this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
461 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
85461 readers
4125 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
One of the things on my FOSS wishlist is an open source alternative to Roku/GoogleOS/Apple TVos, etc. there are lots of FOSS apps on these various platforms, but those apps almost always have varying levels of quality and availability across them.
Right now the closest you can really get is media center PC, but what I really need is something relatively plug and play I can send to family members, preconfigured.
Jellyfin is quite great for me right now. Check it out https://jellyfin.org/
Jellyfin is just a media streaming application
Yarr.
yes I totally don't know why this isn't more of a thing. here's hoping that "plasma bigscreen" will change that. https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
Plasma Bigscreen is coming
Looks very promising
Yeah, a jailbroken Roku OS would actually be fantastic. The actual TVs aren’t bad. Roku has actually figured out how to do streaming decently. It just sucks that the entire company seems to be going down the shitter, and they’re determined to drag all of their screens down with them.
I blocked by Roku TV’s telemetry BS with my pi-hole, at least. But that won’t stop them from trying. Having a way to flash a new FOSS/jailbroken OS onto it would be ideal.
Google TV is the least worst option in terms of open source optionality, Apple TV is best for privacy as is
Why tf does everyone trust apple for anything? They're a pretty awful company.
Because as of now their main financial structure isnt based on selling personal information for ads. They make most there money selling products and services. And I think trust isn’t the right word. Apple is normally the least shitty out of all the shitty big tech companies with modern day convenience.
Again, how do you know that? Cook gave a gold bar to trump, they're not a good company.
No one said Apple was a good company, just better for privacy.
Cook was giving a toddler a shiny for favoritism. That's pathetic on Trump, not Tim.
They're the only mainstream hardware company that takes user privacy seriously. Bad on right to repair and openness though
Why do you think that? Is that what you've heard or do you know that?
They're the only truly mainstream company with E2EE backups among other things. iOS is also much more secure than stock android, only Graphene OS is better.
Is Apple TV hardware any good because the app is appallingly bad. Even on a gigabit network connection it will drop connectivity and lag out. If you pause for more than about 1 minute it crashes and kicks you back into the main menu. It never seems to keep track of current shows and just shows a bunch of irrelevant stuff at the top which you have to always scroll past in order to get to what you actually want.
It makes Amazon TV look like a well polished product.
The hardware is actually one of the better streaming boxes on the market. Good direct play support for most of the big codecs, so your Jellyfin/Plex server isn’t having to transcode things. And it was (not sure if it still is) one of the few that wasn’t completely riddled with ads.
Until I read the last sentence, I had no idea what you were talking about. You sound like you could whip up a media center PC easy enough. The machine I'm typing this on doubles as our media center. I have to take the mouse to the coffee table for a movie remote, but that's the only hassle, and it isn't a hassle for me.
I feel like the tech is already in place. What do you want that isn't out there?
Must get very small, very quiet, require zero ongoing maintenance besides an automated update mechanism, and have a single unified UI across all apps that the user can’t easily escape out of.
Coreelec on ugoos am6b+ is the best option if you want the broadest support for formats possible (though notably missing av1)
Htpc with streaming content or stuff like Dolby vision is a licensing nightmare. Some stuff works, some doesn’t, Linux support is trash, etc
Best solution would probably be a mini PC running a web app dashboard like they do with kiosks. I would tell you to get a rasp pi but they went up in price by quite a bit. You would still have to order it for them and spend a few hours tinkering and installing everything.
Yeah and the experience just wouldn’t be very good. I have a lot of experience with mini PCs auto loading into web dashboards and it never works quite as well as you want it to
As a family we rarely watch "on demand" or live TV. We have a mini hooked up to our TV and sail the seas for shows we want and watch them that way. We have a Roku stick in our bedroom TV and it works great, but if I get the feeling it starts to go all Project 2025 its getting ditched, but I'm in the UK so it'll be interesting to see how it changes here.
