- Joined
- Feb 2, 2025
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- 86
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- 518
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- United States
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- rosiemcdamsel.neocities.org
What do you use to play local media files, outside of the corporate bullshit ecosystem of streaming services and whatever disc releases they choose to grace you with?
For a long time, I've had one of my PCs act as a file server for my LAN, so I can access videos from other devices, but for lack of a dedicated device to play them on in the living room, Noth and I would always just connect one of our laptops to the TV. That was kind of a pain, so we bought this:
(Switch dock for scale)
This is a Raspberry Pi 4, a very tiny computer that's very versatile for tinkering. But even if you're not the tinkering type, it's pretty painless to buy one that's pretty much ready to go with one of these cases and a MicroSD card with the OS already preloaded. From there, just connect it to a screen with HDMI, download the apps you want and boom!
Of course, since the OS is based on Linux, certain things have to be needlessly convoluted. Once I got my media player app of choice (I went with Kodi), I wanted to autostart it with the OS. This ended up taking much longer than necessary because the way to do this has changed a few times and almost every tutorial online is outdated.
But once it was ready to go, it was a great way to conveniently browse the files on my server and watch whatever I want. So far I haven't run into any issues with codecs or anything; even really intricate subtitles display correctly. I'm very much enjoying it.
But what do you use?
For a long time, I've had one of my PCs act as a file server for my LAN, so I can access videos from other devices, but for lack of a dedicated device to play them on in the living room, Noth and I would always just connect one of our laptops to the TV. That was kind of a pain, so we bought this:
(Switch dock for scale)
This is a Raspberry Pi 4, a very tiny computer that's very versatile for tinkering. But even if you're not the tinkering type, it's pretty painless to buy one that's pretty much ready to go with one of these cases and a MicroSD card with the OS already preloaded. From there, just connect it to a screen with HDMI, download the apps you want and boom!
Of course, since the OS is based on Linux, certain things have to be needlessly convoluted. Once I got my media player app of choice (I went with Kodi), I wanted to autostart it with the OS. This ended up taking much longer than necessary because the way to do this has changed a few times and almost every tutorial online is outdated.
But once it was ready to go, it was a great way to conveniently browse the files on my server and watch whatever I want. So far I haven't run into any issues with codecs or anything; even really intricate subtitles display correctly. I'm very much enjoying it.
But what do you use?
). It worked pretty decently then because I just lived in the one room.