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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

What happened to having an HTPC?

For me: I want something that will always work with minimal effort and is easy to use for the family.

I've farted around with every HTPC software from MythTV on and I'm over it. I'll happily pay the premium for an AppleTV that will handle almost everything in hardware.

Jellyfin is pretty good

Jellyfin + AppleTV w/ Infuse is a dream.

I solved this with a wireless keyboard and a Kensington trackball mouse running pure Fedora with scaling set to 200% in KDE Plasma.

Who needs a frontend? Just open brave.

I would honestly just use an Apple TV. But the killer feature for me (I currently use a Steam Deck/Steam Controller) is just Youtube without ads reliably. Also total control, if Youtube jacked up the prices for Youtube Red, I always have Ublock.

Total control is the name of the game for me. I can load Steam. I can load Brave. I can load VLC. I can watch any streaming, play any game (proton supported), or listen to any music.

It's just really grating to buy a nice screen and then have all the streaming services basically lock you to early-2000s picture quality. It's not that it doesn't work at all, but if I get the big nice modern screen I want to be able to use what I paid for.

This is ultimately why I'm still sailing the seven seas

Not user friendly and required dedicated hardware (TV tuners). Governing bodies also couldn't agree on HTPC standards, like Play4Sure, causing even more confusion. Plex and Sonarr/Radar are gaining some steam though.

They're great but my friends get confused when they're staying and I'm not there. Not having a normal remote throws people. Getting a remote to work perfectly and usefully in Linux isn't all that simple. Plus it's not at all easy for it to manage external inputs -- a smart TV can just switch to the ps5 with a button, how would i do that from my Linux htpc keyboard?

Don't get me wrong, I'm never giving up my ublock-YouTube plus steam plus Plex Linux htpc but there's plenty of reasons they're not super practical.

Also doesn't Netflix still throttle to 720p on PCs?

>They're great but my friends get confused when they're staying and I'm not there.

How often that happens to be a pain point?

Pretty often, honestly. My friends and i all let each other crash at our places when we're in each other's town, and somebody is in my town visiting probably 3-4 times a year, and then my brother and sister come out 1-2 times a year each. So in a busy year that's almost once a month.

So enough that I'd like to find a good solution, even if it's not super high priority. My sofabaton Bluetooth remote was hopefully the savior but its Bluetooth mode is pretty bad and makes macros unreliable.

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