I currently use an Apple TV 4K, which is - as far as I’m aware - more or less the best streaming box you can buy. However, it’s the version without ethernet, and Steam Link has become a dog over wifi for some reason. So I figured I’d look around to see if there’s an alternative solution.
Hardware-wise, I have a Dell Optiplex 3020 or a 2014 Mac mini (running Debian), to choose from, but have no real idea where to go from there, beyond the vague notion that KDE have put big screen mode back into beta. I did have a play with that a few months ago in a VM, but was struck that there were (obviously) no applications that made any real use of it.
Does anyone out there run anything they’ve built themselves? If so, what?
This is my white whale. There is a guy making LineageOS versions of Android TV that seem to work well for some people but in my experience are buggy and I couldn’t get CEC working no matter what I tried.
Libreelec (kodi) works fantastic and CEC is flawless with every device I tested, but Kodi these days is really only good for local media (not Plex, Jellyfin, Youtube or streaming services) and real-debrid.
KDE Bigscreen is my last hope, but it’s probably going to be a while before it’s ready, not even including the inevitable wait for TV-interface versions of streaming apps that can run on ARM (if you’re using a raspi).
I ran Konstakang LineageOS on a RPi4 a few years ago, but the hardware decoding didn’t work well. It might work better now. I will probably use Bigscreen once it’s available in an immutable or LTS distro, but for now, I’m using Pegasus frontend on a Linux mini PC. It’s clunky, but kind of gets the job done. Jellyfin desktop and VacuumTube work ok, but I mainly use it for games anyway. I really want Linux HTPCs to be worthy of a daily driver, and Bigscreen is the best hope as you said.
Same boat. It’s odd to me that this topic is so underdeveloped. What are people doing with their pis?