Specifically I'm wondering about the TV frontend UI. Presumably most people are going to be using an android tv box like fire tv or chromecast? Something else?
I recently picked up a new chromecast 4k that has the "Google TV" OS on it and... I'm having a hell of a time coming up with a UI that looks similar to the stock one (with movie recommendations, up next, my watchlist, etc) but that hooks into piracy streaming services.
For launchers I found projectivy, but I noticed that the "channels" feature which pulls in that sort of thing is remarkably limited. Streaming-wise I've got stremio and cloudstream, and only stremio lets me pull in my library into projectivy. Which is okay but I can't get that synced with trakt or getting recommendations; it all has to be managed from stremio.
whereas cloudstream doesn't really have any connectivity at all. There's a few streaming services that somewhat pull things in but it's not great. Netflix doesn't seem to hook into it, nor plex. It ends up being better to just use the stock home and manually launching into stremio/cloudstream when I want them.
Surely there has to be a better way to do this? The stock home screen is nice with free live tv, movie recommendations that link into various paid streaming services, etc. I'd just like to hook in something like stremio, plex, etc. instead, but that seems impossible?
What exactly do y'all do for your setups? Trying to manage my google play watchlist/likes independently of trackt, and then also managing my stremio library separately from both just feels like hell. I end up having to take mental note of the stuff I see on the home screen and manually searching it up.
The live tv channels that the stock homescreen has is seemingly not replicated anywhere else which is a bit disappointing. I saw the old android tv menu get really close to what I'm after, but I can't manage to get it working on my newer chromecast. The menu installs, but the channel feature doesn't work, making it pointless.
Is there a better way?
I have an Nvidia shield on the TV. The main media app is Kodi.
Backend I have Plex (also used for remote and and phone access)
For getting content I use the *arr stack
Ah, this is what my brother is doing I think. I used to be into kodi but it's so clunky. The plex+*arr stack seems cozy for delayed streaming (mark what to watch, watch it later) but does it end up working for streaming? I was also under the impression it's not that great if you lack usenet?
Does it do recommendations? Every time I've tried getting into kodi it was pretty clunky/slow/etc. Hence my desire to get my setup on home screen then launch directly into a stream. Kinda sounds like everyone just launches into an app first.
For recommendations I use Overseerr. It provides a great web front end for requesting to Radarr and Sonarr as well as provides links to what's trending on the major streaming platforms and TV networks.
Kodi is fine for speed on LAN, I just use the Plex app to stream my content out side of the network.
I have Usenet but also augment with torrents. The setup works great.