out the black bars on either side to save some space, so your height will not be 720, but rest assured that it will be what you know as 720p quality. Exit that window and return to HandBrake’s main settings.

Step Three: Set Your Quality Settings and Encode

Next, hit the High Profile preset in the right sidebar and choose your output type. I like MKV; it’s open in nature, supports DTS and AC3 audio, and works great in quite a few media players, including most media center software. Choose H.264 as your video codec and head to the Audio tab. Here, you have a few options depending on the nature of your disc. It will likely be some form of either AC3 (aka Dolby Digital) or DTS—there are a few different versions of each, but for each I recommend choosing the Passthru option for your Audio codec (AC3 Passthru or DTS Passthru). If you choose the DTS-HD or TrueHD track, you’ll get lossless audio, but you can save some space by choosing the regular DTS or AC3 track with very little loss in quality.





Lastly, we’ll pick the quality of our encode. This part is pretty open to experimentation, but it’s pretty widely accepted that doing a constant quality encode is the best option, so select that. I and many others have found that an RF of 18 is the “sweet spot” for Blu-Rays. This setting will give you a file much smaller than your original MKV (around 15% the size, I’ve found), but with quality nearly indiscernible to your eyes from the original. If you have particularly sensitive eyes, you may want it closer to 16, or even 14 for some Blu-Rays. If you tend to not notice minor imperfections, maybe and RF of 20 is more your speed. Again, this is personal preference, and it can depend on the movie too—movies with lots of fast motion and dark scenes will need a higher quality setting—that is, a lower RF—to look good. So, you may have to play with it a bit before you make your final decision. I’ve found a good way to do this is to rip a single scene using MakeMKV, then test that with a few different quality settings in Handbrake before encoding the final movie, since encoding the whole movie can take a long time.





When you’re ready, hit the encode button and let it go to town. It will take a little while, depending on the settings you’ve chosen, so maybe now is a time to kick back with a cold one and, if you’ve already ripped one of your Blu-Rays, watch one (or two or five—seriously, it could take awhile). Once you’ve ripped your movies, you can watch them either in our favorite video players for Windows, Mac, and Linux, or put together a turbo charged XBMC computer for your home theater.


Like I said before, this is certainly not the only way to rip your Blu-Ray discs. A lot of people prefer different programs and settings, but if you’re not a true audio or videophile, these settings should help you upgrade your movie collection to HD without taking terabytes of space. As always, if you have your own favorite methods for ripping HD content, sound off in the comments.

Source: https://lifehacker.com/5559007/the-hassle-free-guide-to-ripping-your-blu-ray-collection