Hello people,

We (my SO and I) bought a Raspberry Pi 5 in the hopes of setting up like a HTPC on our living room TV, with the possibility of streaming torrents through it in 4K possibly. The problem is that I am an incapable failure absolute noob when it comes to everything internet streaming related, and so this got way too complicated way too fast and now I’m burned out and wanting to throw the fucking brick off the balcony, but that would be more than 150€ of our money lying on the cold, wet grass downstairs with nothing gained but a renewed sense of absolute failure on my part.

So can you help?

I installed LibreELEC and Kodi on it (and Mullvad VPN somehow, though the current setup uses OpenVPN which is getting removed in January 2026 so I’ll have to migrate it to Wireguard eventually…) and then got Jacktook up and running. Eventually I realized I had to install and configure some other things too, so I decided to go with TorrServer. I also bought a 30-day subscription to Real-Debrid because apparently that is needed? I have no idea anymore, Kodi itself throws errors related to searches and shit, but I don’t know how to access them on the machine, plus the UI/UX is way too clunky for my taste. I’d probably need to setup SSH to be able to access it easily from my desktop Arch Linux (btw), but last time I tried configuring even that was way too cumbersome and went way over my head. And the problem might even be the VPN that I set up, but I really don’t know anymore and hate everything about not knowing.

  • GlenRamboEnglish
    5·
    5 days ago

    I foot sick of Kodie after a number of years. I moved to Stremio and never looked back.

    Use https://guides.viren070.me/stremio/ with Cyberflix only (I.e. dont both with the rest of the stiff the guide sets up).

    Its less customisable than Kodie but works much better.

    You probably need to install a normal OS on yoir Pi to run it though. So theres that.

    Good luck sailor.

    • Narri N. (they/them)@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Alright, after jumping through some hoops on the OS-side I managed to get everything working almost exactly the way I wanted with this guide. Thank you so much!

      • GlenRamboEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        No worries. Are you still running LibreELEC as the OS/front end to Stremio?

        • Narri N. (they/them)@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          No. I decided to go with StremioOS which didn’t work (like many others online had noticed also), but digging deeper it turned out to just be a custom LineageOS AndroidTV setup. So I downloaded that dev’s fork of it and installed it on to the RBPi SSD, and then installed the Stremio APK for AndroidTV on that and got it to work that way. These are the hoops I mentioned. This was good actually, because then I could just install a SmartTube APK on the same OS and got that sweet adblock and SponsorBlock action on Youtube that I had hoped for in the beginning. Also learned to use SSH which was way less complicated on (W)LAN than I had initially assumed. Now I guess we’re just waiting for Google to complete the death knell of Android, at which point I’ll have to find another way of setting up this service for us. But as it stands we should manage. Again, thank you. You specifically, and those few other folks who replied to my incoherent question straight away.

          • GlenRamboEnglish
            2·
            9 hours ago

            Awsome. Maybe other Lemmys can use your post in future. Before android kills things.

            I want to set up a similar box to run APKs on but want tonight use a remote rather than keyboard. I want to even avoid the small keyboards. Are you using it with a remote only? Or keyboard?

            • Narri N. (they/them)@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
              1·
              2 hours ago

              Yeah, I’m pretty sure there’s information around again once shit hits the fan. But for now it seems to be working.

              And also yeah. Our setup worked out of the box with both KB&M and my partner’s TV’s remote (a Samsung smart-tv of some kind if it matters), though the LineageOS i installed might’ve had some settings of its own regarding remotes that are vital; i kinda went by the vibes of what could be set and set those before verifying if the remote worked initially. But it was working before I changed the OS so it might “just work”.