Media Machine
For several years I have longed for an ultimate machine in which I can watch videos, play games and stream content. A couple of years ago I managed to set up a Retropie and Steam Link on my Raspberry Pi 3B. Most games for Retropie, even up to Playstation 2, worked with no to minimal lag or issues, while the Steam Link had no issues at all, as long as I had a cable connected. I also created pi-lounge to make it easier to pick what applications to play, supporting most kinds of input, including keyboard, mouse, remote controller1 and game pads. Back then I tried to find any sort of media viewer, and the closest I found was Kodi, although it had performance issues and therefore lagged and slow. Later I tinkered with it to install Emby Theater, as my current media handler is Emby. Problem was that it failed to run, no matter what I did, so it failed. I then found out that no other of the media applications worked anymore, with no idea why that was the case, even though I had the slight clue that working with Emby Theater may have removed some dependencies.
Now I have a Raspberry Pi 4B 2GB which I used for a while as a server, but as I felt it was not really useful that way, I moved it and began installing the necessary applications for media content. To reduce this story of hours upon hours of debugging, I found out the following facts:
- Steam Link can only be installed on 32-bit OS, as otherwise it will replace all its dependencies with 32-bit versions.
- RetroPie works on 64-bit OS, even though it advices against this, but its default image is Debian 10 32-bit.
- Kodi only exists as version 17 on Debian 10, and it will still act a bit slow.
- Emby Theater never works on Raspberry Pi, but there exists an add-on for Kodi to connect to your Emby server and display it pretty neatly.
- CEC (aka HDMI-CEC), which is the protocol for communication through HDMI with only one remote, does not exist for AARCH64,
The conclusion is that I am forced to use Raspberry OS 10 32-bit to be able to get everything to work together. While Kodi 17 is slower than Kodi 20, having a faster Raspberri Pi makes it navigating a lot easier, even though it is not perfect, it still plays each media quite alright. Having to use older software with newer hardware feels a bit bad, but at least it works.