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Has anyone tried using the Steam Machine as an all in one living room entertainment box? (lemmy.pt)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
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I'm interested in the Steam Machine's potential to be what the Xbox One wanted to be without the bullshit.

There are some Linux apps like Jellyfin (where I watch most stuff by far) but it seems like Waydroid can fill in a lot of the Android gaps that are missing. With a TV like remote.

This would need to have the family approval factor. No hoops to jump through for the wife, just launch apps and watch.

I'm sure there are some tradeoffs specifically in the DRM camp, but the only actual potential DRM app I use is Nebula so that might be fine. I currently watch YouTube via SmartTube to circumvent ads.

Ars there other tradeoffs I'm missing?

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[–] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

i actually kind of bought one to fill this role. ive had it for a month now here are some of my thoughts

  • coming from a much older mini pc used for this task, the machine is fast. i love how snappy it is in the menus

  • its very plug n play, as intended. setting it up was a breeze and getting flatpaks installed via discover in the desktop mode is easy. I'd recommend getting a model with a steam controller included for these desktop apps, it makes navigation much easier with the touchpads, and community layouts are nice for specific controls an app may use. having valves support makes it much easier to be what it is, you spend a lot less time tinkering with everything and more time just doing what you intended to do in the first place.

  • I'd recommend installing decky as well, it's basically a community plugin loader for steam os thats mainly meant to be used in gaming mode and it has a few plugins to make desktop apps feel more seamless in gaming mode. for example there's a plugin to easily add stuff to your library so it shows up in gaming mode, and a plugin to set up art for your apps so they look "polished" like games do.

  • as for drm content, I think if you install a browser and use the web app version of whatever you wanna watch, you'd be able to get by drm easily. i like watching hockey games on amazon prime with brave, I know this setup is 🤢, but unfortunately brave is the only browser that has worked for this. all others ive tried including librewolf, firefox, ungoogled chromium, even normal chrome from google just dont work or dont work nearly as well. other than the hockey games I'm using vacuumtube for youtube and stremio for everything else.

  • now for a con, and I dont know how much you need to weigh this, but hdmi cec controls just straight up dont work on my machine. honestly I haven't done much troubleshooting to try to fix it but its something to be aware of if you want it, so I'm still using a separate remote for TV and receiver power and volume.

  • and for any waydroid setup you might get into, when I had that on my old mini pc I ran into problems with getting video to play nicely, so I decided to just skip all that and go with native flatpaks for the machine.

hopefully this helps ya out, if you've got any more questions feel free to ask I'd be happy to try and answer.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 9 hours ago

    Thanks, yeah this seems to mostly confirm my suspicions. I wasn't familiar with vacuumtube but a bunch have mentioned it here so it seems promising. I think my partner would mainly just care about Jellyfin and sometimes YouTube, and then maybe the browser will cover other bases. Thanks for the write up.

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