I’ve found some discussions about hosting the Jellyfin server on lower end devices, but what about the client? I imagine the requirements to be pretty low, since a gen 2 Chromecast worked fine.
Has someone tried setting up a raspberry pi in kiosk mode? Can you suggest something cheap that would be good enough for 1080p?
Onn TV box from walmart is $20
There is also a 15 stick version…
You could find lower end/older devices that will work too but when you can get a new 2023 box that’s up to date and not full of bloatware or spyware, why would you want to risk it?
A raspi isnt what id consider low end or cheap in regards to jellyfin, but it will def work fine.
Has anyone done a deep dive to know for sure that it isn’t full of spyware and bloat? I’m weary of anything I can’t flash a new OS to. Or maybe they can be loaded up with a different community maintained OS?
Well I know the older 2021 models could be flashed with lineageos and the 2023 might also but its not really an ideal OS for a TV and not really optimized but there is nothing really stopping you from enabling debug mode and unlocking the bootloader on it.
I haven’t done a deep dive but I know my way around adb and disabled almost all the apps i didn’t want and I don’t notice any abnormal activity going on when its supposed to be idle for example.
I didn’t want to link to or reddit but you can find guides on how to remov what little bloat it does come with.
Thanks for the response! I’ve had my eye on these Onn devices for a while but haven’t looked into any of that stuff yet. I need to replace this old pi3 soon though because I’m tired of dealing with it not decoding h265. The new Onn ones even support AV1 from what I’ve heard.
Cheap? There are chinese 15 bucks android TVs. Amazon sells theirs for 50 bucks and it can play almost everything.
Amazon’s is crap because it’s like apple. You can’t do anything that amazon doesn’t want you to.
Chinese might be spyware. I have no idea. The good thing is they are usually rooted and you have full access to it. You can do whatever you want. They can play 4k but no avi or DV.
The Nvidia Shield seems to be the gold standard, but it’s kind of pricey. I’m using a Raspberry Pi (2? 3?) running LibreElec with the Jellyfin plugin. It works great for video but has some issues with music playlists. You could also try a cheap Onn box from Walmart.
Can the shield pro be used without a Google account and still install things like jellyfin and smarttube?
Sorry, I’m not sure - like I said, I’m on a Pi.
Anything with a hardware decoder for the formats supported by Jellyfin. So, basically anything.
Get yourself a MeCool box
