Hi guys!
I’m looking for a replacement travel dongle to play my Jellyfin movies whenever I’m traveling. My goto device up to this point has been a Chromecast (with GTV I think). But it’s becoming increasingly clear its playback is very unreliable, hanging mid-playback for long periods. I blamed it initially on bandwidth issues over very long distances (the server is on a different continent at the moment!). But playing on the laptop via browser or via the jellyfin media player flatpak works just beautifully. So it clearly seems to be issues with the Chromecast as it’s connected to the same Wifi and TV as the laptop.
So I am thinking…what other devices could I look into as Chromecast replacement? There’s over 3yr old recommendations about a Walmart device (but I don’t live anywhere near the American continent). The other go-to device would be an Nvidia Shield, the canister-looking one. But that still seems a bit hefty for traveling. After all these years, is there any device you’d recommend to use as light-to-bring dongle for traveling?
Thanks!
Maybe one of those HDMI “stick” PCs you can get? There’s x86 Android builds you can run or you can do like I did with my media PCs and boot into Openbox and just launch a fullscreen browser right to Jellyfin and control it from your phone. (My main setup uses Emby but should be able to do the same with JF).
I’ve actually got a portable Jellyfin server I take with me. Built on the OrangePi Zero 2W with a USB->NVMe acting as media storage (as well as the Jellyfin DB). It’s got several other services running as well as a second Wifi adapter so it can also act as a travel router.
For playback, I pretty much just use my laptop or phone but have thought about adding one of the “stick” PCs as a client for it.
Yeah that’s what i meant, one of those android dongles… But which one is good for it. And I wouldn’t be able to bring the server with me, as it has about 10Tb now between movies and TV shows.
Yeah, I don’t know about pre-installed with Android that aren’t ad platforms masquerading as consumer hardware. I’d never use one unless it was supported by LineageOS or something. My comment was more “roll your own” in nature.