Evening Lemmy,

I have run into a small hiccup in my self-hosting journey. Youtube on my TV in the living room has ads… and they become more unbearable by the day. To that end, I’d like to set up a Raspberry Pi (Or something) to run as a one-stop for media. Ideally, I’d like it to have YouTube (Or more likely NewPipe/FreeTube), Steam Link and access to my Jellyfin instance. More ideally, I’d like this to be controllable with a controller (TV Remote, Steam controller, doesn’t matter). The reason for the latter is that I’d rather not create too much trouble for my wife when she uses the TV.

I’ve done some looking, and I seem to be able to get an Amazon Firestick to run NewPipe, and Jellyfin, and maybe even the Steam Link but from the stories I’ve read it’s… less than ideal. So, I was hoping there may be an alternative.

The goal is to get all three in one system, with decently user friendly functionality.

Has anyone set something similar up, and could you point me in a direction.

  • N4CHEMEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    I’m not the person you replied to, but I think my experience could be relevant.

    I have a MiBox TV S 4K, which as far as I know runs pretty pure AndroidTV (but I might be wrong). This is still going to try to connect to Google and Xiaomi servers for tracking and ads… but I have set up a custom DNS blocking trackers and ads.

    I found this Reddit post and followed the instructions to change the DNS server on the MiBox to NextDNS, where I could later activate relevant blocklists (SmartTV, Xiaomi, Google). I also perform monitoring of the domains the MiBox connects to and have blocked a couple manually.

    Finally, for AndroidTV forget about NewPipe and use SmartTube. It’s the same idea, but optimised for the AndroidTV experience where you have a remote and not a touchscreen.

    • Grenfur@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Thank you. This is more aligned with what I was hoping for. I wanted a way to access these services but still lock the device down as much as I can. Thank you for sharing.

      • N4CHEMEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Glad that I could help. If you need help with setting the custom DNS or choosing which domains to block feel free to ask me here.