Specifically I'm wondering about the TV frontend UI. Presumably most people are going to be using an android tv box like fire tv or chromecast? Something else?
I recently picked up a new chromecast 4k that has the "Google TV" OS on it and... I'm having a hell of a time coming up with a UI that looks similar to the stock one (with movie recommendations, up next, my watchlist, etc) but that hooks into piracy streaming services.
For launchers I found projectivy, but I noticed that the "channels" feature which pulls in that sort of thing is remarkably limited. Streaming-wise I've got stremio and cloudstream, and only stremio lets me pull in my library into projectivy. Which is okay but I can't get that synced with trakt or getting recommendations; it all has to be managed from stremio.
whereas cloudstream doesn't really have any connectivity at all. There's a few streaming services that somewhat pull things in but it's not great. Netflix doesn't seem to hook into it, nor plex. It ends up being better to just use the stock home and manually launching into stremio/cloudstream when I want them.
Surely there has to be a better way to do this? The stock home screen is nice with free live tv, movie recommendations that link into various paid streaming services, etc. I'd just like to hook in something like stremio, plex, etc. instead, but that seems impossible?
What exactly do y'all do for your setups? Trying to manage my google play watchlist/likes independently of trackt, and then also managing my stremio library separately from both just feels like hell. I end up having to take mental note of the stuff I see on the home screen and manually searching it up.
The live tv channels that the stock homescreen has is seemingly not replicated anywhere else which is a bit disappointing. I saw the old android tv menu get really close to what I'm after, but I can't manage to get it working on my newer chromecast. The menu installs, but the channel feature doesn't work, making it pointless.
Is there a better way?
It is certainly usable. Though for whatever reason the series "invasion" from apple tv gave it fits. But everything else I have watched on it was fine. I've only had mine setup for a few months though. Roku in one room, tivo stick (android) in another. The tivo stick handled invasion. Both needed some minor tuning though.
Yeah it's the weakest part of the setup on a Chromecast TV running the android app. Works really well mostly though the interface could look slicker. There must be hardware deciding unavailable for some stuff because the odd bit of media is ultrasluggish.
Depends on the hardware you give it I'm pretty sure, a later gpu will support all codecs but older ones might not be able to encode/decode even h256
I've got the 4k one with Google TV and it still doesn't have hardware deciding for some of my collection. Not much, maybe 1%.
Whoops, I read your original comment wrong, I meant server hardware - but that's real weird its not transcoding right to whatever your Chromecast supports
Yeah what's with that? It's still stuttery even after I downsample. And only on specific files.
Our first priority is stability and functionality. Roku's built-in UI components aren't the prettiest, so if you want anything "slick" it has to be a custom element and you'll need to custom code all the behind the scenes logic yourself. That's a ton of work just for a UI change, so we're focusing on functionality first.