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This Christmas I finally took the time (which admittedly didn't take long; I was just lazy until now) to set up LibreElec on my pi and hook it up to my TV, and
by worble 7y ago
This Christmas I finally took the time (which admittedly didn't take long; I was just lazy until now) to set up LibreElec on my pi and hook it up to my TV, and I honestly don't know how I've overlooked this for so many years.
It's a DLNA/UPNP client so I can cast anything I want from my media server on my computer to it (Bubble UPNP is a great app to control all this from my phone) and even though it doesn't have "cast" built into apps like Youtube and Twitch, they're all supported as addons so you can still get 90% of the functionality, so I can finally throw away my Chromecasts. Plus you can either use the TV's remote with HDMI-CEC out of the box, or hook up a wireless keyboard.
With another pi running TVHeadEnd that I feed my aerial into, I basically don't need any of the builtin TV software anymore, Kodi just controls it all. It's a pretty liberating feeling.
- anderspitman 7y agoSounds cool. How easy is it to do what I talk about in the blog post and send it a URL from my phone?
- darkwater 7y agoWith Kodi it's dead easy, actually I was thinking about it while reading your post: "he should use Kodi"
- anderspitman 7y agoI think I probably should. But I also think I shouldn't have to. This is the first time the Roku has let me down.
- jeroenhd 7y agoI use Kodi, and while it probably isn't a complete replacement for Roku (Netflix doesn't work out of the box but I have to admit I haven't looked into getting it to work because it's one of the few "smart" things I let my smart TV do), it's pretty good for showing content. There's a Firefox extension called "Send to Kodi" that I use to quickly cast Youtube videos and other videos from my PC to my Kodi. On my phone I use Kore, which can send a URL to Kodi using the standard Android share menu (hold a link, Share > Play on Kodi). Kodi also supports UPNP so you can use one of the million available apps for that to allow some other media servers as well. It's not perfect, but Kodi has managed to satisfy my video consumption needs quite well. I'm using an outdated version (it's running on my server which runs Debian stable) but I haven't run into problems thus far.
- mikepurvis 7y agoHow have you found DLNA? I tried it briefly with the built-in PS4 client and MiniDLNA/ReadyMedia on a headless Ubuntu machine and I found it to be awful— the server side needed to be rebooted in order to discover new media in the folder, the PS4 client was clunky to use (missing obvious stuff like picking up playing a file where you left off), and iTunes instances on the same network would do weird stuff like suddenly peg the processor and burn themselves to the ground, apparently due to something in the protocol. I haven't yet circled back, but my conclusion was to give up on it and instead pursue an end-to-end solution like Plex or Jellyfin.
- mr_toad 7y agoThe PS4 renderer is pretty bare boned, no getting around that. The newer versions of UMS support resuming and FF/RW, depending on the way the file has been encoded.
- satori99 7y agoFWIW, I use a minidlna instance on a Raspberry Pi to serve my media around the house and I have never had an issue with it discovering newly downloaded media. It currently serves around 3TB of video and audio files, and new files are added daily. I haven't restarted either the Pi or the minidlna service for many months. I choose this option because it is a very light-weight solution with no features that I will never use (like trans-coding or metadata downloading, poster art etc).