My father considers buying an Android TV box. Initially, I thought that’s a bad choice as a mini pc has much greater capabilities and control.

However, he does have a point that Android TV boxes are cheaper (~60) and work with tv cable which most mini PCs don’t have a connector for.

What are your thoughts on this?

  • Andrzej3K [none/use name]@hexbear.net
    6·
    1 day ago

    So the main problem with a Linux TV box these days is that you can’t get a decent experience with legit streaming services thanks to hardware DRM. So the best thing to do really is to have a Linux server (any mini PC will do), and to stream from that to the Android TV box via Jellyfin. I would recommend using Proxmox, as you can have Jellyfin, your downloaders, a nextcloud instance if you like, all in their own containers with a nice web UI to manage them.

    • VoxAliorum@lemmy.mlOP
      2·
      1 day ago

      I don’t really understand. I use Linux and have no problem with Netflix. Not sure how it goes with other streaming services.

      • hexagonwin@lemmy.today
        1·
        1 day ago

        afaik you can’t get high resolution or something. i think it can be partially mitigated by running google chrome instead of firefox or (open source) chromium but i never attempted these.

        • Andrzej3K [none/use name]@hexbear.net
          1·
          19 hours ago

          There was a brief golden age when all these services had web APIs so you could plumb them all into Kodi and have a unified experience. But yeah, these days you have to use a browser, watch in 1080, and find a way to make that into a user friendly, remote control experience. Also bear in mind that the streaming provider will change things just to fuck with you.

          Alternatively, while Android TV is far from perfect, you do get the official streaming apps in their official form, and you can stream your pirated stuff on the side. I think it makes sense to separate downloading from your tv box anyway. Alternatively, I believe there are pretty good torrent streaming options these days that may be worth looking at.

          • hexagonwin@lemmy.today
            1·
            15 hours ago

            android tv might indeed be good. something like nvidia shield tv that is officially google certified for those drm bs…

            afaik those torrent streaming stuff are based on leeching, i believe having a proper seedbox+jellyfin is a much better choice