I had a Rapsberri Pi 4 (4GB) laying around and installed kodi/libreelec to use it with my TV.

I need it to do 3, maybe 4 things, but the experience was rather underwhelming.

  1. Jellyfin client I run a jellyfin server on my NAS. The jellyfin add-on needs several seconds or even a minute plus to load the content of big folders.

Jellycon has a different approach, but doesn’t let me browse folders, which is a must for me (I use pinchflat to download some videos from YouTube channels. They are organized in folders)

  1. YouTube Ideally I would love a freetube client for watching one off videos or finding a video on a certain topic. The YouTube add-on requires API access, sadly.

  2. Twitch The add-on works great.

  3. Remote I have a IR Mini Keyboard that works great with Kodi/libreelec

I was considering installing a lightweight Linux distro and installing freetube and a browser for twitch and jellyfin.

Does anyone use similar hardware? Is there a better solution for my use case?

(If there is a better affordable hardware solution, I’m interested as well)

  • glitching@lemmy.mlEnglish
    161·
    1 day ago

    kodi and its derivatives are not something you should be using. it’s shit software on so many levels and we should burn it in the deepest volcanos we got.

    try one of these:

    1. run lineageOS TV (konstakang images) on it and install regular ATV apps for the services mentioned. so, like googletv except there’s no spying and ads and shit.

    2. create a normal linux box that has a DLNA sink e.g. using macast. there’s no remote control, you use your android/iOS device to send it stuff, like movie from Jellyfin or a youtube video, and it plays it back and allows some control (pause, play, rew/ff, etc)

    3. dedicated Jellyfin box; same as 2) but boots right into jellyfin client. it can be run in TV mode where it reacts to only up/down/left/right/enter/back, via gamepad or remote controller. if yours isn’t recognised, you can emulate it with InputRemapper.

    not familiar with how twitch does stuff.

    you also have the option of installing a normal raspi distro and then using a wireless keyboard and mouse/touchpad to run it, but I am of the opinion that once the device gets placed by the TV, it loses all keyboard and mouse privileges and should only be operated via the TV’s remote.

  • Canuck@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    When I was considering what to run, I found LineageOS TV provided the best experience for being able to get all the other TV apps, and even Jackbox Games. Many TV apps offer some content free with ads, which can be taken care of. Android TV interface only shows Android TV apps in the main app drawer though.

    I loved Debian with KDE Big Screen on the pi for the customizability. You can run scripts like fetching tv schedules right on it (or you can just do this on your jellyfin server), and generally you have more customizability. I run PWAs as well via Firefox. I found Steam Link difficult to get working unless on Buster or earlier.

    For remote, I tried out all the ones on Amazon, and found USB connection to be most reliable, and there’s one that has a keyboard on the reverse, and an option to do voice control from the remote that’s a major 🔑

  • diolma@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    8·
    1 day ago

    Jellyfin is not a great experience on a RasPi4. I tried that for a while but i quickly gave up on it. It runs fine on my N100 mini PC, though.

  • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    61·
    1 day ago

    I have much more powerful hardware than you but Jellyfin shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to load directories. The hardware is fairly irrelevant, this was still the case when I was on my old nas (which was an ancient pc that was garbage). Jellyfin doesn’t require much. My library is gigantic too, easily over 100,000 items across music, movies, and tv.

    What do logs say? How is your network? When I moved into my new place i went ethernet only and had issues with Jellyfin (and other self hosted stuff) and tracked it down to one cable that was super cheap and limited to 100mbit.

    Jellyfin isn’t really geared towards viewing media in a folder structure though.

    You may be best off going with a freetube access. TBH I find Jellyfin works best with media that can be scraped or that I’m willing to create nfo files for. My music/tv/movies? These are overwhelmingly fine. Every once in a while a niche show or album requires manual scraping or a custom nfo. But I also have some other collections like music videos. Imvdb exists but is far less complete compared to other scraping sources and as a result I don’t even bother using it, the overwhelming majority of my collection needs manual nfos. When I’ve tried to contribute to it my contributions have sat in pending for literal months pending approval, even for obvious videos by major artists.

    I don’t know of any scraper for youtube videos and such a thing would be a tremendous undertaking. If you archive a lot it’s a lot of nfos to create. Perhaps you could make a script that generates them automatically by scraping the description and grabbing the thumbnail as fan art?

