the Apple TV is a great little box that is if you like having Apple in your living room but what if you could pay the same amount but get something infinitely more useful and what if this video is sponsored by Squarespace well it is and you can in this video I'll show you how I built my own Apple TV using this Raspberry Pi and some open source software Libra and Cody and by the end of the video you'll be able to build one for yourself too now two years ago I had tried this with a compute module 4 which is the last genpi after all my testing on a 4 K TV my conclusion was it's okay for most 1080p content but couldn't really handle 4K there's a new Raspberry Pi 5 and it's supposed to be better and faster is it good enough to replace a 4K Apple TV or Shield the first thing we need is a pie and a couple accessories Microcenter isn't sponsoring this but they're a great place to get pie stuff but before I go back and snag a pie let's take a glance at the competition you have cheap streaming sticks like the chomecast of course but the real competitors are things like the Roku Ultra and Nvidia Shield those and the Apple TV are all easy to get going and they cost between 1 and 200 bucks but you know what those things aren't actual computers you could use for anything else so after a few years if they drop support you end up with a shiny plastic paper weight so let's go grab the parts we need in the maker section I grabbed a pi5 case and PSU but I had to ask for help to grab a pi five because at least at the St Louis Micro Center they still keep pies locked up I grabbed a 4 gig pi5 because you don't need tons of RAM for video so just buying an 8 gig is kind of burning extra cash I also grabbed a micro HDMI to HDMI adapter cable and the last thing we need to do is grab a Micro SD card now I usually go with SanDisk Extreme but today I decided to grab 128 gig Samsung Pro Plus for video it's plenty fast and 20 cents a gig is decent if you're going to store videos on the P it's probably better to buy a big USB drive but for testing at least this is fine all in we're at 110 bucks before taxes that's in line with mid-range Android boxes and cheaper than Apple TV or other high-end boxes it's kind of crazy that these companies are charging 100 plus bucks for a box that's mostly just for streaming content for that kind of money you should at least get a lot more local functionality at least I think so now you'll also need a way to remote control the pie and there are a few options first you could just use the remote that comes with your TV like this remote has all the basic controls and with the magic of HDMI CC the TV actually sends remote control commands right to the P so you don't need any extra remote otherwise I also like using this little mini keyboard it's from RE and it's useful if you need to type in text or do anything more advanced you can even use the trackpad for full Mouse control if you have an older TV or monitor without C support another option is to pick up one of these this is a tiny IR receiver you plug into one of the Pi's USB ports and pretty much any remote will work with it right out of the box FLIR even makes their own remote the skip 1s but even a little Cheapo remote like this one that I got for free with one of my video monitors works fine too but let's put this thing together and bring it over to the TV move all this stuff out of the way microser always sticks their little uh stickers on here that covers up the the front of the box so if you love saving your boxes maybe ask the store tendance at Micro Center to put their stickers on the back or the bottom uh but this is the USBC power supply for the p and the case and the case comes with a couple accessories that are inside this little box so if I pull this out and pop this off this has a heat sink for the pie and some little rubber feet and uh an interesting fun fact I learned while I was touring Raspberry Pi's Factory it doesn't come in an ESD bag a little electrostatic discharge bag this box actually has a coating on the inside some sort of uh special coating that is ESD safe so they don't have to add the little baggie for the pie uh but here's the pi five this is a 4 gig model you can tell looking at the little memory resistor on the board there and it has built-in Wi-Fi and everything that we need so getting it in the case is pretty easy you just slide it in like that and we're going to put the heat sink on first so you just take this off stick the heat sink right onto the main s so right here that's the main processor for the p and then plug in the this uh fan and sometimes the pie will have a little cover over the fan I don't know if you can see that right there there's a little cover on there uh and you can just kind of pop that off and uh that's just because when they manufacture them sometimes they come off sometimes they don't uh but then you plug the fan connector in here make sure it's seated all the way in there and put that on top put the cover on the top of here like so and then we'll put these rubber feet on the bottom of the case and that's it for the hardware we have power supply HDMI cable and Raspberry Pi which now will not move around because it has these nice rubber feet the last step is getting this card flashed with the right operating system so that it can act like a little Apple TV box using Libra Al and Cody and through the magic