Music and movies over the air

in the living room, with its 6 loud speakers.

It needs a speaker?

Maybe I could attach something to it, like a

I use the RPi2, which requires less power to run and seems sufficient for the job at hand.

The RPi is USB and ETH attached to the Airport Time Capsule right next to it. No power block, no wifi dropping frames. Less pover consumption.

Raspbian seems OK.

Regarding the post-install config, mostly about deactivating stuff to lower the power consumption:

# /boot/config.txt
[all]
# should disable wifi, bluetooth and hdmi at boot time, lowering power consumption
dtoverlay=disable-wifi
dtoverlay=disable-bt
hdmi_blanking=2
#dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d
dtoverlay=hifiberry-dacplus

# builtin audio must be deactivated
#dtparam=audio=on

Also, HDMI deactivation could live in another place, so add the following to /etc/rc.local :

# Disable HDMI 
/usr/bin/tvservice -o

Then, some packages should be installed:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get pulseaudio pulsemixer pamix shairport 
pulseaudio-module-raop pulseaudio-module-zeroconf cmus mpd mpc

Airport works out of the box, using pulseaudio. One should use paprefs to allow them locally on the client.

Pulseaudio remote has to be activated

systemctl enable avahi-daemon.service
systemctl start avahi-daemon.service

Edit /etc/pulse/default.pa and add these lines:
load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1;192.168.0.0/24 auth-anonymous=1
load-module module-zeroconf-publish

In the end, I mostly use spotify with the RPi+shairport mode. It's not brilliant because shairport is not great.

Maybe I should try to run some spotify server/client thing on the Pi, to be controlled as as a remote player.

I have first generation chromecast in the attic that I never quite used for anything. It doesn't work with firefox and the command line support is clunky. I am not quite sure it isn't a spy in the house though.

However, it works just fine with the aforementionned providers from iOS apps. Quick win.

Anyday, it's mostly that for apps and HDMI for the rest.

kodi is an extensible media entertainment all around applications that allows to play content from different providers, such as a NAS but also Netflix or prime video with a third party plugin.

It's big and broken by design. Third party plugins are released on forums, they break and are not vetted for security or anything.

The best bet though seems to be libreelec (just engouh OS for kodi) and OSMC (larger, net only kodi).

It could work, but unfortunately, it's just not that great.

Nothing streams to dlna but VLC. Netflix or prime won't accept it.

Plex is proprietary? Hybrid as it seems.

It's a different architecture, with a client and a server, the client being mostly mobile and the server being a NAS, a RPi, or something similar.

There are no plugin / addons nowadays, which I feel makes it actually better.

The downside however is that the mobile clients require a paid for subscription. And without these clients, there is no streaming to be expected.

Netflix / prime would be a dog with in browser. The chromecast thing is superior in that re