Sorry if this the wrong place, I couldn’t find an HTPC, home theater, techsupport, or equivalent instance to ask.
The gist is I want to add a TV to my master bedroom for my wife to just browse the web, and for my kids to have something to watch in the mornings while my wife gets out of bed. I have a main pc in my theater room for gaming, and an HTPC on projector for movies and stuff. I don’t want to get a roku or any mainstream smart device, but I’m OK with getting something like a raspberry pi (never done this) to have an air mouse hooked up to the TV so my wife can browse the web, open YouTube, Netflix, steam books, Spotify, as well as access my pc library of content for viewing. Not for gaming. Everything I’m finding online is people connecting their pc to their TV and it’s always for gaming. I don’t need large processing, just enough to watch things, while connecting to my home computers.
Thank you.
Wow that looks like an amazing software. I think I saw this year’s ago when I was messing around with plex before plex became as big as it is. I guess the question is what hardware would I use? Would a raspberry pi have the necessary processing power to stream through wifi my pc content, or play it’s own content online?
I’m very ignorant when it comes to small devices like this, and I’ve never dabbled in anything besides windows, As much as I’d love to have the enthusiasm and knowledge of the Linux community here on lemmy.
That I don’t know. I haven’t been looking into one-board computers for a while. The one I bought ~10 years ago was running out of juice when I was trying to run Kodi on it last year. Wifi shouldn’t be a problem IMO, I’ve been using mine as torrent downloader and hosted a few university projects (dynamic web apps) on it. The graphics might. I would guess that as long as you find one with decent specs (so probably not the 10$ one) it should work. I’m sure there’s someone who is doing exactly that and either could answer what to buy/look for or wrote a blog about it
Thanks for the information and pointing me in a direction I can work with.
My pi 3 has struggled with some particular codecs or large (greater than 5 hours) videos. I’m not proficient enough to say that it wasn’t my fault in some way, some config option, but it was a near thing, regardless. A pi 4 or 5 should do it flawlessly, and my pi 3 works more reliably than my roku, even with that flaw.
WiFi, as long as your router isn’t ancient, will be more than enough. Latency isn’t a factor, and you can get HD streaming at well under 100 Mbps, the upper limit of most routers. My router, in another room with walls from an old house that destroy my signal, still gives me about 20, which is enough for 1080p.
I will say a pi 3 feels fairly laggy just using it to browse online. It does much better as a streaming box. The pi 5 I just got yesterday is much snappier, feels great to use. The 4gb model is 60$ right now, although I got the 8gb model.
All this was on default raspberry pi OS with kodi installed as an app. Very little to set up besides getting the media itself shared in your preferred way.
I just set up a bedroom “TV” which is just an old monitor and Raspberry Pi. I installed Kodi and some addons for TV sources. Works OK, just wish there was an easy way to turn the monitor off from the Pi on command so I don’t have to walk over to it and shut it off manually.
Look into HDMI-CEC, it does exactly what you are looking for. Unless you are using a very old screen, it should work (the screen has to support it).
I’m just using a Dell PC monitor (21" 1080p) from like 2010. It supports HDMI but I don’t know about CEC. Either way it could just put the monitor to sleep and that would be fine, doesn’t require CEC. I just am not sure of a way to trigger this manually when I’m done using it.
The Pi is a bit overpriced/underpowered for a streaming platform. I’d look into something more like a mini pc, i.e. n100
Sounds like you already have a solid plan.
If you have any old laptops or desktops you could convert those instead of using a Pi, but the Pi will work wonders as long as it’s not going to be a 4K TV. Your only real concern here is making sure whatever device you use is able to output video at the TV’s resolution and display hertz.
You’ll probably have more difficulty finding a TV that isn’t a smart TV, than finding a home theater device that is capable of streaming nowadays.
I’m thinking of the odrioid N2 after doing a little bit of research. It’s the finding the TV that might be an issue as you’ve said. I don’t want those smart tv’s and their countless user agreements and BS ads. I don’t want ads so bad, I’ll burn my TV down if I see any.
