I'm planning on making a home theatre for my family on my raspberry pi and making my own distro to achieve this. But I'm unsure how I should go about doing this.
Would it be best to make the distro on the Pi directly or use an emulator program to run a vm of a raspberry pi?
Perhaps there's something better I can do?

>why don't you just choose one of these other premade home theatre distros?
I want to improve my programming, have another project I can put on my resume, and have the ability to pirate/stream shit directly from the distro e.g. A search bar that returns results from piratebay and other sites (which I haven't seen in other home theatres)