Hey gang,
I’m looking for a cheap SBC for 4k HDR local content streaming on my TV. I’m moving away from streaming “services” and towards the Caribbean seas.
What I already have
- a LG 55B9 OLED tv. It has a serviceable media player, but due to ongoing enshittification (every update is slower than the previous one, ads everywhere, basically becoming useless) it’s been airgapped for the past couple of years, forcing me to transfer content on a USB drive
- an Apple TV 4K. It’s amazing for streaming but absolutely useless for local HDR content. VLC is years away from HDR playback and the leading media players are stupidly expensive, I hate the subscription model and I’m not buying a 150€+ lifetime licence.
What I’m looking for
- a cheap/affordable SBC
- running Linux (obviously)
- guaranteed to play 4k HDR content from my local network.
- bonus points if it can do all this while running a general enough purpose distro for light emulation.
What are your ideas? Thanks!
I’ve been using a Vero V from the OSMC project. It runs Kodi and comes with a remote that’s simple enough for my family to use. Kodi has been around for ages and is great for both local library content as well as add-on based content. The OS is based on Debian so you could run some other services on it. The SoC has support for AV1 hardware decoding (as well as all the older codecs) and can play 4K HDR10+ content to my TV without issues. There’s also Dolby Vision support if your TV supports that. It’s probably not the cheapest option but I wanted a small form factor and good UI that my family could use without having to be tech wizards.
I didn’t know about this device. This looks very interesting. I need to check how’s playback from Jellyfin in Kodi nowadays.
I was actually testing a Vero V earlier this evening!
The Jellyfin integrations with Kodi are (in my opinion) bad.
There’s the veraion that syncs with Kodi’s library, but the sync is super brittle.
There’s the version that is more “Jellyfin app” (JellyCon), but it might be the slowest UI I’ve ever seen.
For me, Jellyfin just does not work well with Kodi.
Ok, thank you for the info. I will probably stick to Android TV for now then.
Worth noting that Kodi is available as a flatpak. You could just try it on nearly any Linux distro.
Can you install different OSes. Or are you limited to the vendor provided build of osmc?