Now that I have been shanked by plex, and managed to staunch the bleeding, I am starting to think about where to go from here.
The way I see it, I have 3 use cases with respect to my media usage:
- The ability to play media/music/pictures on my desktop/laptop.
- The ability to play media/music/pictures on my wife's desktop/laptop. This requires a higher spousal approval factor.
- Getting media to "dumbed down" smart TVs with wifi access disabled. The last thing I need is to have my TV spying on me.
Item 1 is easy. I have the media dataset on my NAS mounted everywhere it needs to be (including my desktop and laptop). So I can use any number of open source tools from the command line to watch content, such as mplayer, vlc, etc.
Item 2 is a bit more complex. My wife claims not to be a techie, but she is absolutely is...She may not be a sysadmin, or comfortable on the command line, she is certainly able to manage her own PC day-to-day. I do the admin work on it...It's Devuan linux, so I manage the system maintenance. Mostly through ansible, like I do with a lot of the admin work on FreeBSD. But I would like to provide her a "single pane of glass" into accessing media.
Item 3 is the one that I need to really dig in to. The TVs in the house all have roku boxes on them, as I have netflix. But for whatever reason, none of the rokus can get to the roku network (even though the wifi is good-to-excellent, and it can get to the internet, and watching netflix works). So tasks like updating roku apps or doing a factory reset and getting it to download the updated roku code always fails.
So I initially thought about installing a Raspberry Pi on the TVs. But then I considered throwing a mini-pc in there, like the Lenovo m710q tiny or the dell optiplex micro, and turning it into a "TeeVeePeeCee"... An m710q is actually smaller than a pi 4 or 5, and you can bump the memory up to 32GB instead of 8 or 16 on the pi. And I feel like having an intel platform is going to give me more flexibility than an arm one.
So if I build a "teeveepeecee," I have thought of four approaches that I can take to getting my media to the TV:
- Emby - An option, but if I am honest, reading their web page and blog, they have a vibe like plex did when I first started with them. Am I going to end up in the same situation I am in with plex in a few years? I believe they have a pay tier as is, are they going to start chasing the shekels, and start putting more and more features behind the paywall?
- Jellyfin - Jellyfin is a completely open source, paywall free solution. Which means it will require more tweaking and tuning to get it working, which I don't mind. My problem is that I tried to set it up on FreeBSD. Unfortunately, while I got it partially set up, I was unable to import my library...I could probably set up the teeveepeecees as linux boxes, but I have spent the last 12 years migrating from linux to FreeBSD. Do I want to add in a bunch of linux boxes to the network? My initial knee jerk reaction is "nope."
- Kodi - So far, this is the front-runner. I will admit that I have barely scratched the surface with it, but not only does it appear to be a home theater pc (HTPC) tool, but it also appears to be able to handle streaming services and youtube. Will be interesting to see if it will be able to manage youtube and netflix, specifically searches, without a keyboard. I may have to look into a remote with a keyboard...
Watch this space and I will share what I find...If any of you half dozen or so readers of this blog know anything about emby, jellyfin, or kodi, please feel free to share in the comments.