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
    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.

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

            The one that came with my tv.

            I just click up down left right enter return and it works.

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

                It’s a Sony TV, a Bravia model from many years ago. It runs on a raspberry pi 2, connected with HDMI. There is a setting called CEC (if I remember correctly) that was automatically enabled, and lets the TV remote’s commands pass thru to the RPI over the HDMI cable. Should work for most TVs, but if you use an HDMI to DisplayPort/usbC adapter, some of those might not work right.

                I hope you can try it out because it’s very convenient as a user. And as the administrator you can still connect a mouse/keyboard or use a smartphone to configure the more powerful things Kodi can do.

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

                  OK I had no idea this existed so thanks! I’m one of today’s lucky 10000 I guess. I have an old Panasonic with Viera and had no idea it did this. Not working perfectly yet but not far off.