Specifically I'm wondering about the TV frontend UI. Presumably most people are going to be using an android tv box like fire tv or chromecast? Something else?
I recently picked up a new chromecast 4k that has the "Google TV" OS on it and... I'm having a hell of a time coming up with a UI that looks similar to the stock one (with movie recommendations, up next, my watchlist, etc) but that hooks into piracy streaming services.
For launchers I found projectivy, but I noticed that the "channels" feature which pulls in that sort of thing is remarkably limited. Streaming-wise I've got stremio and cloudstream, and only stremio lets me pull in my library into projectivy. Which is okay but I can't get that synced with trakt or getting recommendations; it all has to be managed from stremio.
whereas cloudstream doesn't really have any connectivity at all. There's a few streaming services that somewhat pull things in but it's not great. Netflix doesn't seem to hook into it, nor plex. It ends up being better to just use the stock home and manually launching into stremio/cloudstream when I want them.
Surely there has to be a better way to do this? The stock home screen is nice with free live tv, movie recommendations that link into various paid streaming services, etc. I'd just like to hook in something like stremio, plex, etc. instead, but that seems impossible?
What exactly do y'all do for your setups? Trying to manage my google play watchlist/likes independently of trackt, and then also managing my stremio library separately from both just feels like hell. I end up having to take mental note of the stuff I see on the home screen and manually searching it up.
The live tv channels that the stock homescreen has is seemingly not replicated anywhere else which is a bit disappointing. I saw the old android tv menu get really close to what I'm after, but I can't manage to get it working on my newer chromecast. The menu installs, but the channel feature doesn't work, making it pointless.
Is there a better way?
Plex with Apple TVs. This requires a lot of transcoding but I have dedicated hardware.
I've tried many alternatives over many years but they all eventually annoy me. I've been doing this long enough to know eventually something better than Plex will come along but that day has yet to come.
I don't have any streaming services. They are all terrible and I prefer to put that money towards more hardware, mostly hard drives since my library is of the data hoarding style, ever increasing.
My setup is entirely automated via various watch lists.
IMDb watch lists and Plex watchlists as well as various lists setup to retrieve based on cast / director involvement that feed into Radarr and Sonarr allow titles to be added from my phone.
The added benefit of a my automation setup is that I can lose a hard drive and the system will self heal.
Would you mind providing a bit of detail about the Apple TV transcoding thing?
I’m new to the plex server space and I’ve been working with a bit of a similar setup, hosting off of an Nvidia shield but streaming it to an Apple TV.
So far I’ve had some stuttering problems in plex that seems to have existed for awhile with HDR content. What gives?
I use an AppleTv4K with Plex and I have never had any transcoding issues since I upgraded to the M2 Mac Mini. When I was trying to run it off of my 2011 iMac I had transcoding problems up the wazoo for 4k content.
I’ve had the same issue sometimes, usually switching the video player to “Use Old Video Player” (or vice versa) solves it. Sometimes the HDR tone mapping is a bit off then, but as another commenter recommended, Infuse works well for that.
Are you using the Plex app or a third party app such as Infuse? Infuse can handle more codecs and things like image-based subtitles that I don’t think the Plex app can handle, which should reduce transcoding requirements.
Using the Plex app so I might give Infuse a shot, thanks