Not exactly self-hosted but I know many jellyfinners here would cherish this as well.
Finally, an OS worthy of my “alternatively sourced” content library!
HALLELUJAH!!! I was wondering what was going on with this project. I have so many old laptops waiting around just to be converted for Plasma Bigscreen so I can get rid of my android TV boxes that run like garbage
For real. My nvidia shield (the tube version), has been struggling with 4k HDR playback lately. It needs frequent reboots. I later come to learn that the device is 32 bit, yet it’s one of the most competitive devices in the space? Silly.
Fun horror story I learned recently, so are many, many, many of the things that share their internals, commonly, tablets. good luck figuring out whether this specific 4gb ram tablet has 64 bit, aka the majority of em either dont. Some are even using 64 bit processor with 32bit android build, so even if the processor cna handle it, no 64bit applications for you
This definitely looks like a project to follow
can you
sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-rooton it?Glad to see it being picked back up. I tried it previously and I really didn’t like it. It felt half baked. The new version looks like a substantial improvement. Now if only every streaming app didn’t lock their services behind DRM and mobile apps.
Couldn’t you get around this by making the “apps” in bigscreen be browser shortcuts to their respective streaming website?
As others have mentioned, the websites tend to be limited both by resolution and functionality.
My TV supports CEC(most do these days) which will pass the remote input onto the devices connected to it, like a computer. Which means with Plasma Big Picture I can navigate with my remote, and any app that supports navigation with simple arrow key input would work great.
Unfortunately, the streaming websites, last time I tried, absolutely suck at that and assume you are navigating with a mouse.
Many streaming service websites limit browser streaming to 720p.
Or just outright don’t allow it at all on Linux as if that does anything whatsoever.
Really? I’m on a Linux desktop and I had not noticed. Though I steam from Netflix on it very very rarely.
With Netflix in a browser, you can bring up your streaming stats in the browser window as you’re watching something by pressing Ctrl + Shift+ Alt + D. It’ll give you several bits of information as an overlay, including what resolution the video is playing at. Next time you stream from them, give it a shot and see if you get anything above 720p. I know I never have and if you search online, you’ll find others with the same experience. In fact, I think Netflix might actually have this on a FAQ page somewhere…
Found it! https://help.netflix.com/en/node/30081
Scroll down to the OS selection and you can see what resolutions are supported by which browsers on Linux. Turns out Opera will give you 1080p for some reason, but the rest are capped at 720p.
I wonder if making another browser spoof being Opera would work too,
Whats stopping spoof to Android? Possible workaround?
I suspect it probably would. Though I haven’t looked too deeply into it myself, I’ve heard of browser extensions you can get to force 1080p from Netflix, so maybe that’s what they’re doing.
That only would launch them and probably won’t support remotes properly.
That’s looks much better.
I tried the older version for my htpc and didn’t like it.
I would love to see this keep improving.
Is this basically a DE? Could you run steam and full on gaming PC off this?
Baeically its a somewhat stripped down version of plasma ment to be used with a controller or remote, but it is only a DE, so applications that arent controller friendly are going to stay that way.
Setting steam to launch big picture by default tho would basically turn any powerful pc you have into a steam console (steam big picture) with an extra home screen (plasma bigscreen) that shows all your other applications
The thing is without this, if you somehow exit steam, you are toast and need to plug a keyboard or access via ssh. Having a DE with controller support like this would indeed rock, as I stop depending on steam for launching things.
I wonder if you could eventually get it built into Bazzite
It’s an alternative shell for Plasma, so theoretically you should be able to do anything in it that you can do in Plasma.
On my Arch box it installed a minimal set of Plasma utilities to support it, which means my setup is still very limited (and I can’t turn off screen lock!), but I haven’t tried if it would change if offered a full Plasma install.
I can most certainly launch Steam, Kodi, Jellyfin etc.
Or is it a “mode” of KDE? Like can you use a distro of KDE and then put it into Bigscreen mode?
It’s not that. Or at least you have to reboot into it.
…or can you just load a desktop environment without rebooting… Keeping your apps open…?
