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?
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.
In Firefox on Linux it’s a definitive “maybe”. It works on my gaming machine, not not on my home theatre PC. Same Linux install. Same configuration: Firefox with the user agent extension for Netflix, which was needed or it was stuck at 720p. HTPC is still stuck at 720p.
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.