Best streaming box/stick for Jellyfin?

[beanbagboy]

Just looking for something that is fairly snappy and can handle itself. Nvidia Shield seems overpriced for its age and I'm not sure how much I'd like an Apple TV due to its closed ecosystem. I really only plan on Jellyfin and maybe Netflix, but having more options if I decide to go that route would be cool.

Been using the Roku TV client (that's all I have access to) and it's pretty miserable. My android phone does a better job streaming the same files on WiFi than the TV does on ethernet (both remote from a different state).

Suggestions? Google TV any good? It's only $99 so if it works well enough I wouldn't mind going with that. I'd like something that can do 4k but I don't have any realistic need for something that supports crazy audio setups.

[TheDreadPirate]

I have the Google TV Streamer and in terms of UI responsiveness, it is a big upgrade over the CCwGTV's it replaced. Having said that, the mediatek chip set the Google TV Streamer uses is bugged for Dolby Vision and HDR10+ content. If you don't have any HDR10+ or DV content, this won't be a problem. Your other option is to convert your DV and HDR10+ content to plain HDR10, which isn't a problem on the Google TV Streamer. I wrote a guide for this process over in the walkthrough sub-forum.

A lot of other user have reported that ONN TV boxes are pretty good for the money.

For non-Android TV options, the Roku Ultra 4800X is very responsive.

[Quinterly]

One drawback of the Google TV Streamer is it doesn't do passthrough of TrueHD or dts-HD MA. Neither do any of the Roku devices.You are limited to lossy audio formats (DD+ is the best you'll get).

Nvidia Shield and Apple TV 4K are both superior for audio handling. FireTV 4K Max and Cube do TrueHD passthrough but not dts-HD MA which make them better audio handling devices than the Google streamer.

[phaelax]

I'm not sure how much I'd like an Apple TV due to its closed ecosystem

If all you want to run is jellyfin and netflix, is that really an issue if the ecosystem contains everything you need? In my opinion nothing really matches the performance and responsiveness of the appleTV. It's not perfect, I occasionally have to restart the device because for whatever reason it stops sending audio to the tv but I'd say that happens less than once a week. I have a firestick, absolutely hate it. It works, but the menus, the ads, the responsiveness, it's just not a good device. And it only got worse after an update blocked users from changing the default launcher (I used wolf). Have not used Roku myself but a friend has one and jellyfin has worked fine for her. I too have heard positive things about ONN and have considered buying one to play with, but having watched some videos on it the interface looks as horrible as amazon's.

This won't really help, but a friend and I have discussed building our own android-based streaming box. We're both developers and after not having much luck with LineageOS and AndroidTV (couldn't get it to play nice with the google store) we considered developing our own.

[gizmomelb]

I'm guessing (as in I don't have one) that the amazon firestick tv devices might be worthwhile (especially when they are on sale, and if you don't like it then you can return it for full refund) as they support Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos passthrough and HDMI-CEC remote control. Personally I use an intel n100 mini pc - which doesn't have HDMI-CEC natively (I made an adapter), nor does it support Dolby Vision (personally I cannot tell the difference between HDR10 and Dolby, so it's good enough for me) and it's as snappy as hell - I boot straight to KODI on the device (libre elec) and use the Jellyfin KODI plugin to connect to my Jellyfin server. The n100 mini PC passes all audio to my soundbar, which handles up to Dolby Atmos 7.1 decoding.

[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!!!)