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.
I’m about to start my adventure with Raspberry Pi powered TV box. I will try Plasma big screen - https://plasma-bigscreen.org/ It seems like a good place to start.
Dont. They are notoriously bad at such things. Lack of Hardware acceleration mainly. These old Chips and problems with single-board-complications are just not worth it at such high prices.
An Intel N100 MiniPC will have much more compute with less complications.
Honestly, you might be looking at a ShieldTV.
I considered this, but ended up going HTPC instead. The Shield is just too old and now they’re loading it up with more ads you can’t get rid of. Screw that.
I bought one last year, and even though I was hesitant because of its age, it can handle all the content I throw at it (4k 10 bit hdr h265, etc). As for the the ads, I solved that by installing a third party launcher.
The only issue I have with this setup is that I haven’t found a good replacement for YouTube yet. A revanced for android TV would be amazing.
One of my requirements was Steam (either locally or Steam Link) and EmulationStation. The Shield cost nearly the same money as the AMD Ryzen mini-pc I’m using, so I just decided to go with the more powerful device so I could run light to moderate Steam games at 1080p in addition to In-Home streaming. I use my gaming PC for WFH, so on days I work my kids wouldn’t be able to play games from Steam unless it was local.
I think out the door I spent about $230 for a Ryzen 5000 series APU machine with 512GB of SSD and 16GB of RAM. With the shield at ~$199, I went for the more DIY solution, which isn’t for everybody, but I’m an tinkerer.
I recently set up LineageOS on my rpi4 for this. With that setup, I think you’d be able to use the Android version of Moonlight. I haven’t used Moonlight before though, so not sure how good of an experience that is on Android. Since the official images didn’t support Android TV, I ended up using this version. Performance is a little slow in the menus (and very slow in the Twitch app, but that’s also true on the fire stick). I’ll probably give rpi5 a shot at some point in the near future to see if that offers better performance.
Bluetooth game controller works quite well (a little too well, the box notifies me when controllers are trying to sync), and works with apps like RetroArch and Jellyfin. I think it’s supposed to support AirPlay or whatever the Android equivalent is too, but I haven’t tried that. I also had to install gapps to sign into YouTube, but most other streaming apps I tried worked without it. Some of them require specific Android TV devices though, so a 3rd party app store or side loading may be needed for some of them.
I originally wanted to use Plasma Bigscreen with Waydroid, but I ran into the same problem of not being able to find an Android TV image. I did try building it myself, but that was taking too long so I eventually gave up.
