Cutting the cable and switching to streaming video doesn't mean you have to miss out on the wealth of free, local, over-the-air HD TV channels in your area. All you need is an antenna—but if you're like me and live in an area where reception is spotty, you need an antenna that can bring in those local channels as clear as day without putting an ugly, boxy antenna on or behind your TV. The Mohu Leaf is the perfect antenna for the job.
The folks at Mohu were kind enough to send me a Leaf and a Leaf Plus to try out, and considering I cut the cable months ago in favor of streaming video from Netflix and my favorite IPTV channels, I was happy to give it a shot. Our own Adam Pash already owns a Leaf, and both of us agree—it works as advertised, if not better. The Mohu is as paper thin as its specs imply: It's about as thick as a laminated sheet of paper, 9 inches x 11.5 inches rectangular, omnidirectional, and can be mounted anywhere. It's widest at the base where the connector cable attaches to the body of the antenna.
The Leaf is white on one side and black on the other (purely cosmetic) so you can choose which color you want facing out in your room. Mohu claims the Leaf can receive channels from up to 30 miles from broadcasting towers (you can check what you're in range of here), which makes it ideal for cable-cutters or anyone looking for free HD programming in urban or suburban areas. It also supports full 1080p HD video if your local broadcasters are sending it. When I set it up I was surprised at the number of channels I was able to get and how clear they came in, even though I live in an urban area. Just putting the Leaf on the wall directly behind my TV yielded a surprising number of local and public channels and great video quality.
The Leaf is white on one side and black on the other (purely cosmetic) so you can choose which color you want facing out in your room. Mohu claims the Leaf can receive channels from up to 30 miles from broadcasting towers (you can check The Leaf ships with adhesive hooks you can use to mount and reposition it if necessary, but once you dial in your local channels, you'll want to leave it where it is. The best part of having a paper-thin antenna on the wall though is that once you have it where you want it and you're watching TV, you can completely ignore the fact that it's there and you don't have to deal with an ugly box or other indoor antenna sitting on your entertainment center or next to your window taking up space.
There are plenty of other omnidirectional HD antennae out there, but the Leaf can be mounted anywhere, works remarkably well, and boasts some great reviews at Amazon. It comes in two flavors, the original Leaf and the Leaf Plus, an amplified version that also supports external power, even over USB if you choose. The original Leaf retails for $44.99 direct (currently on sale for $35.99 direct and $39.19 at Amazon) and the Leaf Plus retails for $74.99 direct, both with free shipping. Both models are available now.
Wall mounting your TV is a great way to 
Dear Lifehacker,
If the bulk of your computer usage is browsing articles on the internet, reading email, writing, or anything similar, the biggest problem you'll have with the bigger HDTV screen is the lower resolution. Text will look fuzzy and hard to read—especially up close—when compared to most high-resolution monitors. Remember, when it comes to monitors, 
When the bulk of your computer usage is tied up in gaming or watching movies, a big HDTV-as-monitor is a great experience, but it comes with a few caveats. First off, the same ergonomic problem applies, so you need to have a desk set up in a way that you can sit back a bit from the TV. Second, you're still better off with the higher resolution 1080p TV if you're using it as a part-time computer monitor, so the cost might bump up a bit.
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. 
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.
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.
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 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). It isn't lossless, but it's pretty darn good and is by far the simpler option (lossless audio would require more software, more time, and more space, so we won't go into it in this how-to).
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, and if you tend to not notice minuscule imperfections, maybe 20 is more your speed. Again, this is personal preference, though, 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.