    • minimalfootprint@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      I have much more powerful hardware than you but Jellyfin shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to load directories.

      That has been my experience as well with accessing it via the web interface. I read up on the kodi addons a bit more. As I understand it the jellyfin addon integrates the jellyfin library and has to sync it. I think this causes the delay for me. I think I will give Jellycon another try, since it accesses the libraries themselves. I will take a look at my media management and refine the folder structure to make it work.

      TBH I find Jellyfin works best with media that can be scraped or that I’m willing to create nfo files for.

      Metadata is actually an aspect I have little trouble with. There are solutions for TV and movies and pinchflat actually provides metadata for the youtube videos in a format jellyfin can use.

      Pinchflat - How do I get media into Plex/Jellyfin/Kodi?

      • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        FWIW while my hardware serving Jellyfin is more powerful, my hardware accessing is not much more, I forgot to mention that detail

        I typically use a ugoos android tv box flashed with coreelec. I believe it’s more powerful than a pi for this application but it’s not particularly powerful.

        I use Jellyfin for kodi over Jellycon. I’m not saying one is better than the other, I’ve never tried jellycon, but that is what my experience is based on. In my experience initial library scans are very lengthy (building db from scratch) with the size of my library, 20-30 minutes. This never is necessary at this point though and was only needed because I was testing something for coreelecs nightlies that required me to trash my db a lot. Typically I login and it updates within a few seconds, even if I’ve recently had a somewhat hefty update. It does help that the ugoos has fairly speedy emmc here - my initial testing running coreelec off of the sd card this was a bottleneck. Flashing to internal emmc and enabling hs400 mode made this notably quicker

        Pinchflat is interesting! Thanks! I have been looking for a better YouTube archival tool

        IMO kodi plugins are very hit/miss. This is why I prefer the setup I have where storage nas runs Jellyfin then flashed android box runs coreelec. Kodi and Jellyfin both have IPTV plugins, for example, but they are terrible. So when I want to use IPTV I boot to the degoogled android side and use tivimate, which is much more stable and convenient. I also have an APK for youtube there with adfree and sponsor block integrated. There is a build of freetube for android but unfortunately I cannot get it to work on the box. I don’t watch a ton of youtube though

  • i_p88@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    I can recomend https://github.com/firsttris/plugin.video.sendtokodi for youtube … you can share the videos from your phone but you have to deactivate the youtube-addon … the advantage is you can share videos from a lot of other sites to … there is a list of site that work with this addon on github

    as backup you can try youtube for trailers from the slyguy-repo … this addon works without api

    https://www.matthuisman.nz/2023/11/youtube-for-trailers-kodi-add-on.html?m=1

    • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      Cool, so this puts yt-dlp on Kodi and downloads videos before watching them. Hopefully this works better for older hardware than the YouTube plugin, which I think has to use more computationally expensive methods to stream from YouTube directly with the cat and mouse game between yt and them.

      Do you know, does it keep the video files it downloads, or does it delete them automatically?

  • cooljimy84@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    1 day ago

    With the forced upgrade to windows 11 a lot of older mini PCs are getting flooded on to ebay. A little i3 or i5 7th gen with be massively faster then a pi. Plus sips power when idle and completes tasks quicker

  • Im_old@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    I use a rPi3 for this stuff exactly. I have about 300 movies in the folder (I know it sounds like a rookie number but I keep only stuff I know it will be watched) and kodi (through jellyfin addon) only takes a few seconds to load. My jellyfin server is not on the nas itself, it’s on a separate docker server for hw transcoding on the fly (and the nas has hdd drives).

    I used the piped addon for youtube.

    I use kore app on my phone to control kodi. Been working like this for about 7 years.

    • minimalfootprint@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      Thanks for the info.

      I used the piped addon for youtube.

      I have been using piped and invidious in the past as well, but with youtube cracking down more and more I have trouble finding usable instances at all. Hence my switch to freetube, which mostly works so far.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    1 day ago

    A minute plus sounds like slow networking, but also, just organize your folders betters and you’ll fix the problem right there.

    I already get the feeling this is a post where OP is going to ignore all same advice to fix the issue, insist they are n the right, and then double down asking for the moon and telling everyone how wrong they are to suggest fixes though, so…