Best streaming box/stick for Jellyfin?

[Jamie Chapman]

Please take this suggestion with a grain of salt. It works really well if you like to tinker, have an old PC laying around (something in the past 5 to 8 years should work fine) and happen to have a very technically minded, amenable, relaxed wife (do these exist?). I qualify on the first two sentiments, but failed miserably on the latter.

For the past few months I have wanted to build a "true" htpc streaming box using:

1. Some experience
2. A lot of Google searching
3. and, of course, a fair amount of time since there is nothing pre-built for Windows that creates a turnkey solution, pay-for or otherwise.

My goal was a 10 foot user experience, and I knew going in that it had to pass the wife test. As I mentioned before, the wife test failed miserably, so if your wife isn't the Buddha's great-great-great (and on and on) granddaughter, you will want to stick with the options mentioned above.

I had a tiny PC laying around, an 8th gen core i5 Dell OptiPlex 3060 that I loaded with clean Windows 11. This tucks in neatly behind my wall mounted living room TV (a basic 4K 65" Samsung)

I then found FlexLauncher (I was about to give up the whole project until I stumbled upon FlexLauncher at 2AM on an htpc subreddit) - https://complexlogic.github.io/flex-launcher/, which is a great little utility, fully customizable using a config.ini file. All the instructions needed to set this up are on Complexlogic's portal.

While configuring this system, I stumbled across Jellyfin's TV Display mode, which makes the entire Jellyfin web interface function as a Smart TV app. This gave me a lot of hope on the wife test, but alas, all other streaming services' web interface designs do not function in this way, and do not offer an option to. They are designed to function with a keyboard and mouse at their core, which is where this project fell through.

Anyway, each "app" in flex launcher is simply setup to call a full screen Edge browser (any other browser works fine here in place of Edge), pointed to the streaming site's URL.

I then picked up this RF remote on Amazon, which makes the whole thing work great, so long as you don't mind using the gyro mouse to navigate the streaming portals for certain functions, such as left to right scrolling.

Pepper Jobs W10 GYRO Air TV Remote - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078NT49MJ?ref...asin_title (this remote works flawlessly. Even with the USB dongle plugged into the tiny PC hidden behind the TV, from across the room at about 15' I never experienced a stutter. Very smooth when using the gyro mouse. I did make my mouse icon a lot larger to make it easily viewable from across the room)

If anyone is interested I have my Flex Launcher configuration in a zip archive at the following location (zip contains the latest Flex Launcher executable, full config, icon images as png files, etc). The two entries in the config.ini that won't work are for my Jellyfin and Audiobookshelf dockers. I changed these paths to denote that you will need to update them with your own IPs or hostnames, or you can just comment them out or delete the lines to remove them from FlexLauncher.

FlexLauncher configured for many popular streaming services - https://1drv.ms/u/c/44735ba371fb11aa/EQv...A?e=3ZNno2

If you want to give it a try using my pre-built config, you'll want to extract to C:\FlexLauncher for best results. Tinker with it. I had a lot of fun setting it up, and will probably wind up using it in my garage cave once the spring comes.

And, last but certainly not least - For my living room TV I wound up buying the Google TV Streamer 4K. For $100 it was well worth the peace of mind of a happy wife. It loads everything pretty fast, and other than the notes mentioned above about certain formats, it works great (Huge shout-out to Niels van Velzen and everyone else who worked on the Jellyfin for Android TV app. It's amazing!!!)