Ah. The 5 Plus uses a Rockchip SOC where the Opi 3 / Zero 2W use Allwinner. I’ve read Rockchip is better supported, so maybe I’ll look into one of those. I just wanted the Pi Zero form factor for this project so went with that one. I should also have clarified that there’s no stable GPU support in Armbian for the OPi 3/Zero 2W but there are for other models.

Even without GPU, I’m surprised it runs Jellyfin at all let alone quite well (lack of transcoding aside). That’s in addition to running everything else I threw on it at the same time, so I’m still genuinely impressed.

I’m very pleased with the OrangePi. I use it for my Jellyfin server. It sometimes struggles with real-time 4k transcoding

What model OPi do you use and what system image (Armbian, Diet Pi, OrangeOS)?

I’ve got the Orange Pi Zero 2W (effectively the OPi 3 in a different form factor) and also run Jellyfin on it, but there’s no stable GPU support in Armbian. It also doesn’t even transcode 720p at a usable rate, so I just pre-encode everything to something it can direct stream.

It’s not my primary JF server, but it is nice to have during power outages and such since I can run it all day from a power bank.

How are the Orange Pis?

I got the 4 GB Orange Pi version of the Zero W2. The performance is there but I found it to be a bit quirky. That said, you might have better luck using the manufacturer’s images. Only reason I didn’t was that they were several years old and on an unsupported kernel. Took some doing, but I finally got Armbian working stable.

Tips:

• Don’t enable zram for more than 50%. It’ll happily compress more than that, but allocating more than 50% causes all kinds of random weirdness and crashes.
• The GPU either doesn’t work or isn’t stable. I gave up on it and just pre-encoded the media to a format that Jellyfin wouldn’t need to transcode.
• Make sure the antenna is mounted away and perpendicular from the main board. Had a lot of weird EMF-induced crashes when the antenna was parallel to the board inside a case.
• You will need a heatsink. Unless you underclock it below 1 GHz, a heatsink isn’t optional like it is on a Pi.
• Unless you just need the USB A ports or the IR receiver, skip the expansion board. The ribbon cable that connects it exacerbates the EMF issues. The 3 buttons on the front do not work with the Armbian builds (and the overlay that enables them doesn’t seem to work on newer kernels and no one seems to be working on it). The analog audio, likewise, does not work on Armbian with newer kernels and, last I checked, there are no overlays.

I also have a 4 GB Banana Pi in the same “Pi Zero” form factor. I haven’t messed with it much, but the three things I’ve noticed so far is the wifi chip is much better than the Orange Pi (I think it’s a Realtek chip here), the Bluetooth doesn’t work in Armbian (though it’s close), and it has eMMC which makes the system much faster.

https://github.com/marytts/marytts

I’ve used MaryTTS semi-recently. It’s older but works well enough for my cases. I have it running on a server (locally) and my endpoints make a call to it and playback the returned audio file.

On Android, I use SherpaTTS which has good voices, but I’m not aware of a desktop/Linux option. It mentions using voices from Coqui which you linked, so I would guess that would be the way to go for desktop.

Saw some posts and comments from a while back about the Trek books

That was probably me. I started reading them over the summer and have talked about them quite a bit. I haven’t read Q-Squared yet, but I also have it in my collection (not for $1.99 though 😠). I took a break after I finished the Cold Equations trilogy but am probably going to start on the Titan series next.

Thanks for the heads up about it being confusing to follow. I tend to do marathon reads rather than short sprints, so hopefully that helps. I don’t think I’ve read any of Peter David’s books yet, but the ones by David Mack are all great and well paced.

and not let it ruin the medium

If you’re not a fan of that one, yes, please don’t let it ruin the rest of them for you. The Destiny trilogy is absolutely amazing as are most of the ones I’ve read (though Destiny is for sure my favorite).

My collection so far:

I’m not ready for it to end (even though I knew it was coming and is still a year and a half or more away) 😥

Am I whooshing, or are you and I remembering VOY: Tattoo very differently? lol

Nedry was literally a computer scientist and systems designer / programmer from Cambridge. Arnold was a theme park engineer (designing rides and control systems; some programming involved but a whole different paradigm than developing large systems).

Source: Have read the novel 50+ times.

Arnold was an engineer, though. He was competent in using the system and not totally lost when poking around the code, but he’s no computer scientist. Basically, he was a power user / sysadmin rather than a developer.

I am not a gamer these days and am unfamiliar with Arc Raiders, but if there’s any way to incorporate the Klingon death ritual when one of your squad goes down, that would probably be pretty epic

I can’t even do “vacation” Klingon lol. All I know is Qapla’ means “success!” and you call someone a petaQ when you want to insult them.

In the “DS9: Millennium” trilogy, that’s pretty much exactly what kicks off the plot lol.

Yeah, I don’t know about pre-installed with Android that aren’t ad platforms masquerading as consumer hardware. I’d never use one unless it was supported by LineageOS or something. My comment was more “roll your own” in nature.

I did not know I was missing Spock Goldblum from my life, but damn if I don’t want more.

Maybe one of those HDMI “stick” PCs you can get? There’s x86 Android builds you can run or you can do like I did with my media PCs and boot into Openbox and just launch a fullscreen browser right to Jellyfin and control it from your phone. (My main setup uses Emby but should be able to do the same with JF).

I’ve actually got a portable Jellyfin server I take with me. Built on the OrangePi Zero 2W with a USB->NVMe acting as media storage (as well as the Jellyfin DB). It’s got several other services running as well as a second Wifi adapter so it can also act as a travel router.

For playback, I pretty much just use my laptop or phone but have thought about adding one of the “stick” PCs as a client for it.

Who approved this?!

I always forget that’s J.G. Hertzler. It’s like…the less elaborate prosthetics he wears, the less I recognize him. See also: Laas in DS9.

(At least, until he speaks)

Laptop-style speakers may be just enough. It would be tight and maybe the badge would have to be enlarged slightly to accommodate it, though.

I did a deep clean of my laptop not long ago and was surprised at how tiny and flat the speakers actually were. They won’t fill a room, but they’re enough for light music or a Teams call at arm’s length. Granted, it might not be good in a noisy area, but that would be a problem for the mic as well (not to mention public speakerphone use is kind of frowned on lol).

Would love to have one of those. Guess I’ll have to settle for 3D printing one and hacking up a Bluetooth headset/speaker to make it work.

I saw that, but it’s November 19 already. So they’ve either not restocked or have sold out already.

I clicked a few of the “Where to buy” links from the bottom, but only the non-Bluetooth ones were available.