After spending the last few days, tinkering and trying to put together an HTPC for my family, I wasn’t able to get a smooth enough experience to match even our old, ad-filled, laggy, Roku. In particular, every streaming service I tried needed to be controlled almost exclusively by mouse, as everything has been reduced to electron apps/websites with little-to-no keyboard or controller navigation support. As such, I’m looking for other options, although considering how quickly these platforms change and how outdated a lot of the information available on them is its hard to single out the best options.
In particular, I’m looking to be able to:
- Use Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney+. Ideally other services too, since we tend to juggle subscriptions.
- Control it with a remote, controller, or similarly simple device
- Be able to cast to it from a phone
Does anyone have much experience with options for this - esspecially if you’ve tried multiple and can compare?
A computer hooked up to a projector/other display. Smart TVs are an absolutely terrible investment into a locked down proprietary ecosystem you have no control over.
Also, going with a computer+projector is significantly more affordable.
Man you can get a 60" TV for like $300
You pay for it in the data they collect from you and the ads they show to you.
Don’t connect it to the Internet.
I mean, If I wanted to be controlling everything with a mouse, I’d just sit at my desk. Unfortunately every other input method has near-zero support on PC at this point, even for a lot of the more open seas options. Kodi with a paid, illegal service was basically the only option I found, and I’d really rather not go down that route, esspecially when handing off this device to less tech-savvy family.
That’s a fair criticism, especially if you want to limit what media your kids are consuming. We’ve got a setup like I described above in our house but we’re both tech literate so being able to use a proxy server to access South Korean Netflix is an advantage to us.
There do exist media focused keyboards (even partial keyboards without a functioning keyset) to control play/pause, volume etc - but a lot of the streaming services don’t have good UIs on PC unless you’re willing to use a mouse.
I use a flirc ir receiver in a RPI. Use any remote and bind the buttons to keys to set it up then go. I set mine up about ten years ago and still use the same setup even though I upgraded the pi.
How do you get streaming services to work? As best as I can tell, none of them support much in the way of non-mouse inputs, and I wasn’t able to find any scripts/addons being maintained.
Get the android app “Unified Remote”. Works perfectly, and you’ll have several options, from cursor control to buttons programmed with hotkeys.
LG recently released an interesting series of “monitors”. Basically smart TVs without the smart, but sized like big TVs.
That is great news if they stick to it. Ttheir WebOS TVs are becoming slimier and slimier.
Love me some slime 😋