We get sick of ads on YT and currently have a number of ChromeCasts around the house.
So I’m looking at building some little casting target devices that load a Firefox instance with Ublock Origin to view videos (cough youtube) without ads. Now initially I’ll just load Linux on an OrangePi5 and get that working. But then I thought, with the advent of Firefox on Haiku, what SBC type computers would someone be able to install Haiku to? (If any)
The key take functionality would be very low power use at idle but reasonable video playback performance, HDMI out /w audio support.
None of the ARM-based SBCs works currently since the port of Haiku to the ARM architecture isn’t finished,but Intel-based SBCs should generally work.
Technically,they shouldn’t look any different to Haiku than a Laptop,so I expect them to work out of the box (minus maybe a few missing drivers,as usual).
The LattePanda V1 might be suitable for your use case,a 4-core Intel Atom is good enough for video playback and that thing seems to use even less power than a Raspberry.
Alternatively,there are a few RISC-V boards on which Haiku can boot,but there’s no software repository for Haiku RISC-V yet,so you’d have to compile Firefox and any other app you need yourself using the limited power of a SBC,probably not the best idea.
Beware that Haiku does not support HDMI audio at all currently,but there are small adapters that can put a HDMI video and 3.5inch audio together into one HDMI output.
No,that’s exactly the opposite of what we need here (and a lot more common).
It takes the combined Video+Audio HDMI signal of a Raspberry and splits it into a separate VGA Video for a monitor and 3.5mm audio for external speakers.
Since Haiku doesn’t support HDMI audio and the LattePanda SBC has a 3.5mm audio port,we need to combine Video-only HDMI and the audio port into a combined Video+Audio HDMI signal for the television.
Alternatively,you could also use separate speakers instead of the TV audio,that would probably be easier.
I haven’t found a suitable adapter yet,but I’m sure that thing exists,will look again later after work.
But since you already have an orange pi, perhaps consider using pihole to block advertisement in your entire network on the dns level instead.
Haiku is currently not a great platform to view videos on.
If you still want to use Haiku I’d recomend using qmplay2 instead of a webrowser for youtube.
The downloading is done with yt-dlp and then I wrote a wrapper around libvlc for the player process. There is a healthy smattering of websockets and IPC comms to glue it all together. And it’s snappy and responsive. We like that.