of video editing I will have a micro SD card that's flashed with Libra Al all I had to do was download the image from the LIC website then I used bolina etcher to write that ISO file to this and that's it so I'll put this into the pi five right here and we'll bring this over to the TV and get it plugged in the pi has Wi-Fi built in but there's also a wired ethernet port so if you want to get it online you can go either way and you don't even need to connect it to the internet if you don't want to but for me I'll use Wi-Fi so I can watch YouTube so all I have to do is plug this into HDMI and then power the first time it boots it takes maybe 60 seconds or so and hey that's the perfect amount of time for me to tell you where to buy this shirt over on Redshirt jef.com I completely redesigned my merch site with Squarespace of course they're the sponsor of this video but it was easy building the new store in Squarespace I used one of their blueprint templates and their fluid design engine makes my store work great on desktop and mobile they took away all the hard parts of shopping carts payment Integrations product pages all that stuff all I had to focus on was getting my photos on the site putting in the price and shipping info and finding a company that handprints these nice new shirts squarespace's new Ai and SEO tools can help you get your site going fast even if you didn't build websites for a living like I used to it's honestly refreshing not having to worry about programming or databases and to just put a new site together clicking a few buttons for once go check out the new merch store at Redshirt jef.com and if you want to get your own merch store or any other kind of website set up fast go to square space.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com Redshirt to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain you might be wondering about this couch uh I actually ordered a couch for this new office space and only half the couch showed up the cushions the pillows and couple other parts but uh the base and the back are not here so I'm kind of improvising but uh it's it's okay uh we're going to set up li following its Little Wizard and I can use the remote here or I could use my little re controller or whatever uh the point is that we just need to get through the wizard to get everything configured so we can start putting content on here so I'll start off using the remote control and if I just hit next uh it's saying if you want to get it on the network you can do that um the default host name is Libra alect so other computers can see it that way and I'm just going to connect through my 2.4 GHz Network and hit connect and this is where having the little controller keyboard is handy because instead of using this thing and clicking through like a caveman I can just use the keys so I'll say okay hopefully it will connect now and there it is we're online click next and uh by default it turns on Samba and there's actually a way that you can load content through your netor work to the pi using Samba and you can turn on SSH or turn it off uh I'm not going to use it for this but if you wanted to log into your Pi remotely that's a nice way to be able to do it uh but I'll hit next with the defaults and it's complete so the next thing that I need to do is to go over to my desk and I'll copy some video files some movies TV shows other sample videos and things like that back at my desk I can add my movies and TV shows over the network I have a folder with some of my movies here and on my Mac I can connect to the Libra elect device on my network I'll copy a bunch of the movies into the movies folder under videos and let that go for a while now copying files over Wi-Fi is going to be pretty slow and it depends on your Wi-Fi setup where you put the pie a lot of things if you want to use this setup with 4K streaming video even if that stream is coming off your NZ like with jellyfin or something you should consider running wired ethernet over to your piie it's going to be a lot more reliable than any Wi-Fi but I also copied a bunch of TV shows into the TV shows folder and some extra sample footage to test different resolutions into a samples folder with all that content loaded up I can go back to the TV and see if I can watch it so once I copy all the files over Cody is still not showing anything in here so I have to go into the files section and tell it where to look uh there are other ways to get videos in here but I'm going to go ahead and add videos and browse into my home folder videos and movies and hit okay and hit okay and I'm going to tell it that it contains movies and what this does is it tells it where to look uh for information about the movies so it's going to look at the movie database and pull down a thumbnail and and the title and the description information all that kind of stuff and I actually set up my library so that each movie is in its own folder so I'm going to uh turn on that option but if you just have your movies in a in a folder by themselves you don't have to and hit okay and yes I want to refresh the data and it will start pulling in all the information and you can see that in the top right there uh it'll pull in information for all the movies and start populating the the data back here which you can see up here so that's nice and if I go into one of the movies it'll start playing it right