A while ago I hacked root on my LG tv, but eventually I gave up on the war against spying/ads and just unchecked all the agreements, unplugged the network from it, and hooked up a $20 Onn 4k tv box instead.
Now it does everything I want. It has an unlockable bootloader, root, can run custom roms, all the good things.
I gotta admit, it's pretty LoTek of him to strap a partially dismantled Lenovo laptop to the back of this thing, but... couldn't he have just used a mini PC that's designed to be mounted to the VESA mounts present on many flat-panel TVs?
Because he had a partially dismantled Lenovo sitting around.
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.
I used an Apple TV for the longest time, but as more of my content shifted from pure consumption to more interactive live streams or YouTube videos that often serve as a jumping off point for research, the artificial limitations of the platform came to bear.
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.
TV has a fixed IP, which is not allowed to leave the local network.
I stream my entertainment from an Nvidia Shield and when I am done both are powered off on the power strip. Problem solved.
The "function" that instantly drops you out of your app into an advertising funnel if you press the wrong button (the obvious one to press, naturally) while the screensaver is on is a real scumbag move.
Just takes one dark pattern to make me assume everything you do is a money grab.
And I use MythTV[0] myself. I've gotten a lot of hate from other HNers about that ("why aren't you using $MEDIAPLATFORM instead?" "That's so old, you should use Kodi, instead" -- when Kodi is older than MythTV.).
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!
>If you want an emby fork without the login etc, you can try Jellyfin out. I really think it's overtaken Emby in functionality already anyway.
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.
Late response on my part, but I'm happy to report back that shuffling my 17,000 track library does not crash Jellyfin on the latest stable version. Give it another try maybe?
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!
As a follow-up, it appears that once jellyfin had time to complete all its processing of the media I configured, Firefox was able to shuffle a playlist of ~20,000 tracks -- after an hour or so.
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.
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 is weird how FOSS is constantly reinventing this wheel. All the user wants is the ability to play media over the network and via USB. Think VLC on a HDMI stick. Simple and elegant. What we always end up with is a media server for the network, with torrents, RSS feeds, email alerts, weather, and a semi broken media player, almost as an afterthought. We want a hammer but end up with a hammer factory distribution center, warehouse, and a crane specifically designed to move around pallets of hammers.
I do this now, but single guy who sees me using it will inevitably launch into an extensive explanation of how it is wrong/insufficient and some sort of media management server and phone app ui would be better.
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.
If it's anything at all like what KDE Desktop is, then I have very high hopes for it. Kubuntu is one of the best pieces of software that I've ever used. It actually has real UI design thought behind it (unlike GNOME), and is performant (also unlike GNOME).
Kodi became it's own deeply complex thing; far from a WM/DE?
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.
In addition to what lolinder pointed out about a WM being completely unrelated to your package manager choice, I want to reiterate the point made by TaylorAlexander - Kodi is a TV-ish interface that ships with an integrated repository of add-ons that can be installed. What you are describing in the sentences where you're not mentioning a DE is exactly what Kodi is.
Your WM/DE doesn't ship with apt or pacman or whatnot, because your WM/DE is just the window manager or desktop environment.
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:
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?
Use it? Older Chromecasts still work, they're not like Android phones stuck on an old version of Android and can't install newer apps. It's a target device for audio/video. It's fairly limited but that also means old ones are fine.
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.
Such a device would necessarily only play pirated content (well, and YouTube) or SD content. All the streamers don't allow desktop Linux browsers to play HD content. (Well, there's a hack for Netflix. Don't tell em.)
I would really love the convenience of something like an Amazon fire stick, but as all open source and ad and spyware free.
This SD-only thing is one of the more annoying things about using Linux on the desktop. Some of the big streaming services don't officially support watching on Linux devices at all right now (except for special cases like Chromebooks maybe).
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?
I could swear I saw some smart TV (or "smart display", it was marketed for digital signage) that put all the smarts on a Raspberry Pi compute module or something like that. Can't find it right now, though:/
Just a warning - at least some non-dumb Hisense tvs are suffering from flash memory corruption rendering the whole tv unusable, since to switch HDMI inputs to use external sources still require Android UI operating. Google "Hisense low memory" - a lot of perfectly fine otherwise tvs turns to electronic junk just because of that.
I believe the current generation of 4k Hisense TV's are now smart tvs - my old hisense (still worked fine, but I wanted a bigger screen) was dumb, the replacement available was a smart.
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.
I talked to support a while ago because I needed a replacement. There were none in stock but the agent said they were experiencing a supply shortage, though there are plans to get more TVs onto Amazon and Walmart soon (whenever that is).
Trying to buy an Nvidia Shield has always led to mixed sounding reviews on what I should buy. The number one problem I would really like to solve right now is my Chromecast's chronic inability to output 5.1 audio from streams (sometimes) meaning I can barely hear dialog due to the stereo downmix.
But no one can positively tell me what works, and what doesn't.
Don't have any issues playing 5.1 audio on the shield or my old google tv stick, it might be a problem with the sources you're using. The only time I had an issue was with the AppleTV app refusing to realize a particular show had dolby vision and surround sound available, so I had to force-stop and clear the app's cache and then it worked fine.
I'm not a huge audiophile, but everyone I saw commenting on Reddit said that Plex works amazing on the Shield, with the various audio on their files. I think the primary audio feature they sought was Atmos.
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.
Now it does everything I want. It has an unlockable bootloader, root, can run custom roms, all the good things.