I currently use an Apple TV 4K, which is - as far as I’m aware - more or less the best streaming box you can buy. However, it’s the version without ethernet, and Steam Link has become a dog over wifi for some reason. So I figured I’d look around to see if there’s an alternative solution.
Hardware-wise, I have a Dell Optiplex 3020 or a 2014 Mac mini (running Debian), to choose from, but have no real idea where to go from there, beyond the vague notion that KDE have put big screen mode back into beta. I did have a play with that a few months ago in a VM, but was struck that there were (obviously) no applications that made any real use of it.
Does anyone out there run anything they’ve built themselves? If so, what?
The trouble you’ll quickly run into is that with a non-iOS/Android/Windows platform your streaming sites won’t go above 720p, and your attempts to run sandboxed Android apps will pretty much all fail. Now if all you mainly do is serve local content from e.g. Jellyfin that’s not much of a problem, but as you already own an AppleTV that’s probably not your only use case.
I probably should have laid out my uses in the OP, shouldn’t I?
We primarily watch TV from a friend’s Plex server, or my own Jellyfin. We don’t have Apple TV+/Netflix/Amazon, or anything. Not these days. The only legit streaming service we do occasionally use is BBC iPlayer.
Other than that, it’s a Steam Link / Moonlight machine, plus sometimes playing tunes from Apple Music.
A nicety would be to be able to AirPlay to it, so my wife can show me videos that she’s saved to show me, but I’m not sure how feasible that is outside of Apple devices.
Older Linux laptop, T480s are cheap, plus you have a Linux laptop in a pinch, or whatever Thinkpad is currently being dumped on the market from corpo fleets. All of that just works, host a Jellyfin on it and upload videos to that, laptop, so low wall power. Moonlight is great on my T580 to a wide 1440 for example. Bazzite’s pretty painless.
I don’t think that’s true anymore. In Firefox you can check “play drm” and it will let you stream Netflix and others in 1080p.
Chrome and Edge on Windows do it standard.
It may be circumstantial but I just checked and Netflix and Disney+ are both only rendering at 720p in Linux (Kubuntu 26.04) in Firefox and Chromium for me. Maybe official chrome is better, I don’t have it installed at the moment.