Streamer functionality - dedicated touchscreen?

[ahofer]

How many of these people don't have a phone with a streaming service like Spotify on it? I used to want the same sort of thing, before I realised that Spotify connect solved all the problems. If will turn my amps on, select the right input, and control the volume, all from an app they already know how to use.

Yes, that's what I do now, although, believe it or not, selecting the input is a huge obstacle! I've seen two people give up on that step, despite written instructions.

This is also a place where the internet occasionally goes out of service, so the ability to browse through the local collection (which already syncs to a cloud server and my apartment in NYC) is also helpful.

 

[Xulonn]

I am retired and living as an expatriate in Panama on my modest government pension (American Social Security), so my funds are limited and I don't subscribe to a media service or cable TV.

For now I am happy with a low-end Intel NUC5CPYH dual boot HTPC feeding a recent model Samsung 40" LED TV, and controlled by a back-lit Logitech wireless keyboard. My music and video collections are stored on a Synology NAS. However, the TV never gets turned on except to watch video, and I control my music playing with my Android tablet or office PC, so I don't need a separate touchscreen for my audio player. (You can still buy this NUC on Amazon - barebones plus, 4Gb RAM, and a Kingston 60Gb SATA SDD - for less than $200 - fine for any audio, but the old Celeron CPU is too slow for reliable h.265 HEVC video .)

I use Daphile (a headless music player based on Squeezeserver) for dedicated audio, either local/NAS music files or streaming internet radio. Daphile boots by default from the internal 128Gb SSD on my Intel NUC HTPC. For video, I turn on the TV and reboot to LibreELEC (Kodi) running from a USB memory stick. Both applications are free, up-to-date, robust and reliable, and have good feature sets. I tried Volumio, but couldn't get it to access my NAS. Daphile is headless - once installed, there is no video output and you control it via its IP address with any internet browser on any device. I never turn on my TV unless I am going to watch a video. I simply hit the power buttons on the NUC and my old Classe 70 amplifier, my Topping DX7s DAC turns itself on, and in less than a minute, start playing music remotely via my PC or tablet

I occasionally download and watch TV shows and movies (I'm currently watching season three of "The Expanse" at two episodes per evening). I have a huge collection of digital music - ranging from 64kbps MP3's to 24/96 FLAC, so the headless design of Daphile means I can control Daphile with my Windows PC or my two Android devices - smartphone and tablet.

For showing weekly movies to a small audience of indie-film fans at our local tiny expat community theater, I use the OSMC variant of Kodi on a RaspberryPi 3+ / HiFiBerry stack in the excellent HiFiBerry metal case. I feed 1080p video to an Optoma projector via HDMI, and connect the HiFiBerry's two channel audio to the theater sound board and its ElectroVoice monitors. OSMC recognizes the HiFiBerry audio, and has never faltered - unlike its predecessor - a tiny metal Wetek Hub Android box. I was able to "upgrade" the Wetek to pure Kodi, but it was clunky, had limited I/O and required an outboard HDMI "audio extractor for line-level audio out. I much prefer a well-supported RPi3+ with a DAC hat running OSMC to obscure and flaky cheap Chinese proprietary Android boxes.

(Edit: Add 4Gb RAM & $20 to Amazon price for Intel NUC5CPYH HTPC)