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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I’m old school, but a simple NFS server for media has worked well enough for me for decades. Entertainment-center-connected devices were once Linux PCs, now cheap ancient Mac Minis running XBMC/Kodi. All connected over wired Ethernet. This setup has been bulletproof for as long as I’ve run it.

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I've come around to thinking just having a cheap computer with a normal OS with a wireless keyboard + touchpad combo hooked up to the TV is less of a pain than the "friendlier" alternatives, for DIYers, because it's so much simpler to set up and maintain, at least for video libraries. About the only thing I miss with that is last-episode tracking for series.

Main down-side is that it can be harder to get e.g. surround sound and HDR working reliably with a VLC + filesystem-browser solution.

Agree. What is HN's budget recommendation for Linux friendly wireless keyboard+touchpad?

How important is the touchpad part? The Logitech K400 is pretty good.

I would encourage you to look at the 'airmouse' category of products, though. I have the Wechip one and it works pretty well and detects as a standard mouse/keyboard. It has a mini keyboard on one side and a D-pad on the other, with a wii-mote like function for moving the cursor.

Thanks, I'll search for airmice. A touchpad is not essential if I can attain the same functionality.

edit: Some review of air mouse remotes https://fixthephoto.com/best-air-mouse.html

I disagree actually when compared to something like the vero 4k+ Running osmc & kodi.

I do that too, mostly. The only real downside is no transcoding. That's fine as long as you stay on wired Ethernet but a 50G remux via trans-pacific nfs is... suboptimal. Recently I've started running a Jellyfin server on a spare NUC for those times when transcoding is needed, but sticking with direct nfs access when it's not. Seems like the best of both worlds so far.

Totally agree, own your own client hardware and connect to a central server on your LAN.

My RPi3 kodi was performing wonky after ~30+ hours of uptime.

The duct-tape fix was scheduling a reboot at 3am.

I have my media collection mounted via NFS on Jellyfin and it's pretty nice.

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