After spending the last few days, tinkering and trying to put together an HTPC for my family, I wasn’t able to get a smooth enough experience to match even our old, ad-filled, laggy, Roku. In particular, every streaming service I tried needed to be controlled almost exclusively by mouse, as everything has been reduced to electron apps/websites with little-to-no keyboard or controller navigation support. As such, I’m looking for other options, although considering how quickly these platforms change and how outdated a lot of the information available on them is its hard to single out the best options.
In particular, I’m looking to be able to:
- Use Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney+. Ideally other services too, since we tend to juggle subscriptions.
- Control it with a remote, controller, or similarly simple device
- Be able to cast to it from a phone
Does anyone have much experience with options for this - esspecially if you’ve tried multiple and can compare?
That’s a fair criticism, especially if you want to limit what media your kids are consuming. We’ve got a setup like I described above in our house but we’re both tech literate so being able to use a proxy server to access South Korean Netflix is an advantage to us.
There do exist media focused keyboards (even partial keyboards without a functioning keyset) to control play/pause, volume etc - but a lot of the streaming services don’t have good UIs on PC unless you’re willing to use a mouse.