away and I'll go back and you can also go in and get information about the movie too uh but I need to do the same thing for TV shows so I'll go into files [Music] and I'll do the same thing I'll browse go into home folder TV shows okay and hit okay change it to DV shows and refresh the data same thing it's going to pull down the information for the TV shows and uh for TV shows it pulls down episode information all that kind of stuff which is nice and if I go back now I can see blue is in here and it's still scanning so it's not completely full yet but I'll go in and you can see that there's each each uh episode information here and if I go in I can start playing one and I'm going to turn this off because I don't want to get copyright claimed and I can do the same thing with videos down here and I can add my sample videos that I'll I'll uh test and and see how they look now I spent a while testing a ton of different videos on this thing the bottom line it's fine for almost any of my content at 4K YouTube encodes at vp9 but whatever settings they're using it decodes just fine on the Pi's CPU it'd be nicer if the GPU included a vp9 or av1 decoder but the CPU can still handle it without stuttering all my movies and TV shows are encoded with h.265 or 264 and no matter what resolution I tested play back was butter smooth and I have Dune here in 4k and it plays back in HDR with no problem I'm not playing back any of the sound of course because I don't want this video copyright claimed but since I only have stereo speakers on this TV I can't test surround sound or Dolby Atmos that should work though just like it did on Pi 4 but all my content from 720p Bluey shows and 1080p Chernobyl up to 4K Blu-ray rips of newer movies like Dune and top gun Maverick I had zero issues at all with playback the only times I encountered stuttering was with high bit rate 4K files especially 60 FPS 60 FPS works great at 1080p but the pi was a little picky about any format besides h.265 at 60 FPS luckily most video content is 30 or 24 FPS so it's not a big deal for most people and if all this format stuff means nothing to you then don't worry the bottom line the pi plays back most real world content just fine anything at 1080p no matter what the format it plays back smooth as butter at 4K it's a little more picky but it was great for all the movies and TV shows I tested I'll have a blog post with more detailed notes and you can even download other things like 8 and 10 bit HDR files to test on your own too links in the description I also decided to test AirPlay with my iPhone basically you can use your pi as a sound output for an iOS device but it won't let you do screen mirroring or let you play videos from an iPhone to the TV I also wondered if the little fan built into the pie case would be loud enough to distract me while I was watching things it's actually audible when the Pi's decoding bigger for K videos but it quiets down any other time you could install an active cooler on the pie and that's a little quieter or you could spend a few more bucks on a nicer fanless case to cut out fan noise entirely this little EA Tech case is completely passive and it still holds everything together nicely and there are a few other cases just like it this video isn't a comprehensive overview of Liber and Cody on the pi 5 there are a lot of things I didn't even touch on like there are tons of extra add-ons for sports streaming and other TV networks integration with TV tuners for a tool like experience and more but I really wanted to see if I could practically replace my Apple TV with a Raspberry Pi 5 and the answer is yes the one thing I'd really miss though is MLS games since Apple has an exclusive partnership and if you have Netflix Disney plus prime or any other of the thousands of streaming services today those might not work on here either but then again I just recommend dropping all your subscriptions and owning your own content like we did back in the '90s before I wrap up there's one more elephant in the room and that's power the pi uses 1.8 Watts when you shut it down but using the instructions in this blog post you can cut that to zero unfortunately the pi also doesn't turn on automatically when you turn on your TV there are actually a few ways around that problem but they are a little annoying you could leave the pie on 24/7 but then it'll use 3 to four Watts all day long I'll leave a few links in the description so check that out if you want to build one of these things and go further but looking back on this build the pi5 isn't the perfect modern 4K play everything set top box and that's why I'd say even after all the setup and even after the whole spiel about having a more free Home Theater box if you just want something to plop down next to your TV for 4K content live sports and all that jazz the pi5 might not be the best option if you can live with its limitations and want a piece of Hardware that you can make useful for 10 plus years after you use it as a media box though this ain't a bad deal I've had a pie running since last year for family vacations since sometimes we just want to let the kids veg out and watch some Bluey and what's better since I control my own media there's no risk my favorite TV series will just Disappear Completely when Sony or apple or Amazon or whoever decides they want to yank it until next time I'm Jeff geerling