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Roku OS’s home screen now features a large, permanent ad (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 0 points 2 months ago (1 child)

Since there are a lot of comments here I want to ask this: we purchased a xiaomi tv stick (specs below) and a 15 year old intel pentium dual core w/ android runs circles around it with the exact same apps plus the PC has significantly more stable network connection. The stick's OS is old however not bloated and it even blocks google banner ads OOB. Did we get a very bad unit or are all of TV sticks / boxes unusably slow unless you get a shield or an apple tv?

https://www.mi.com/us/product/mi-tv-stick/specs

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    When my really old TV box was in it's last legs I tried 2 different Android TV boxes, which whilst not in TV Stick format like that, have very similar hardware specs.

    These things were around €50 from AliExpress.

    They were frustrating, one was actually sluggish, the other not exactly fast (it really boils down to the version of the cheap ARM CPU in your device and the processor names don't exactly make clear which ones are more or less powerful), and ran Android TV isn't all that great at customizing it and comes with pre-installed crap and Google spyware.

    Replaced them with an N100 Mini-PC running Lubuntu and with Kodi always on top. That thing runs circles around those 2, not even reaching 10% CPU usage when playing 1080p h256 videos.

    Now, I also use the Mini-PC as a home server, hence Lubuntu makes sense, but for the stupidly simple solution just install LibreELEC which is a distro pre-configured to just run Kodi.

    You can get a wireless remote for it, at which point it's pretty much the same sofa experience as a TV Box or TV Stick except for the ON/OFF button (because it only works to turn the Mini-PC OFF, not to turn it back ON).

    That said, that Mini-PC with 8GB memory and a 128 GB SSD was about €130 over a year ago and now it's about €240.

    I believe the Shield and Apple TV are actually more expensive and you don't fully control what's running in that hardware, what it does with your personal data and even if it will end up enshittified or not, unlike with a Mini-PC were you installed Linux.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    My current setup is similar. the pc runs a custom build of android tv w/o google services, with the remote of the tv box. I already have checks notes 5 spare pcs, i just had no idea 2.4ghz remotes could be dirt cheap. The item you sent appears as 2 usd before taxes & shipment but doesn't ship to my location lol. Oh and every single one of the pcs have hdd, i'll need either a new ssd or use one of my flash drives with a live linux install as permanent is very slow from USB.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Well, a quick check of my Mini-PC which has a bit more software than Lubuntu and Kodi but not by much (so, also stuff like Firefox and qbittorrent) shows a bit over 20GB used for everything but the mount to were the qbittorrent is downloading files, so even in this day and age of stupidly expensive storage all the storage you need is still going to be about €20 or less (that's the price of a new 64GB SATA SSD from AliExpress, which should fit the same connectors as your HDDs unless those PCs are so ancient they still use PATA instead of SATA).

    I expect a dedicate distro for just a TV box like LibreELEC should be even smaller.

    Mind you, I have the storage for the videos I watch in Kodi outside in the form of portable mobile HDDs since its a much better price per GB for bulk storage and the speed of even mobile HDDs is fine for playing h264 and h265 compressed stuff, so that's of course not counted in those 20GB.

    Upgrading an old PCs with a 64GB SATA SSD should be reasonable cheap and more than enough to run either LibreELEC or Lubuntu with Kodi plus a bunch of extra stuff.

    That said, the benefit of a Mini-PC like the one I got (with an N100 processor or similar) is that it uses very little power (unlike old desktop PCs or even notebooks) so it's cheap to just leave running all the time and it's quiet.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    forgot to add this to my previous reply: if you configure the remote to put the PC to sleep instead of shutting down and allow waking up from USB devices, you might be able to wake your PC up with the remote. I can't do this because my remote uses Bluetooth low energy which I couldn't configure wake up for. And yes 2 of the PCs are ancient enough to use ATA instead of SATA probably, one has a Pentium T4300 and Intel GMA 3100. However I don't need 5 HTPCs lol.

    I am locked in the software space as I need something very specific that kodi could only partly satisfy and android tv could fully satisfy.

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