this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
58 points (98.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35822 readers
902 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Onn needs a Google account. Fire stick requires an Amazon account. Apple tv, obviously an Apple account. PS5, Xbox all the same.

Is there a box that will let me stream Hulu, Netflix, Spotify, my own stored media?

Osmc is great for home stuff, but can't do Hulu Netflix.

I could use a Linux PC, but not as simple as 1 remote for a cheaper box top.

Any suggestions? Or do I just get a Linux host

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

There we reports of that for some, so it's worth it to check the model before you buy.

There are however, A TON of models, most which haven't been flaged as having malware and spyware.

That said, you can always pay more (about 2x to 3x) to get an alternative from a Western brand that's not one of the big corps (whose products are also "filled" with at least spyware).

The other option is to instal LibreElec on a Single Board Computer (essentially "make your own Media Box") were you have full control since LibreElec is basically a Linux Distro from media boxes with Kodi, compiled for the main ARM architectures used in those things (A6 and A7 if I remember it correctly), but that requires a bit more expert knowledge and you need to get yourself (or print, if you have a 3D printer) a box for it if you want it to look nice on your living room.

The option I'm currently using and which so far I think is the best is the Mini-PC with Linux, Kodi and the air mouse remote, but then again I've been using Linux on and off for 3 decades and for part of my career was designing and implementing server-side software so am very comfortable setting up and using Linux (not that installing Lubuntu and then Kodi on a N100 Mini-PC was at all complicated, as it just works and most modern Linux distros seem way ahead of the stuff I've worked with before when it comes to hardware compatibility and ease of use).

I actually had for maybe a decade what's now a really old ASUS media player (which they don't even make anymore), which couldn't play media with newer codecs so I upgraded it to one of the cheapest Android TVs (€18) but that turned out to be sluggish, so I upgraded to a better one (€35, which seemed to work fine), but then I just went "screw this" and replace it with a Mini-PC with an Intel N100 (€150) with Lubuntu and Kodi and also moved other services into it (it's now also my home NAS), then added always on VPN and a Torrent server.

That Mini-PC is the best setup I've had for this stuff and there's still plenty of room in there to add more services (both storage-wise and in terms of computing power) and I highly recommend it if you're comfortable enough with the software side of Tech (a SBC with LibreElec is a little more demanding of familiarity with hardware).