It’s using plasma-nano session, which is a minimal Plasma session, and adding a launcher and settings app from what I can see.
You can run it in a regular window if you install the dependencies and use kde-builder to compile it and run. See the Dev docs at https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/
If you do decide to install all the kde-builder stuff, I’d suggest you use a distrobox container to make it easy to remove the many, many packages that it will install in order to set up the build environment
What does DE mean in this context?
It’s a Linux concept. Basically, imagine you could have a Windows 11 PC with the Windows XP GUI or with the macOS GUI. In Linux, these kinds of different GUIs are just desktop environments, which you can install as you see fit.
Conversely, you can also have an OS without a desktop environment, which is basically what’s used on Linux server PCs.Desktop environment
Can one PC run this for TV while also running DE for desktop?
Been seeking such solutions it seems like I am dreaming too hard lol
Is just another DE which you can choose when logging in
ok, but it would be wonderful if you could have this run on the TV, while the main screen runs normal plasma.
speaking of that, it’s probably doable with setting up multiseat, probably in systemd logind
edit: @sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
let me know if this way you got a notificationYeah, wanted to suggest multi seat, but never played with it myself, so no clue how both sessions interact
My understanding is you’d have a completely seperate set of peripherals for each seat, so that might be an extremely viable solution
Does it have Stremio and an equivalent to YouTube ReVanced/SmartTubeNext? If so, I’m sold. I’m tired of the slow clunky interface on my Android-based TV. Paid nearly $2K for this fucker and they couldn’t even be bothered to give it a CPU with more than 2 cores, nor more than 8GB of storage space. Like a cheap Chinese Android phone from 2014.
Can’t wait to switch to Desktop Mode on my SteamDeck to open Plasma BigScreen.
Wow this looks to be really promising!! I would LOVE to get rid of my current Nvidia sheild Android TV setup, as that contain the mast part of Google I’m forced to use.
I kinda want to ask how well does firefox work? I kinda want to try using amazon prime one firefox with ublock origen (yes I know jelly fin and plex plus other tools exist) just curious
When I’ve used Prime Video before it worked flawlessly in Firefox with ublock, but that was on a laptop
Try Stremio and you can skip all that
Let’s goooo!
(And let’s support!!)
Nice! The revival is further along than I thought. Can’t wait to put it on my Steam Deck. And maybe my desktop PC will move into the living room in the near future. Would be the perfect timing.
Looks promising. Does remote controllers work with it?
I expect so.
KDE Connect also works great as a remote control for many things, presumably including this.
I’m wondering what I’ve done wrong with KDE Connect as I could never get it working on any device across 3 different smartphones
I found opensuse’s default firewall rules were very restrictive and you needed to open a port.
Sadly the distributions I tried did not open the required port(s) on the built-in firewall (Bazzite and CachyOS, for two).
I would suggest to disable any firewall and check if you can pair.
You are probably correct that the firewall is the culprit. Good suggestion.
I realize disabling the firewall for testing is OK, but I recommend looking up what it takes to open the ports or app in the firewall instead. I’ve spent my whole career running into and fixing instances where techs disabled firewalls for “testing” and never re-enabled them.
You mean they didn’t just turn off the firewall on all client machines and rely entirely on a single firewall at the network gateway? Because that’s what I’ve seen way too much of…
HDMI-CEC seems to be currently unsupported. So you won’t be able to use your TV’s remote yet.
The article actually stated that the featured is untested.
Controller support exists, but getting TV remotes to work over HDMI CEC is still untested.
Being Linux, if you were really motivated, you could probably write a shim service that converted CEC to basic input that it does support, or someone out there probably already has.
now, that sounds more interesting than just “unsupported”!
Looks nice! I’m getting it set up on an old Pi right now for a new media center in my basement.
I tried it like a year ago, and there were really a lot of things I dislike. Let’s see how it goes. Would be nice, because I still don’t have a good solution for this.
It is getting a complete makeover
I ended up with a kde desktop set up that was good.
I used a mini handheld keyboard by Rii, it had a touch pad. There are many different styles of it. But with the customization kde has, I got a pretty fluent set up. It was a full desktop but almost more like android in terms of usage.
