Howdy y’all, I’m currently using an Amazon firestick on my living room TV, (running Wolf Launcher, Jellyfin, and SmartTube) but I’m considering upgrading to something more privacy friendly. Especially since Amazon is starting to crack down on “Side Loading” installing my own damn software.
The most open alternative seems to be an android TV box, but Google is walling up the android garden more heavily now too.
On the software side of things, I need something that:
- Is remote controllable
- Won’t harvest my data
- Let’s me install what I want
- Specifically will run the 3 programs I use. Jellyfin, SmartTube, and Kanopy.
On the hardware side of things, I’m pretty open, whether that be a rasberry pi, or a modified android TV box (provided I can flash an OS that isn’t infected with Google).
Has anyone else done anything like this? Steaming devices all seem like locked down, data harvesters, which just so happen to also show you movies.
Micro form factor corporate “desktops” are the easy and cheap answer here. More expensive but also easy are the n100 lil boxes. You may need to disable or cover a bunch of gamer leds.
Weirdly cheap but with one hidden cost is appletv 4k, you gotta either pay monthly or one time to the infuse (jellyfin client) app developer to unlock dolby decoding. TBH I don’t mind paying one time for software, it’s the subscriptions that bug me also it’s what we still use so that’s why it makes the list.
After all the stuff about super/bad box started getting around I haven’t been able to really trust android set tops, which sucks because the price is right on those little fuckers.
Also I often found awful support environments for safely using android tv boxes, lack of lockable bootloaders, undocumented memory for blowing the original install back in, weird variants of weird socs.
It made me do the Seinfeld at the movies gif, ymmv.