There are a lot of ways to “do” media in a house. Plex seems popular. Jellyfin, too. In the end they all do vaguely the same thing, it’s just a matter of picking the one(s) that will do what you want it to do.
I’ve been a long term Kodi user for TV and Movies, which I believe started life as XBMC – Xbox Media Centre. It
I loved Logitech Media Server (LMS) too. LMS would run on my first NAS that I bought, and would serve music to Raspberry Pi players that I scattered around the house. Then an update happened, and I couldn’t run it on the NAS directly, so I moved it to its own Raspberry Pi. I could use a Spotify plugin. Then the plugin misbehaved. Then Daniel Ek showed his true colours. I moved to Tidal. Players were flaky. Raspberry Pi audio quality wasn’t great and I looked at buying a HAT for the Pi for better audio and then I gave up. Last I heard LMS was being shut down – Logitech had had a gutfull and weren’t interested any more. Turns out it was handed over to the Community, and it is now Lyrion Music Server. I’ve not tried it, because I rejigged some things. Which is what this is about.
Switch the TV on, and amp switches on because of magic signals over HDMI. Cool. Until you want the amp to stay on to always be able to play audio. That was change number one. The setup is now simplified to be:
Raspberry Pi/KODI -> Amp -> TV
and all the media sits on a NAS that has a simple CIFS/SMB share.
The amp is always on, and doesn’t care if the TV is or isn’t. It will always play the audio that it receives from the Raspberry Pi.
KODI handles everything. All of the media library stuff, grabbing movie posters, TV episode details, and music.
You can drive it from the TV remote control over CEC (which comes default embedded into KODI), or using a pretty snazzy remote control app on a device connected to the network. There are versions for Android and Apple.
Good stuff.
