First off, I am a complete newbie to the topic of Home Assistant and haven’t even dipped my foot in the water yet. So if I’m asking stupid questions that are clearly answered somewhere, please point me in the right direction!
I’m in the midst of trying to figure out how to cut the cord with our cable company in a way that my Mom can live with. She’s older and has never been inclined to learn new tech stuff. Anything like that was in my late father’s court.
I’ve got an antenna set up that is almost getting all of our local channels (except for one stubborn VHF one I’m working on). But both of us watch some cable channels we’d like to keep watching. I’ve compared the various options and Philo seems to be the leading contender. We’d actually get more channels that we both want than we do on our sad small town cable setup. For me, it’s a no brainer, but my mother is set in the world of pushing the channel up/down button on her remote. She doesn’t even use the number pad to navigate. Getting her to navigate a guide/app on screen is unlikely to say the least. I wish because she actually likes the idea in concept because our cable is not the best and she likes what I showed her.
The reason I specifically mention Fire TV is because of it having a combined guide with the likes of Sling/Philo and Recast/Air TV 2, etc. That seemed like part of the way there. I haven’t settled on a network tuner yet since I don’t know what way I’m going ultimately but I have played with the Fire Guide and frankly even I find it a little clunky. Navigating from one live stream could use some work IMO. If I want to keep watching the program I’m on and pull up the guide, what I’m watching gets minimized to a small pop up window. In this regards I like the Sling guide better.
Anyway I digress… I just wanted to give some background. What I had hoped I might be able to accomplish with Home Assistant is to create a list of channels, either in the Fire Stick’s main live guide or perhaps on Sling TV. I like Philo better but Sling is still a step forward for us. I wanted to set up our Harmony Hub remote where if Mom pushed the channel up button (or down) it went to the next “channel” in the list. Searching in the forum I found some discussions of launching apps and a couple of launching specific media, but nothing quite like what I was hoping to accomplish using Home Assistant and a Fire TV? Conversely, I’m not married to a Fire TV. If it would be easier to accomplish on an Android TV box I would definitely consider it. But as far as I can tell Philo is not yet part of the Android TV live channels app, so I guess if I went that way it might be Sling instead?
And one more question. Assuming what I hoped to try is possible, I’d rather test it out on an existing PC rather than jump in with both feet and get a Raspberry Pi to run this on. If I set up Docker on my PC and managed to set up a configuration that worked, would it be relatively painless to copy over my config results to a Pi?
Thanks!