I had a Rapsberri Pi 4 (4GB) laying around and installed kodi/libreelec to use it with my TV.

I need it to do 3, maybe 4 things, but the experience was rather underwhelming.

  1. Jellyfin client I run a jellyfin server on my NAS. The jellyfin add-on needs several seconds or even a minute plus to load the content of big folders.

Jellycon has a different approach, but doesn’t let me browse folders, which is a must for me (I use pinchflat to download some videos from YouTube channels. They are organized in folders)

  1. YouTube Ideally I would love a freetube client for watching one off videos or finding a video on a certain topic. The YouTube add-on requires API access, sadly.

  2. Twitch The add-on works great.

  3. Remote I have a IR Mini Keyboard that works great with Kodi/libreelec

I was considering installing a lightweight Linux distro and installing freetube and a browser for twitch and jellyfin.

Does anyone use similar hardware? Is there a better solution for my use case?

(If there is a better affordable hardware solution, I’m interested as well)

  • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    61·
    2 days ago

    I have much more powerful hardware than you but Jellyfin shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to load directories. The hardware is fairly irrelevant, this was still the case when I was on my old nas (which was an ancient pc that was garbage). Jellyfin doesn’t require much. My library is gigantic too, easily over 100,000 items across music, movies, and tv.

    What do logs say? How is your network? When I moved into my new place i went ethernet only and had issues with Jellyfin (and other self hosted stuff) and tracked it down to one cable that was super cheap and limited to 100mbit.

    Jellyfin isn’t really geared towards viewing media in a folder structure though.

    You may be best off going with a freetube access. TBH I find Jellyfin works best with media that can be scraped or that I’m willing to create nfo files for. My music/tv/movies? These are overwhelmingly fine. Every once in a while a niche show or album requires manual scraping or a custom nfo. But I also have some other collections like music videos. Imvdb exists but is far less complete compared to other scraping sources and as a result I don’t even bother using it, the overwhelming majority of my collection needs manual nfos. When I’ve tried to contribute to it my contributions have sat in pending for literal months pending approval, even for obvious videos by major artists.

    I don’t know of any scraper for youtube videos and such a thing would be a tremendous undertaking. If you archive a lot it’s a lot of nfos to create. Perhaps you could make a script that generates them automatically by scraping the description and grabbing the thumbnail as fan art?

    • minimalfootprint@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      I have much more powerful hardware than you but Jellyfin shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to load directories.

      That has been my experience as well with accessing it via the web interface. I read up on the kodi addons a bit more. As I understand it the jellyfin addon integrates the jellyfin library and has to sync it. I think this causes the delay for me. I think I will give Jellycon another try, since it accesses the libraries themselves. I will take a look at my media management and refine the folder structure to make it work.

      TBH I find Jellyfin works best with media that can be scraped or that I’m willing to create nfo files for.

      Metadata is actually an aspect I have little trouble with. There are solutions for TV and movies and pinchflat actually provides metadata for the youtube videos in a format jellyfin can use.

      Pinchflat - How do I get media into Plex/Jellyfin/Kodi?

      • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        FWIW while my hardware serving Jellyfin is more powerful, my hardware accessing is not much more, I forgot to mention that detail

        I typically use a ugoos android tv box flashed with coreelec. I believe it’s more powerful than a pi for this application but it’s not particularly powerful.

        I use Jellyfin for kodi over Jellycon. I’m not saying one is better than the other, I’ve never tried jellycon, but that is what my experience is based on. In my experience initial library scans are very lengthy (building db from scratch) with the size of my library, 20-30 minutes. This never is necessary at this point though and was only needed because I was testing something for coreelecs nightlies that required me to trash my db a lot. Typically I login and it updates within a few seconds, even if I’ve recently had a somewhat hefty update. It does help that the ugoos has fairly speedy emmc here - my initial testing running coreelec off of the sd card this was a bottleneck. Flashing to internal emmc and enabling hs400 mode made this notably quicker

        Pinchflat is interesting! Thanks! I have been looking for a better YouTube archival tool

        IMO kodi plugins are very hit/miss. This is why I prefer the setup I have where storage nas runs Jellyfin then flashed android box runs coreelec. Kodi and Jellyfin both have IPTV plugins, for example, but they are terrible. So when I want to use IPTV I boot to the degoogled android side and use tivimate, which is much more stable and convenient. I also have an APK for youtube there with adfree and sponsor block integrated. There is a build of freetube for android but unfortunately I cannot get it to work on the box. I don’t watch a ton of youtube though