Absolutely. Tell your friends and family members too: Don’t connect your TV to the internet. They are slow, buggy, insecure, and a privacy nightmare.
HTPCs are ideal, but unfortunately they are can be a little cumbersome for people who just want to maximize convenience.
Streaming sticks are equally bad on privacy, but they generally perform better (than TVs), are supported longer, and most importantly: they can be easily swapped out if they stop meeting your needs.
That being said, what kind of HTPC distros do y’all recommend? I’ve been using an NVIDIA Shield Pro for a while and I’ll probably go Linux HTPC when this thing finally dies.
and most importantly: they can be easily swapped out if they stop meeting your needs.
Important enough to repeat.
I have gone thru 3 different streaming devices over the lige of my current TV.
Each suffered, after several years, from needing to have an updated app to continue supporting one or another streaming service that no longer had an app available for that hardware.
That fault is mostly on the streaming services for updating something in their stream but only providing an updated app for a small list of hardware vendors/models.
If I was relying on built-in streaming hardware in my TV, it would have become e-waste many years ago.
I use a spin of Debian for ARM called DietPi. It’s not HTPC focused, but it makes it easy to install and manage all sorts of applications (including HTPC solutions).
Has a solid community as well and they’ve been around for a long time (a decade or so).
Absolutely. Tell your friends and family members too: Don’t connect your TV to the internet. They are slow, buggy, insecure, and a privacy nightmare.
HTPCs are ideal, but unfortunately they are can be a little cumbersome for people who just want to maximize convenience.
Streaming sticks are equally bad on privacy, but they generally perform better (than TVs), are supported longer, and most importantly: they can be easily swapped out if they stop meeting your needs.
That being said, what kind of HTPC distros do y’all recommend? I’ve been using an NVIDIA Shield Pro for a while and I’ll probably go Linux HTPC when this thing finally dies.
Saw plasma-bigscreen in another thread for htpc’ don’t know how good it is.
Looks promising, but it hasn’t been released yet. I hope they make arm64 builds.
Was anyone able to compile and get to work on Arch? Mine kept failing
Important enough to repeat.
I have gone thru 3 different streaming devices over the lige of my current TV.
Each suffered, after several years, from needing to have an updated app to continue supporting one or another streaming service that no longer had an app available for that hardware.
That fault is mostly on the streaming services for updating something in their stream but only providing an updated app for a small list of hardware vendors/models.
If I was relying on built-in streaming hardware in my TV, it would have become e-waste many years ago.
I use a spin of Debian for ARM called DietPi. It’s not HTPC focused, but it makes it easy to install and manage all sorts of applications (including HTPC solutions).
Has a solid community as well and they’ve been around for a long time (a decade or so).