For the past several years, I relied on my TV’s built-in decoding facilities (LG OLED 55B7V), in combination with minidlna and/or Jellyfin. That has served me well for a while. However, too many videos now come with DTS audio tracks, and I even had issues with video once or twice. I don’t want to transcode, for æsthetic reasons.
It is surprisingly difficult to play video from a computer. I tried
to just use an N100 box I had, but that requires setting up the
“monitor” (HDMI to AV receiver) connection correctly (with HDR, a
24.976 framerate for movies, and audio out), correct flags to
mpv (for GPU decode,
vo=dmabuf-wayland to avoid a rendering roundtrip, and
for audio passthrough of as much as possible; I also had to disable
that audio output in Pipewire).
And it still didn’t look right.
Running Kodi atop a normal Linux system is also annoying, what with logins, setup steps, and everything.
I ended up getting a Ugoos AM6B+, with CoreELEC and JellyCon. I maybe would have preferred Jellyfin’s app interface, but it’s not really important. What’s important is that it works out of the box (for a certain meaning of “box”; you do have to set up CoreELEC).
The AM6B+ is one of very few devices that work with Dolby Vision profile 7 FEL. That’s important to display UHD Blu-ray remuxes; the “FEL” (full enhancement layer) encodes the extra brightness for HDR. The tradeoff is that it does not support AV1 decoding at 4k; I haven’t yet run into those, so that’s probably fine.
I set up this “puttering Wednesday” feature to limit this sort of content, but it still seems to dominate on here. Too easy to write, and there’s always something.