With Chromecasts being discontinued, increase in ads, telemetry, etc I’m wondering if anyone else is going back to old school HTPCs or if they have some other solution to do this in house.

I think the options here are likely:

  1. Rooted streamer (ie Chromecast, firestick)
  2. Android Box
  3. Mini PC

I’m actually most interested in experimenting with #3, a mini PC running KDE Plasma Bigscreen. Most of my self hosted apps can be run in browser windows, and a full desktop (while harder to navigate) is better than the browsers you can get on Android.

What is everyone esle, especially the privacy / de-googled self hosters doing for their media front end?

  • @[email protected]English
    5•3 months ago

    The mini pc is the most flexible. Batocera works really well and includes:

    • Kodi to stream local media and can act as an Airplay receiver
    • the ability to run Flatpaks
    • a nice 10 ft UI
    • emulation backends and moonlight game streaming
    • the ability to pair Xbox and PlayStation controllers

    Get a usb IR receiver like FLIRC or something similar with HDMI CEC to control everything via standard remote.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•3 months ago

        This is the first time I’ve heard anyone say Kodi has a learning curve. I’m curious what you found difficult?

        • @[email protected]English
          3•3 months ago

          Not OP but I found Kodi incredibly intuitive up until the point that something didn’t behave as expected. Then it was very complicated and support was difficult to find and understand.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•3 months ago

            Pretty much this. Imagine some untutored user given the jellyfin client. They can figure it out pretty quickly as it is much like Netflix. Compare that to a Kofi on a Pi, first you have a keyboard/mouse. OK, then arrow keys and spacebar get you a ways in - now how do I stop the video? Panic till you find out it’s the X key.

            It is the simplicity vs functionality debate. Kodi is amazingly configurable but it is not accessible for your normal household user without a ton of work. Jellyfin(as an example) just runs on the Roku they are already using.

            Eventually I’m getting off my old Roku 3 permanently for Kodi, so I’m just saying I wish Kodi had a dummy mode.

            • @[email protected]English
              1•3 months ago

              You’re describing a completely foreign experience to me. I’ve always controlled Kodi with the TV remote. It’s kind of annoying to type in stuff, but I mostly use Kodi to record and watch jeopardy.