Emby Theater OS

[Suliamu 4]

Hey there,

I know this is a bit more than just a simple feature request, but i would like to pitch here the idea
of an "Emby Theater OS". 
Basically a ready made img for Raspberry Pi (and other SBC) and an .iso for USB-Stick, that loads/installs a dedicated Operating System
just for the cause of opening the Emby Theater App and interacting with the kernel on low level base.  
So that you just have to load/install it and a default installation of it can be immediatly used on TV after logging in.  

 
Reasoning is:

I've set up a client-box for my grand-parents. 
And in the course of trying out different methods to serve the emby-content i found that all of those solutions are not really perfect.
Using Kodi is stable on the one hand, on the other hand you basically lose _ALL_ individual options you've set up the emby-server with and have to configure Kodi very individually and keep it up to date all the time. Also troubleshooting Kodi-problems is hard when oneself does not use Kodi. This solution would make more headaches that it would prevent. 

Those proprietary clients like Amazon Fire Stick with an app are also not really a solution.
I've had more than once the occurence that family-members subbed to an amazon-premium-channel or bought a movie out of mistake because those interfaces are exactly made in such a way that it lures people to click on things they don't understand and i really don't want to constantly micromanage this. And it creates costs.  

I've also tried to set up a dedicated Fedora for this purpose on a little Chromebox.
It starts Emby Theater Linux in Autostart and this works fine but there are quirks. 
My grandparents manage somehow to minimize the client or bring up the gnome-overview which leads to input from the remote not working anymore.   
Also i often run into problems with returning to the main-screen of the Theater-App. It is basically stuck in the overview of a media item. Only closing and opening the whole Theater App again works.  
Also the energy- & update-management of standard Desktop-Linux-Systems is not really tuned for such a usage and it would be really nice to have something that works more robust in such an environment without resorting to Standard Workstation Gnome or KDE or such.  

I found KDE Plasma Bigscreen which is basically a KDE for TVs that can load different apps in fullscreen and has a "settings"-app tuned for fullscreen and screensaver-options and so on.     
This would be a nice base i would think for such a project.   
It is out for some time but no one seems to utilize it or make something with it unfortunately.  
https://plasma-bigscreen.org/de/

 

 

 

[jaycedk 382]

Would like to see this, but it would come as a dev cost.

I think this would be a great third party project.