we live in hell
I don’t even understand the pitch? you have the disc playing, in your hands, your ownership, no buffering, no subscription required. and they’re saying…hey do you want a worse experience?
we live in hell
I don’t even understand the pitch? you have the disc playing, in your hands, your ownership, no buffering, no subscription required. and they’re saying…hey do you want a worse experience?
Get any TV. Build HTPC. Never let the TV access the network itself.
I’ve been doing this for 15 years. It gets easier and less expensive each year as hardware improves.
Judging from the trend, soon smart tvs may include a cellular modem (always on, paid by the manufacturer) or support mesh networking (passing your data through your neighbour’s tv) so it can always send out telemetry data and retrieving ads. Amazon already did it via Amazon Sidewalk, which is said to cover over 90% of people in the US.
Yikes. Soon you’ll need to buy a Faraday cage that fits your TV and sofa.
Do you know of any good guides on this? I started messing with Linux plasma bigscreen and got twisted
Buy a Raspi 4 or 5 if you can get it. Canakit has slightly overpriced but compreshsive kits. Digikey tends to get raspi 5s faster then other stores if you want the latest and greatest, but it’s a b2b company that is kinda annoying to buy from as a retail customer. A 4gb model is all you need from either gen. Keep to a 32gb or larger sd card.
Install libreelec as the operating system. They have a usb program that will flash a usb drive to do this for you. It will automatically boot into kodi, which in is a linux based media center. You can then point kodi to any file server you have, or plug in a usb drive into the raspi with your movies/shows. Kodi aslo has great addons, so you can add things like youtube/nebula/etc.
For advanced use, setup jellyfin on a home server, then use the jellyfin kodi addon to sync all your media. This is really nice when you have kodi setup on multiple tvs, as it will sync when you pause shows/movies, can auto skip intros, stream live tv and make sure all your systems are up to date about with what media you have available.
For a great universal remote, buy a flirc ir recivever that plugs into usb and a flirc skip remote. Flirc is a great company in this space.
That remote reminds me of Logitech harmony but it’s waaaay cheaper
100% taking up the same mantle, but better.
Logitech went all in on cloud only and then dropped harmony support, so putting out good hardware that’s local only is a good call from Flirc.
The OS bit is what I’m missing. I’ve got Kodi on a old i3 right now running Debian and Otaku. I’ve also got old pi4s I’ve never done anything with (unfinished projects).
I’ve also heard of jellyfin before. That’ll be later once i have local media. For now I want a front end for streaming media from online sources. Seems like I have to look at Kodi addons.