For the past 25 years of sailing the high seas I’ve always used my PC for watching whatever. But as this is not always practical, I am looking to connect a raspberry Pi to my TV to have a setup with smaller fingerprint and larger screen.

I briefly tried one a couple of eons ago (2010ish?), but sadly I don’t remember the name.

Requirements:

  • Must be able to run from a raspberry pi
  • Must be able to stream media over my network (protocols aren’t that important as I can probably spin up whatever is needed. Preferably I would just have it index a couple of NFS mounts and local drives)

Bonus question: Which Pi model would you recommend running this? I have a bunch of Zero W, and while everything “works” on them, it simply wasn’t powerful enough to decode video at a watchable rate.

  • Bezier
    7·
    2 days ago

    I had kodi running on rpi’s for a while, but then recently switched to jellyfin. Either will get the job done, but jellyfin has been a lot less janky for me.

    Pi3 and below don’t have codec hardware, which means video is decoded in software, and the cpu isn’t very powerful at that. Pi3 got me h264 at 1080p, but I had to replace it since anything more was a slideshow. If your stuff is h265/AV1, minimum is pi4.