A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Finding a good client is hard. Folks recommend the Nvidia Shield Pro. Finding something that plays all the formats and can pass audio through hdmi to a AV receiver. Umcompressed HD audio, HDR/10/DolbyVision. Etc.
If I can just pop a debian machine down, that is great, but a hardware guide would be nice to see.
Debian! I have a Plex server on Debian and it’s been nice and stable. I stream 4k to two tvs at my house at once. Works well.
That sounds like the server side, but what about the client side?
the only difference is you install a desktop environment on desktop debian imo
Linux Mint Debian Edition if you find Debian itself too intimidating.
I've been using fedora on a small intel 6th gen or newer mini pc. I then cook up some custom launch scripts that cause JMP to run at login. I use cockpit and a CMK agent for remote monitoring and management.
I got sick of the lack certificate management on Android TV and how much you need to do to make it reasonably private.
If you are on the latest mesa drivers (hence fedora over a more LTS release), and you install Jellfin Media Player via flatpak, everything should just work with hardware decoding.
Thanks for the Fedora nod. I'm looking in to Bazzite. For Intel transcoding on the server I had to install the non-free firmware, and will probably have to do the same.
Check out the other Ublue projects, there are slimmer alternatives in case you won't do any gaming.
I'm looking at chimera. Mostly because I also want to use the same machine for gaming, and since chimera boots right to steam, then I could add an entry for jellyfin
I was hoping to use Chimera, bit with it only supporting AMD GPU's (I'm running an Intel n100) I had to keep looking. Bazzite looks interesting.
I have a Raspberry Pi 3 with a Hifiberry DAC running OSMC (nicely packaged Kodi on top of Debian) acting as my media center and recently installed Jellycon with the hopes of being able to use server side transcoding for a few formats my old TV doesn't support.
My verdict: Menu navigation is slow, but it's a native kodi integration (supports widgets) and playback works great once you made your way through the menus. You can selectively set transcoding options per file type which is exactly what I needed.
Best solution I've seen so far, as it also does IR remote passthrough over HDMI if your TV supports it. The addon works in any kodi setup of course. I think there might be a way to start playback from the Jellyfin web UI but haven't bothered with it. This would fully remedy the menu slowness, I think.
As far as I can tell there is no good Linux client for HTPC.
Closest thing is probably SteamOS only you fill the game slots with streaming services with Heroic Games Launcher. But then you're going to be limited to 720p on most services, which blows.
Server OS?
Whatever one you’re most comfortable with.
Client OS?
There’s a lot of different factors for this one.