My old Android TV is almost 10 years old and despite ADB modding it shows its age. So I took a look around and quickly found out how bad things have gotten in the Smart TV space.
Dumb TVs are out of the question because of their high prices - they’re for commercial use after all.
What I want is a nice big TV (around 65" to 75") with a real colorful, sharp display and an OS that does not annoy me with ads (I despise ads) and recommendations while still fulfilling my needs, which are
- Crunchyroll
- Prime
- Ad-free Youtube client like smarttubenext
- HDMI for console gaming
- Absolutely no stuttering and frame rate issues when playing videos in apps
- Preferably no stuttering menus
- Reasonably priced
Anything else is completely uninteresting to me.
And yes, I know about the nvidia shield, but that thing is 5 years old and I don’t want to ride an already old horse that might be replaced very soon due to its age (even though there’s currently no signs of that on the horizon). I also don’t like using more than one remote…
I have no issue with modding it as long as that’s reasonably possible - just to get rid of most bloatware, annoyances, ads and such.
Any ideas?
Reading your post, all I can think of is to get a decent TV and a small form factor computer, install LibreELEC on it and you have a standalone Kodi box.
Lots of plugins available (YouTube, I think Crunchyroll too), absolutely no ads, no slowdown, fluent and capable UI. It can be strange that all the plugins use Kodi’s framework, but they all work just fine. Some needs some additional things to do to work, but you really set up your plugins once, and they are good to go. I’m using Kodi for 3-4 years continuously as my main media machine and all the plugins updates regularly. You can play back local or remote media through network share seamlessly. Just get a PC with enough hardware to do 4K video. (I’m watching at max 1080p, but for that, a 3rd generation Intel i5 was more than enough).