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I've had LibreElec running on the same Rpi4 for five years or so, and it's doing its job fairly well without much maintenance.
But it's pretty much a single screen setup. I don't actually know how well it handles a Roku situation with several concurrent users — if I understand your requirements correctly.
I used Kodi for around 3 years (on LibreELEC and standalone on various computers). I would recommend going through the settings of Kodi and any addon you install as there are a lot of things you can tweak. In my experience, most good looking skins/themes made Kodi too slow to use (and take a while to setup). I mostly used Kodi to stream using the Fen addon, so I just configured it to open automatically when starting Kodi.
I would give more specific recommendations but I haven't used Kodi in around a year at this point and Kodi-related projects have a tendency to get abandoned/disappear; I'm pretty sure Fen was taken down since I last used it, for example.
I ran it very successfully on a RPi4 as a media center connect to the living room TV.
However, I don't really get your plan to virtualize them on one machine. What's the goal here?
Well this machine has 2 display port and another HDMI output, if I passed a connection to each VM, could I keep from needing 3 different media players? as everyone's HDMI cables run to the same closet.
Libreelec is a great htpc, meant to give you that same "10ft computing" experience as any other media center. Its requirements for 1080p aren't that intense, as it runs well on a raspi 4/5. They do recommend keeping the resolution set to 1080p in kodi and letting your tv upscale to 4k if youre playing 4k content, so that is a good metric to target.
You can run it as a VM, but running 3 off the same machine loses a lot of the "media center that controls one tv" utility, unless you have 3 hdmi ports on that computer that are wired to those 3 TV and can pass through 3 IR blasters or bluetooth connections for physical remotes. If you can, it should work fine.
If you are routing IR blasters, flirc has a USB blaster and a remote called the Skip that should work out. Ive used the usb blaster with kodi and it integrated seamlessly, but haven't used the remote yet.
So you could get 3 of the remotes, 3 usb IR blastere and whether length of usb cable you need for each to connect to the host and pass those through to the VMs.
I think this is the right place to ask (and thanks for introducing me to the subject!). The people at [email protected] would like that too.
Yeah I figured that would be my next spot to ask!
I‘m running libreelec on my bedroom piTV to watch twitch (crashes with midroll ads atm, need to figure it out) and youtube. Works well besides that new midroll problem and can be used with my 10+ yr old dumb lcd tv. Dont ask about the energy consumption please, thanks. :)