Imperfect, Linux-powered, DIY smart TV is the embodiment of ad fatigue
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Now it does everything I want. It has an unlockable bootloader, root, can run custom roms, all the good things.
What are you able to do?
(I have an LG tv, never hooked to ethernet/wifi, only used as a display for 4k bluray)
I've done the same thing with some random HP laptop from 2006 whose screen died, used it for youtube on a TV until it finished crapping out. I had windows xp on it though.
A Windows PC is the easiest thing for this, so I built one. LTSC with all of the annoying crap turned off, Firefox with extensions, fast, upgradable hardware. Full keyboard and trackpad, plus smaller pointer and keyboard devices scattered around.
The costs of doing so are the cost of buying a cheap used SFF PC from eBay or a new miniPC and a few hours of setup. An N100 box can be had for less than $200 USD with enough horsepower to due basically any HTPC task you want, including ones the STB makers wouldn't allow you to do like emulate old consoles or install whatever software you want.
LTSC is a Windows 10 servicing channel that offers 10 years of support for a static feature set. It is designed for devices and use cases where functionality and features don't change over time, such as medical systems, industrial controllers, and air traffic control devices.
It seems to be a supported annoyance-free windows.
Download links and explanation here: https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
Just takes one dark pattern to make me assume everything you do is a money grab.
You couldn't pay me to own a TV with Roku as the OS.
No, it's not the slickest interface. And no, it's not the most full-featured. But it doesn't spy on me (like Kodi, Emby and/or others) and it doesn't try to show me ads either.
I don't run it off a broken laptop (a fanless minipc for the front end and a VM for the back end), like in TFA, but it works nicely and does what I need of it -- and most of all, it doesn't spy on me or try to show me ads. That's a win!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythTV
Edit: Added missing link.
And I meant Plex, not Kodi. Kodi doesn't (AFAIK) spy on their users, but Plex does. My apologies.
Thanks for the suggestion. I did try jellyfin (for playing my 18,000+ audio tracks) and when I tried to shuffle them all (that's my use case) it crashed, every. single. time.
I'm sure it's fabulous for many folks, but it doesn't meet my needs.
Perhaps I will.
And (as you already knew -- and now I do too!) you are correct. The Jellyfin server no longer crashes when trying to shuffle all my tracks (~20,000).
And when I view my music by "Songs", I can shuffle all the tracks without issue while using the web interface via Firefox. Hooray! I never got that far with jellyfin before.
Unfortunately, the Roku jellyfin client (again, this is my use case) doesn't have a view by "songs" option. As such, in order to shuffle all my tracks, I needed use a playlist (an actual m3u playlist rather than a jellyfin playlist -- as I don't really want to have to individually click on 20,000 tracks and add them to a jellyfin playlist -- which might or might not work anyway).
Which isn't a big deal, as I already used such playlists elsewhere. But attempting to play or shuffle such a playlist fails. Not just on the Roku client, but on Firefox as well.
So I guess I'm either going to have to wait for jellyfin clients to support such large m3u playlists, or until the Roku client has a "Songs" view.
Again, thanks for your heads up. It was much appreciated!
The Roku jellyfin client (not the server, it seems pretty stable) reliably crashes after ten minutes or so of attempting to load the same playlist.
Interestingly, jellyfin on Android appears to have the same behavior as the Firefox/web interface, although I didn't wait an hour to see if that was the case.
That said, Finamp[0] (also available on FDroid, FTW!) on Android loads up the playlist just fine and starts playing almost immediately. Which makes me wish Android was my use case. :(
All in all, it was rather disappointing. That said, I still do appreciate your suggestion.
Finamp is a great app, it's well developed and works far better than the official Jellyfin app/site imo.
Jellyfin on android is pretty much just a webview, so it should behave similar to your browser.
I agree! It worked so nicely that I'm going to expose jellyfin to the internet so I can access my full music collection via my phone (currently I have about 1/3 of it -- which was all that I could comfortably fit on my phone's storage).
Thanks again for the suggestions -- it opened up (with jellyfin/finamp) a new use case for me!
It just seems weird that this doesn't seem to exist. Like, you get something close to it and then it becomes Kodi or something.
I suppose I mean something that Linux people would recognize is a DE. A slightly easier and TV-ish interface, but still ships with e.g. apt or pacman or whatnot, etc.
The underlying distribution will be Debian or Fedora or Arch or Alpine or whatever, which will provide package management and whatever else you need. Then you install something like Kodi on top of that as the WM/DE:
https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Install_Kodi_for_Linux?https=1
Haven't heard any news about it for a while, but it looks a bit like "Android TV except not Android".
To the tune of https://xkcd.com/918/ - Well, I guess that's all I really wanted.
VLC can stream on the local network directly to a chromecast. And surprisingly it actually works.
The file is on my pc, I want it on my dumb tv.
A chromecast was the minimum number of steps to make that happen (an extra long hdmi cable was more expensive than a chromecast at the time) and works every time without internet or ads.
It's pretty hypocritical that big organisations run servers on Linux and often have developers using Linux and yet don't give the same consideration to the Linux community as customers/users.
Somehow I suspect this comes down to media industry executives insisting on this or that flavour of DRM - as if that's going to stop anyone who runs a Linux desktop if they really want to find "alternative" sources of the material anyway. There must be enough users running Linux these days who would be willing to pay to support the shows they enjoy and just want the same service as their Windows or Mac using counterparts if they're paying the same money for it?
No personal knowledge/experience with it but it always sounded like a true DIY project.
There should be an open Chromecast. Pocket-sized SoC with HDMI port where one can install whatever Linux kernel and userland. No need for "custom ROMs" from third parties. Once purchaser pays for the computer, they should be able to wipe the pre-installed crapware, if they so choose, e.g., maybe when it gets old, without making the thing useless.
WTF can someone do with an old Chromecast. Toss in the garbage?
They won't do 4k, but I'm sure there's someone you know that has a TV that isn't 4k and doesn't have a Chromecast that could use it.
Not the end of the world - it's still running off an HDMI input from a PC, so the smarts are there, but not doing any damage.
But no one can positively tell me what works, and what doesn't.
I'd really like to have a more headless system like Chromecast. I'm contrast to here, to this media PC needing its own dedicated input device. Anyone in the family should be able to open their phone & manipulate the current session collaboratively.
I've been kind of ok with Jellyfin-mpv-shim on devices as display server. Jellyfin has the everloving worst most anti-filesystem ridiculous media management, and the Android client can be pretty finicky, desyncing and needing restarts, or having its themeing get messed up & becoming unreadable. But I've kind of learned to live with it. Eventually everything plays.
I also broke out BubbleUPNP again recently & it's been pretty good. Particularly after setting up a BubbleUPNP transcode service on my media server, it's become quite reliable, and has always been quite the Swiss army knife of taking whatever media you have and sending it to whatever device you want. It's not open source & not ideal for keeping track & progressing through a bunch of shows over time, but it mind of shows that the UPNP dream, conceptually, was pretty awesome.
Hoping eventually Open Screen Protocol starts materializing for real. Matter Cast is out but it's a travesty, the most un-interoperable load of crap where your tv seemingly has to already know how to go download a custom native app to work, 100% anti open anything. Open Screen Protocol looks conceptually great, like a way to have a thick client but a dumb one that only runs whatever your phone tells it to. Please please please.