Older Linux laptop, T480s are cheap, plus you have a Linux laptop in a pinch, or whatever Thinkpad is currently being dumped on the market from corpo fleets. All of that just works, host a Jellyfin on it and upload videos to that, laptop, so low wall power. Moonlight is great on my T580 to a wide 1440 for example. Bazzite’s pretty painless.
Comment on Can anyone suggest any self-built Apple TV alternatives I currently use an Ap
djdarren@piefed.social 13 hours ago I probably should have laid out my uses in the OP, shouldn’t I?
We primarily watch TV from a friend’s Plex server, or my own Jellyfin. We don’t have Apple TV+/Netflix/Amazon, or anything. Not these days. The only legit streaming service we do occasionally use is BBC iPlayer.
Other than that, it’s a Steam Link / Moonlight machine, plus sometimes playing tunes from Apple Music.
A nicety would be to be able to AirPlay to it, so my wife can show me videos that she’s saved to show me, but I’m not sure how feasible that is outside of Apple devices.
MalReynolds@piefed.social 11 hours ago
friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
This probably isn’t what you’re going for, but my family all use our gaming PC running bazzite for this kind of thing. We use Firefox and have bookmark bar links to plex, immich, etc., and we all just use the same system account, and some of us have our individual steam accounts. Use it with a blueooth mouse and keyboard, and game controllers. It’s not tiny, and using the keyboard and mouse is bigger than just a remote, but we get to type on a real keyboard, we get to point with a real mouse, and we don’t have to fight with all the app limitations that would come along with a more limited device. Been doing this for like a year or two and nobody has complaints. We sometimes still use our xbox in another room, but it’s pretty rare. Using a real PC for this kind of thing is just a better experience.