We need to develop an open, modular or all-in-one NAS with easily enabled services like Jellyfin, Navidrome, Paperless, Home assistant and so on.
With IPv6 we could avoid having to deal with CGNAT, but that could be solved as well.
People have been trying to do that for a long, long time, with various levels of success. There are a dozen options out there to try, but the scope of that kind of project huge compared to a simple streaming appliance OS.
I'd like for something like that to be sponsored by the EU
I’d like it to be sponsored by no one but the people that make it personally.
Yeah but as you said, that didn't work so far
Same. I'm currently doing the mini PC media center. It's nice but I don't see my family doing something like that. It's a bit too expensive and less plug and play than a $40 Roku/Chromecast unfortunately.
Those things are so cheap because they serve you ads and sell your data. They're sold at a loss. Most brain dead idiots are fine with that trade it would seem. If you could get Linux running on one of those that would be great.
I feel like Kodi mediacenter app is one of the main things to consider putting on it. Like, booting some Linux and instantly launchung it, so it's UI is the main UI for user to interact with. It covers most TV usecases of mid 2010s and shines if you have a medialibrary on the network.
But it doesn't cover occasional web browsing, DRMed videostreaming platforms with their own apps, etc. Worse than that, if we don't limit it to just Kodi, we'd need some UI to pick apps, swtich apps, etc, and if that's critical, it's probably worth it to rip an image of some WebOS, like on LG TVs, or an Android fork like on SmartTV boxes/sticks, whatever is less combatative, and methodically carve out bloat and adware, forming an image of inherently insecure/outdated OS that has the UI thing working right.
Outside of SteamOS idk if Linux (not Android) had slick console/SmartTV-like DEs/system-wide GUIs. But since the problem is on the surface, I believe there are some who tried, or configured/themed their environment to act like it.
I have the feeling so many people are super enthusiastic about it, it will be a matter of months after it's included in regular KDE that someone will make a "Linux TV" distro centered around plasma bigscreen while minimizing setup complexity, aimed at using it for TV only... And there's some (quiet) rumours that steam might be interested in using KDE bigscreen on the steam machine...
https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
😳
Yeah. The closest I've gotten without a media center PC is using remote adb to remove all the bullshit from my Nvidia shield.
What would be amazing is if there was some way to have a fully declarative system that was integrated with a system update UI.
You would upload the config somewhere, your family's streaming box would see a new update is available and either prompt them to install it or install it for them overnight.
I’ve never used it before but it sounds like you’re sorta describing NixOS? That might be an option to sorta Jerry-rig this idea together.
KDE is able to release plasma bigscreen. That, or frankly gnome would be fine with an air mouse.
A FOSS alternative would likely be missing or have meh performance from many of the streamers. All the big ones use proprietary codecs that are expensive annual licenses. And even then the streamer controls what various access methods are allowed to see and at what quality. I think netflix still limits web browsers to 720p, for example. And straight web access isn't great, you want an interface that can ideally be controlled with about 6 - 8 buttons (4 directions, OK, and Back are the minimum) which might require API access to these services, which introduces more access control. Netflix (and maybe others) even have hardware installed at the ISP level that give them a lot of control over individual access as well.
Basically for a full featured FOSS service you'd need to start with getting grants to buy to codec licenses, and then you'd need to hire people just to maintain your relationship with the streaming services to stay in their good graces while they know you're working against their bottom line.
For me it's kind of JellyFin + TailScale, but that probably isn't going to work with less tech savvy family members or on all devices. Plex works well enough, but then again it's the same thing that someone has to be responsible for the 'media' portion, and a lot of people enjoy live sports, which seems difficult through the open source things.
Yeah JF + Tailscale in one of them $20 Walmart Google TV boxes works well enough but like, I’d love to drop the Google part entirely.
Yeah, I just use the web interface, so I end up having a cheap PC with a keyboard/remote which works pretty well, then it doesn't matter the TV and get's away from Google altogether.
Can you configure and ship it?