Hello sailors,
as a long time FireTV stick un-enjoyer, I finally decided that the time has come to get rid of this piece of crap I was baited into buying because of the low price. The number of streaming services keeps increasing (splitting content among different servives) and each and every one of them is demanding for an increasing amount of money for a monthly subscription; "buy this movie only" services dont actually give you shi except for the right to stream it for as long as it stays in their library, even though af course you pay 13,99 as if it was a physical copy of a movie. In addition to that, the FireTV is now completely filled with ads. I am tired of this shitty customer treatment, im sailing.
I am not experienced into local media-sharing and management, so I am looking for advice... What's my best move to replace it?
I thought a good idea would be to buy an unexpensive MiniPC that i can put behind the TV? Is that overkill? But what OS would i put into it? A linux distro I am guessing or Android TV? Is there a way I can interact with it using a remote? Are there instead "better" FireTV sticks (no ads and let users install and watch what they want)?
Gimme advice or share your secret setups please :)
Look into Jellyfin and the *arr suite for automating downloads. If this seems too complicated for now, just get a cheap 1 TB external SSD, a VPN (check out mullvad), a torrent client (i suggest qBittorrent or Transmission), bind the torrent client to the VPN to prevent leaks and off you go!
The simpler method has some drawbacks, not all TV's support all codecs and formats, you have to move the external drive from your computer to your TV for example. Getting Jellyfin setup will give you a more streaming service type of experience and if someone else than you might want to watch something, start with Jellyfin.
If the Jellyfin experience is horrible and you just really wanna watch a movie to relax on a saturday, maybe take a look at Plex.
If you already have the MiniPC just lying around then great, just use that! If you don't have it, you can also host Jellyfin + the *arr suite on your PC (unsure about Windows compatibility) and start them when needed or have them run in the background when your computer starts.
I'm still looking for a justification of the arr suite. It's not hard to find files and I like being able to choose.
I also still need to figure out how to use docker to sandbox my qbit+ VPN.