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Someday someone will invent a way to let you watch video files on your TV and it'll just work and it won't do weird things like "you can't watch stand up comedy" (plex) or "only 30% of your files will play" (dlna) or "if you have a video split into two halves, it can only see the first half" (jellyfin)

That'll be a cool day.

in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

I've been using a crappy giant smart television hooked up to a computer via HDMI. One input away from all the files you could ever watch, also it makes computer gaming a treat.

Wireless mouse and keyboard are pretty cheap these days too.

An idea at least.

in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

Only way to do it reasonably. A proper huge computer screen is just prohibitevely priced. I secretly hate that it's a smart TV but best I can do
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

@PatrickoftheG This is my plan if (when) Roku finally enshittifies and starts serving ads directly through the HDMI input.
Nice little SBC and accessories along a factory reset of the TV.
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

@Foone🏳️‍⚧️ @Patrick xine has a remote mode so you can control it from another SSH session, so you can just leave it fullscreened on the TV and then issue commands to any connected SSH session

Something... I... have never had... as my primary... mediaserver

in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

Why is this still a complete shit show?

Wait, I have answers to that myself. We have a projector that does video files and I had to teach my spouse about codecs and containers because you can't update the firmware in the projector. Good thing for him I've been doing dvd to file rips for almost 2 decades now.

in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

clearly some should crowdfund the VLCBox
it's a little box that runs VLC (WITH UPDATES) and nothing else. it just talks to ethernet or wifi and shoves videos out an HDMI port
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

surely a Raspberry Pi image must exist for this purpose? Just image: write disk image to SD card, plug card to 'Pi, power on.
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

an SD card slot and/or USB A port would be cool so we can read off hard media.
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

this is what I do on my TV, just use the VLC app to play via smb share from the NAS
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

while I'm not generally an apple fanboy, the Apple TV with the Infuse app will literally play anything (just like VLC).
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

and there should be some settings to let you take in HDMI from a port and multicast it to other receivers.

I have two sets of commercial versions of this kit. Both use vlc, both are proprietary, can't buy more receivers, and both are really shitty.

in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

I've had good luck using LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi... just point it at the videos directory on my NAS and it largely worked as expected. My only complaint was that Kodi has *so* many options that everything feels like it takes more steps than it should... that, and my SD card kept getting corrupted, but I don't know if that was LibreELEC or the RPi that did it (no videos on the card, but all the scraped metadata and config).
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

Jellyfin has been good to me. I have had trouble with some x265 files, though, although I think that's a Roku problem.
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

I've used all three and I don't know what the stand up comedy thing with Plex is?

Edit: I mean I've never heard of that before

This entry was edited (3 months ago)
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

I run MythTV here and occasionally my video playback is literally just green on black. Like watching on an 80s PC monitor.
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

As silly as it sounds, maybe an Android streaming box? You get Kodi, Jellyfin, native hardware acceleration, and depending on the box, full HD/UHD codec & HDR support. Otherwise, one of those mini PCs plus LibreElec should give you enough power to run & store everything. I've got a silly one by Verizon.
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

I stopped trying to use the TV garbage software and installed VLC, working great so far
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

all these different attempts at making a fancy movie picker and nobody has done something that works more reliably that just sticking video files in a few folders and picking the one I want out of it. I never saw the point of Plex and jellyfish when I can just stick my movies in an SMB folder.
in reply to Foone🏳️‍⚧️

telling nginx to make an autoindex page from my media library is still the most straightforward hosting experience I've ever had.

Didn't even choke the pi3 I was running it on, like DLNA/samba did.