After spending the last few days, tinkering and trying to put together an HTPC for my family, I wasn’t able to get a smooth enough experience to match even our old, ad-filled, laggy, Roku. In particular, every streaming service I tried needed to be controlled almost exclusively by mouse, as everything has been reduced to electron apps/websites with little-to-no keyboard or controller navigation support. As such, I’m looking for other options, although considering how quickly these platforms change and how outdated a lot of the information available on them is its hard to single out the best options.
In particular, I’m looking to be able to:
- Use Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney+. Ideally other services too, since we tend to juggle subscriptions.
- Control it with a remote, controller, or similarly simple device
- Be able to cast to it from a phone
Does anyone have much experience with options for this - esspecially if you’ve tried multiple and can compare?
A computer hooked up to a projector/other display. Smart TVs are an absolutely terrible investment into a locked down proprietary ecosystem you have no control over.
Also, going with a computer+projector is significantly more affordable.
Man you can get a 60" TV for like $300
You pay for it in the data they collect from you and the ads they show to you.
Don’t connect it to the Internet.
I mean, If I wanted to be controlling everything with a mouse, I’d just sit at my desk. Unfortunately every other input method has near-zero support on PC at this point, even for a lot of the more open seas options. Kodi with a paid, illegal service was basically the only option I found, and I’d really rather not go down that route, esspecially when handing off this device to less tech-savvy family.
That’s a fair criticism, especially if you want to limit what media your kids are consuming. We’ve got a setup like I described above in our house but we’re both tech literate so being able to use a proxy server to access South Korean Netflix is an advantage to us.
There do exist media focused keyboards (even partial keyboards without a functioning keyset) to control play/pause, volume etc - but a lot of the streaming services don’t have good UIs on PC unless you’re willing to use a mouse.
I use a flirc ir receiver in a RPI. Use any remote and bind the buttons to keys to set it up then go. I set mine up about ten years ago and still use the same setup even though I upgraded the pi.
How do you get streaming services to work? As best as I can tell, none of them support much in the way of non-mouse inputs, and I wasn’t able to find any scripts/addons being maintained.
Get the android app “Unified Remote”. Works perfectly, and you’ll have several options, from cursor control to buttons programmed with hotkeys.