I want to try to set up a Raspberry Pi I have as a smart TV box and I was hoping I could find some advice.
My main requirements are:
- can run Moonlight
- can be controlled from a Bluetooth game controller (that should also work in Moonlight)
What would be nice:
- can run VLC or Plex or something
- can support AirPlay
- can be used for some actual streaming services like Netflix
Any suggestions?
Any Linux distro with Flex Launcher and an Air Mouse+Keyboard Remote.
This is what my HTPC looks like currently:
With Plex banning people with large pirated libraries and their opt-out “watch reports” stuff, they’re showing signs of enshittification. I setup Jellyfin as a alternative option for my library just in case. I even have a domain and HAProxy handling TLS offload for Jellyfin.
I’m a Plex Pass Lifetime subscriber, but I like Jellyfin a lot. Once they get the HTPC experience a bit more polished, I might fully move to it and retire Plex, but I’m hanging onto Plex for now.
The lifetime subscriber bit makes a lot of sense. I didn’t have a Plex Pass and ditched them last year when the enshittifcation became worse than the effort to move everything over to Jellyfin. Basically swapped overnight once I was committed.
As I see it, they are close to parity on the video/shows side, but the music thing on Jellyfin is severely lacking for me. PlexAmp and all the special mix and radio features are where it’s at for me, and so far I don’t know of an open alternative to that.
Got Flexlauncher on my setup (Debian running on an old laptop) too and was hoping you could share some advice:
- what’s the best way to launch websites as “apps”? Bonus points if I get to keep uBlock Origin :)
- currently using a wireless keyboard only and running to the trackpad when it doesn’t suffice, what air mouse would you recommend?
- that wallpaper looks great, could I have a link?
For full screen web pages, I’m using Chromium and the --kiosk and --full-screen flags in the launch command. This removes the title bar and such and just loads the web site in full screen. I only use this and the AirMouse for Netflix and PBS. Everything else works with just the remote’s arrow keys (Steam, Plex HTPC, Jellyfin, ES-DE, etc.).
I’m using this AirMouse from Gimbi. This plus AutoHotKey to remap a few buttons and the 4 programmable buttons at the bottom for TV and soundbar controls work for me pretty well. I mapped the ! button to Alt+F4, the search button to the super key, etc. The programmable buttons are TV Input, TV Select, and Soundbar Vol+ / Vol-.
I think the wallpaper was a built in one for the Cinnamon desktop, but I’ll try and find it and link it here.
Thanks for taking the time to answer! I did read the Flexlauncher docs which also recommend the Chromium command, I was hoping there’d be something like that for Firefox because it’s just a matter of time before ad blockers become handicapped in Chromium. But guess that’s the only solution then.
