I bought a monitor since the smarts in my smart-tv died, making the entire display unusable. Now I wanted to use a separate SBC for smarts in the "dumb" monitor. I would have gone for a modded fire-stick, but Amazon in their infinite wisdom, sunset all versions except the 720p potato and the smart-speaker-cube. I'm currently using a RaspberryPi 4 and looking at argon one for a remote control case. Googles widevine does limit the DRM on some content I "own" though. With Amazon on course to EOL the more sane sticks, are there any well-moddable streaming-sticks/boxes, that bring the relevant codecs and DRMs?

  • Account_93@lemm.ee
    ·
    2 days ago

    Personally I just run a ThinkCentre mini pc with Fedora. Bluetooth keyboard/trackpad; Sorted. Not as convenient as a remote but don't need to fiddle with stuff.

    You can get them cheap used on eBay

  • sic_semper_tyrannis@lemmy.today
    ·
    4 days ago

    I'd say put your RPi4 in a Flirc passive case and use Kodi via LibreElec.

    The Argon One connects the fan control in a funky way so your OS must have some way to configure the fan controller. I know Batocera v41 has Kodi 21 built in and their wiki says how to get an ArgonOne working properly. You can then have it set to boot into Kodi and have retro emulation as a secondary option.

    • Nicro@discuss.tchncs.de
      ·
      3 days ago

      From what I've seen, the argon does passive-cool alright too. With Flirc I'd need to keep the mini-HDMI-dongle and buy a separate IR dongle, that takes up a usb-slot and doesn't have a low-power MCU. My Pi is currently in a no-name passive-case already. Unless I misunderstood you, I don't see the advantage.

  • Majestic@lemmy.ml
    ·
    4 days ago

    If you just don’t like ads AppleTV works great.

    That said if you’re set on something less locked down you might look into Dune-HD boxes. They have some that have a dual OS. One is Android TV (not sure how mod-able) the other is Linux that can have other kinds of apps. They’re virtualized and accessible without a reboot. They have great codec support. Just realize only some of their models have the Android TV dual system thing.

  • skarn@discuss.tchncs.de
    ·
    4 days ago

    As far as I can tell there are two separate worlds, with close to no overlap.

    On the one hand the mainstream stuff, proprietary, DRM compatibile, interner dependet, non moddable, no privacy, no way to own your content, tracking you from asshole to appetite, often ad-infested.

    Best you can hope for is some Android TV streaming box, but the moment you start to do stuff like root it or unlock the bootloader some streaming apps might decide to stop working, or degrade your quality. DRM-protected streaming services will completely refuse streaming high-quality content to any hardware you really control.

    On the other you have self-hosted, often open source, tweakable, local, customisable, technology, compatible with all codecs you want, but functionally blocked from DRM. There is essentially no way to legally acquire video content for the second one. You could get a libredrive compatible BD reader and rip your own movies, but that's still illegal in many countries, certainly the US, and is a ton of work.

    If you have sufficiently powerful hardware, you might be able to stream low-bitrate 720p with software decoding. They won't serve you better stuff. Anything better than that, you should consider it accidental and likely to stop soon.

    • Nicro@discuss.tchncs.de
      ·
      4 days ago

      Yeah, it's kinda telling, if you look at my prime subscription for example. I can either:

      • Hook into the web-service with Kodi, breaking TOS and theoretically risking the account. While Google, missing their widevine tax, limits the quality.

      • Pirate the same content without an account, at full 4K.

      It's truly a service problem.

      • skarn@discuss.tchncs.de
        ·
        4 days ago

        Not quite. The Kodi plugin still uses Widevine. You just don't get higher quality content unless your hardware is "certified" with some key burnt in at the factory, or some such nonsense.

  • iturnedintoanewt@lemm.ee
    ·
    4 days ago

    Following on this, I'd like some sort of dongle capable of running Lineage OS. I only need it to run Jellyfin and some other fdroid apps. Any suggestions?