(Repost ish, from Technology), So I just bought a new telly and to my surprise, not, the OS is rather bad and has very limited amount of apps. Therefore I’ll invest further in either Apple TV or the Firestick. Anyone got any recommendations, tips or hot takes on this in terms of pirated content? Which is more accessible and I reckon both support Jellyfin?
I love the Apple TV. It has a super fast ui. I use infuse on it to play content from a network share, and Plex.
Like most things when comparing Apples to Androids, the Apple product is typically cleaner and more performant throughout its longer lifespan.
My Apple TV 3 is still doing OK. My Firestick / Android / GoogleTV devices from the same time period (and some even later) are too slow to use.
My friends who have them are also super satisfied, but obviously anything Android based has the advantage of sideloading apps to consider. Depends on what you want in the end, Apple has Plex and Jellyfin apps which I think is enough for the average pirate.
An Nvidia Shield Pro is hands down the best but it is much more expensive. Slap a third party launcher over the top and use it for streaming Jellyfin or Stremio or Kodi or whatever floats your boat. Super responsive and is android-based so you can sideload whatever you want. It also has the most compatibility with most codecs so you’ll be able to direct play more through Jellyfin rather than transcode.
Yeah the Shield Pro is amazing, even though the last update was 2019. And even with an earlier version of their AI upscaling, 1080p content looks great on 4k. Hopefully with the Switch’s successor leaks swirling around it means that they’ll do a 2024 update. Probably wishful thinking.
And if you want to go even further: it has active official LineageOS support, I flashed mine two months ago
I still need to de-Google my Shield. How’s the performance of LineageOS on the Shield? HDR and DV content still playing well?
Sorry but that is sth that I cannot answer properly; I have a fullHD TV from 2012 connected, so HDR is not sth I can even test… I have not experienced any lags or hickuos so far though, just some general problem with fullscreen on newpipe but that has an open issue on Github for six months already. (And downgrading to an old version solved it for now)
firetvstick is android based so you can sidelode a lot of apps that aren’t in the store
If you want to invest in new hardware, I would suggest getting a mini PC. You can get these refurbished for under 100€. Add a wireless keyboard with touchpad (Logitech K400 or Microsoft Media Keyboard) and install Linux+Kodi.
You can select Kodi in your login manager to start straight into Kodi, so you dont have to mess with a desktop environment if you just want to watch a movie.
KDE is also developing a desktop environment for TVs called Plasma Bigscreen, although I haven’t tried this one.
And unlike devices with a locked down, proprietary OS you can run any desktop application or game on it (if the hardware supports it).
What OS do you recommend installing beside Kodi? I’d be curious to learn about how the bypass the login screen and boot straight into the software.
I use Debian. If you install the kodi package, you also get the Kodi desktop environment installed.
On your login screen, you will find a menu to choose between different desktop environments. On lightdm you can open it by clicking the wrench icon in the top menubar.
There you can select Kodi and log into your system.
Fire stick has too many ads and hostile decisions, you can’t even turn it off
A decade ago I had a jailbroken apple TV 2 and it was great with what now is called infuse, it took videos directly via SMB and showed them with a really slick interface.
So between the two… I’d buy an Androidtv (real, not a fake Chinese one, like that "Chromecast with Google TV)
If it wasn’t so expensive I’d buy an apple TV again just for infuse. A decade ago was more reasonably priced compared to the competition, right now…
