basically like a more privacy-friendly version of an android tv or apple tv, maybe a little bit more tinkering but not a lot. Like i know stuff like a raspberry pi with linux or something is an option, but that’s just a little bit too much for me imo. I mainly want to watch youtube (something like smarttube), jellyfin and some streaming services (netlix, prime etc.). I’m in the eu btw
thank
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If you’re looking for something legitimately privacy friendly, your options are super limited. I’ve settled on a PC with Linux. I just found a cheap retired office PC, and I control it using KDE connect on my phone. I’d recommend trying out plasma bigscreen. You don’t need to do much tinkering, just install the package and select it as the session on your login screen. https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
ive heard mixed things about plasma bigscreen but i guess i can try when i fix a little linux box
I personally just adjusted the default KDE desktop to look decent on my TV, since I set it up before the current release of bigscreen did. Bigscreen just seems like less tweaking overall, which seems to fit what you’re looking for. I’ve tried other options like Kodi, Android TV and ultimately been left disappointed. Using KDE connect (or a controller with steam input) and a browser is definitely a bit janky, but it does give you the freedom to use whatever media platform you like without worrying about whether there will be supported apps or plugins for your smart TV/Box. You aren’t going to find a TV Box/Smart TV that isn’t spying on you, at least out of the box. I fought this for a long time trying to find something that worked better for me.
is there like some youtube app with an adblocker and sponsorblock (or just apps in general) that have a more tv friendly ui?
YouTube’s default UI isn’t too bad, in my experience, admittedly my tv is on the small side. I use slightly increased scaling to make things bigger. I use jellyfin and it’s default web interface works well on a tv, I haven’t tried the desktop app but it’s there. I used to use Kodi and while it did present a much more TV centered UI, getting each app working was a matter of managing different third party plugins that would break on me frequently. I used to use Freetube, which both blocks ads and includes sponsorblock. It lets you use YT mostly without an account, including subscriptions, playlists, watch history, etc. It takes some fiddling to import your subscriptions if you do use a YT account.
Using the mouse and keyboard on my phine via KDE connect is my default and works well for the less TV centric UI.
I have a laptop plugged in a commercial display. I use a x360 controller as a remote via Steam.
What you need is a mini PC with good hardware decoding ability, a linux distro and a web browser.
Many would use a raspberry pi or similar device, as they are quite performant afaik and really small and efficient. Though, they are ARM which means some niche software or even entire widevine DRM (used in browsers for spotify, netflix etc) might not work.
So instead, something cool: you can get a chromebox with socketed RAM on the used market. I have one from Acer that has an m.2 slot, 2 ram slots, plenty of USB and even thunderbolt! And the best part, basically all x86 ChromeOS devices can be corebooted with mrchromebox.tech 's work.
(Using an m.2-to-multi-sata-adapter, PC power supply, sata-to-fan adapters, pc fans, sata cables and a custom rack you can make a NAS out of any of these chromeboxes, which runs regular Linux, can have plenty of RAM and has open source firmware!)
So you not only have a small linux pc, but it also runs free firmware and you can disable the intel ME!
And then some Linux distro with Plasma Bigscreen. It is not full fledged but apparently works good with KDE Connect. But you can also use regular KDE or GNOME (with GSConnect or something newer I cant find).
for streaming (if you really want to endure that) you could use Firefox, or with Brave you could even create Webapps. Those are separate .desktop files and might automatically show up in plasma-bigscreen!
As distro just something that reliably auto-updates. NixOS for sure but manual setup, Fedora Kinoite would work too. A universal blue based TV variant would be really cool (because Fedora cant legally ship patented codecs for h264, h265, aac etc). You could always take the kinoite-main image and layer the additional packages.
Install Kinoite normally, then rebase. Not sure if the first one is still needed.
rpm-ostree rebase --reboot ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/kinoite-main:latest reboot rpm-ostree rebase ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/kinoite-main:latestThis repo seems to contain all the things needed to configure a base fedora kinoite system to work with plasma bigscreen. A few files and a few packages.
You might need to reread his post. lol
I have a customized onn android tv box from Walmart, it was $20. I stripped out all of the pre installed apps and installed a custom launcher so there aren’t ads on my main screen, just the apps. I also installed smart tube. It’s not difficult to do I just followed a guide.
Got a link to the guide?
Here you go, it’s on Reddit sorry.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidTV/comments/q9mfz8/list_of_customizations_for_walmart_onn_4k_box/
Nice Thank you
If you set up whatever, and have it DNS through PiHole or AdGuard running on a Pi, you get a decent amount of protection.
Also, I started my self-hosting journey in a Pi 4.
I’m running DietPi and it’s been very easy to just ssh in (I only discovered the web interface on Sunday!) and install off the provided ‘app store’ and it’s very plug-and-play.
I have an nvidia shield. It’s ok, privacy is dubious.
I’ve heard good things about vero. I’m unsure how privacy focused they are.
You can also install LineageOS on the Nvidia Shield if you didn’t know.
I’m guessing you lose the upscaling though.
Oh, I didn’t know!
