I’m looking to build a small entertainment device for use in my offgrid place. I’d like to use it for reading, music and movies. I’d like for it to have low power needs. And for it to carry a varied library.
How would you build such a thing?
My initial idea is to repurpose an android phone, install VLC, and an SD card with pirated video transcoded to 720p, ebooks and mp3s.
Does it make sense to maximize battery life by jailbreaking the phone and disabling background services?
Thanks for your input
I might consider kodi since it will probably be more organized. Vlc will have normal file navigation but with kodi it will organize everything into movies and TV shows. If its going to be a purely offline device then you can just flash a custom ROM and see a decent amount of savings. It will likely be difficult to find a current generation phone with an sdcard and a tablet might make more sense for this use case. If you know you are gonna flash the device you are going to get you should make sure it has decent custom ROM support. Generally if it has an official lineageos build then it is well supported. All of this might honestly be more trouble than it is worth if you are not experienced with flashing a custom ROM so maybe just start with stock and see if you actually need to first.
I’ll happily spend the time to figure out how to flash a custom ROM if the juice is worth the squeeze :)
What savings are you referring to?
Savings in battery. It’s mostly just from not running google play in the background. If you then go on to root that custom ROM you might be able to use some specific root tweaks. I suspect the savings for a custom ROM to be 10% or less. Airplane mode and battery saver will help a decent amount which is available on stock.