Post #3416346

2026-06-26 20:25 UTC

There are several pieces of set top box software out there already, and they all "work" for varrying definitions of work, and I kind of hate them all. If you're looking for suggestions, I run jellyfin as my server and interact with it from either the jellyfin google TV app or kodi via openelec. This is fine. It does the job. There are some papercuts, and it means I have to supply my own media. It's a nerd solution, and probably the best we can hope for.

Replies (1)

@ajroach42@retro.social 2026-06-26 20:35

I say "probably the best we can hope for" despondently. Jellyfin's server works pretty well. The mobile apps, with some nerd-shit tinkering, work pretty well. The kodi UI is tolerable. But using this setup means 1) running a server 2) supplying my own media 3) setting up some kind of solution for remote access (I went with zerotier + a reverse proxy from one of my already overloaded VPSs) 4) figuring out the plugin ecosystem if you wanna access any media you don't have locally. It's janky. I want to say it's also fragile, but surprisingly it hasn't been fragile. It's just janky. But from this setup, I can't access any major streaming platforms (I don't think! I haven't really tried) because they all mandate playback DRM. I can kinda work around this for youtube and things that are yt-dlp compatible, for as long as they continue to win that war, but it's still far less cohesive than a native application. (this is not a problem for me! I suspect it is a problem for other people.) Additionally, as far as I can tell/the last time I looked, there's no peertube support available for current builds of kodi or available for jellyfin at all.

Open ##3416345