Replacing my fire TV with a pi + Kodi
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A while ago I wrote about ads showing up on my TV player, which annoyed me. To solve this annoyance I repurposed a raspberry pi I had lying around into TV player over the winter holidays.
All I needed to do was be able to access my Plex server and twitch. One option was to install android on the pi and just use the official apps. It looks like not even android TV is free from ads anymore (source).
In my previous post I had mentioned wanting to going for an osmc device. Upon further research I found out osmc actually runs on top of Kodi. Kodi is an open source (and ad free) piece of software that would be cable of doing what I wanted. It comes with add-ons for Plex and twitch (and more). The installation and setup was incredibly straight forward thanks to LibreELEC. I highly recommend donating to either project if you use them:
- LibreELEC: https://libreelec.tv/contribute/
- Kodi: https://kodi.tv/contribute/donate
All I had to do was replace my fire TV with the pi.
I am using a wireless keyboard + mouse combo to interact with the pi. It's possible to use the fire TV remote with the pi (it's just a Bluetooth keyboard). I live in a condo that has quite a fair amount of Bluetooth devices advertising themselves for pairing so its difficult to find the remote in the pairing list. I may try again in the future as it's possible due to it being the holidays loads of folks were setting up new devices as well.
For now though good riddance fire TV and good riddance to ads.