I think the Pi 5 would be well positioned to be a free, OSS media box. Android TV and Google TV are very popular today, along with Roku, Apple TV, etc.
I installed PiHole and noticed that every single click of my Roku remote gets sent to Roku’s servers. PiHole blocks this of course, but there was nothing I could do to disable this telemetry on the Roku device itself.
Google TV is slightly better - there’s options to adjust targeted ads, and an “app only” mode, but there’s still usage and other data sent to Google. Also you can’t use it at all if you don’t sign in with a Google account.
I haven’t used other platforms.
But I would like to see an easy to use, easy to configure, OSS streaming box. Now that this can do 4k60 and HDR, it might just work for things like Netflix, Plex, and other services.
Right now the best products on the market for high-bitrate streaming are Apple TV and Nvidia Shield Pro. I wonder if the RPi 5 can compete with that?
There's no shortage of projects for this, particularly enby, jellyfin, and kodi spring to mind. The only real challenges are GPU transcoding support, app selection for integration of services like Spotify, amazon prime streaming, and netflix, and app availability on client devices like TVs.
In terms of specs a Pi4 was already beefy enough for this use case, fwiw. But the software stack is hard just because no one seems to target the "set top box“ space quite the same way. There are client/server media platforms to compete with plex, there are single.box media platforms, there are set top boxes to compete with roku, and every possible mix in between.
I installed PiHole and noticed that every single click of my Roku remote gets sent to Roku’s servers. PiHole blocks this of course, but there was nothing I could do to disable this telemetry on the Roku device itself.
Google TV is slightly better - there’s options to adjust targeted ads, and an “app only” mode, but there’s still usage and other data sent to Google. Also you can’t use it at all if you don’t sign in with a Google account.
I haven’t used other platforms.
But I would like to see an easy to use, easy to configure, OSS streaming box. Now that this can do 4k60 and HDR, it might just work for things like Netflix, Plex, and other services.
Right now the best products on the market for high-bitrate streaming are Apple TV and Nvidia Shield Pro. I wonder if the RPi 5 can compete with that?