X86 HTPC solution for my living room?

Operating Systems & Open Source
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Hey all,

I’m relatively new here; hopefully I’m posting this in the right place.

On the surface, my question is relatively simple. I have a home server in my living room running Proxmox, with lots of fun things on it including a Jellyfin server.

I am thinking of getting some sort of TV or projector for my living room and plugging it straight into this server. I do not want another box, and would strongly prefer to passthrough a GPU to something virtualized.

Beyond that, though, I don’t really have any hard constraints. I’d like to run some sort of “10-foot” application on this TV that supports Jellyfin well. Here are some other nice-to-haves, in no particular order:

  • Web browser
  • Accessing other steaming apps like YouTube or Netflix
  • “Casting” someone’s screen, or a YouTube video, to share with the family
  • Playing games, maybe from Steam?
  • A nice remote control, either a piece or hardware or a nice smartphone integration

Here are some potential solutions I’ve started to explore:

LibreELEC
This is a JeOS for Kodi, which seems to check a lot of the boxes for me. However, Kodi doesn’t appear to have many “general OS” features, like being able to pull up a YouTube video (either in a browser or in a standalone app). I gotta be able to watch L1T on this system :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

OSMC
This appears to be similar to LibreELEC, and it’s not entirely clear to me which I should prefer over the other. FWIW, I’m a bit concerned at how little discussion there seems to be about OSMC in recent years…though sometimes Google lies to me. Edit: doesn’t look like there’s an x86 version

SteamOS
This would obviously work really nicely with my Steam game library, but I don’t know how much I’d be sacrificing in terms of Jellyfin/media playback quality. The excitement about the Steam Deck makes me hopeful that SteamOS has / will have consistent updates and application support(?)

Android TV
I’m not sure how serious I am about this option because Android TV seems to be difficult to deal with on x86. However, if I got it working it has the potential to check every box: big ecosystem of apps and integrations, casting support, neat interface…eh?

Plasma Bigscreen
This project looks like it might be everything I’m looking for, it seems to be a 10-foot-style window manager that lets you customize nearly everything about your setup. My concern though (based on admittedly very little research) is that it seems rather new and unpolished. As much as I like fiddling with my setup, I want something that will look nice and work next time we all sit down for a movie.

…

So I guess my question becomes, what would you do? Does anyone in the L1T community have a nice HTPC setup that you can recommend? Any tips or resources would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!

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Well, that wouldn’t be a problem since you can just install Kodi (or Jellyfin Media Player or whatever) and have it be linked in the steam library.

However, there is still no SteamOS install image so installing it on random hardware is not actually an option.

It also really depends on what type of media you have. Any HDR movies/shows? Or is Dolby Vision even in the mix? Because both of them limit your options quite a bit.

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However, there is still no SteamOS install image so installing it on random hardware is not actually an option.

Drats, thanks for the tip. I assumed that it was generally available.

Any HDR movies/shows? Or is Dolby Vision even in the mix?

Nah, neither of these are strict requirements. I might pick up an HDR-compatible projector, but I’m not married to that idea. I like my two-channel audio setup well enough.

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Yesterday I installed KDE Neon in a VM and installed Kodi into it. With a theme (“skin”) and the Jellyfin integration, it works well enough. One thing that impressed me about Kodi was the mobile remote app, Kore.

I’m excited that GPU passthrough worked relatively easily, so now I have a screen hanging off my server with Kodi on it. Good motivation to get the ball rolling on a TV or projector acquisition.

I might just leave it like this, maybe get one of those wireless keyboard/trackpad combos so that I can exit Kodi and browse the web, or log into Netflix, etc. However, it would still be nice to have everything integrated a little more tightly. I’ll update this thread as I try things out.

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I absolutely love that you use this. I’ve been using Kore on an old android device since 2019, you can effectively do away with remotes entirely if your TV runs on an auto sensing HDMI adapter

btw I think you can get Netflix working through Kodi using an app, and youtube as well. Maybe even a browser.

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I think you can get Netflix working through Kodi using an app, and youtube as well. Maybe even a browser

I’ll give this a shot, thanks for the tip.

I started this project hoping for a clean 10-foot interface to a browser, Steam library, self-hosted movies…maybe Kodi will surprise me, but I’m starting to think I should just plan on opening and closing Kodi as needed. I foresee too many possible “I want to download a file and open it on my TV” moments, or even “I’d just rather drop into a terminal right now”. Maybe Plasma Bigscreen really is what I’m looking for…I’ll have to try it one day. For now, Kodi is working well enough with Jellyfin that I might just keep this setup. I’m thinking of ordering a wireless keyboard like this one to make it easier to browse the web from my couch.

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In the spirit of documenting this setup for others who might be Googling for similar problems…

I plugged an audio interface (an old Scarlett Solo) into the back of my server and tried passing through the USB to the VM using the Proxmox interface. The resulting audio sounded absolutely awful, garbled and largely unintelligible. Apparently USB passthrough (whichever system Proxmox uses by default, sorry I don’t know a whole lot about virtualization) isn’t ready for high-bitrate audio for one reason or another.

Perhaps there is some configuration trick to fix this, but knowing I had a spare PCIe slot on my motherboard, I just ended ordering this USB card for ~$30 and passed the whole thing through. Worked like a charm!