Are there any alternatives that are independent of streaming services?
Roku at least felt non-evil or non-evil adjacent in its notional neutrality.
There is a setting on my Google TV (I think it is 'Disable Personalization' or similar) that gets rid of most of the ad-space and turns the home screen into just a list of apps that I actually have installed.
It is easy to sideload apps like SmartTubeNext, and the Plex client works well, so that covers 100% of my needs.
Roku do Automatic Content Recognition, why do you feel they are non-evil?
The Nvidia shield used to be a decent streaming box?
I'll also echo my general disappointment with the direction of these devices. A decade ago, they were one of the best streaming devices you could buy.
then a couple years back it was "there's a new discover tab, filled with ads! Don't you love it?"
then it was "not enough people are viewing the discover tab, so we're merging the discover tab with the home tab! Don't you love it?"
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They're still decent hardware for a streaming device (although somewhat dated at this point), but now you have to go out of your way to make the software not shitty.
Removing the stock launcher helps a lot, but requires ADB access. (easy enough, and [insert llm of choice] can both generate a minimal replacement launcher and install it for you for about $10 worth of tokens, so technical users are fine, but I can't really recommend them to non-technical family anymore.)
I always use a custom launcher (Projectivy) on my Google TV devices, lately typically the $20 Onn stick and intercept the Home navigation to open the launcher either using the option built into Projectivy or with a free app from the Play Store/Fdroid.
Takes <5 minutes to setup everything once and then I basically forget the native Google TV launcher exists. Pretty much unbeatable value for a $20 ad-free Jellyfin/Plex/Kodi/Stremio setup. YMMV with different models but I also had no issues remapping the remote buttons from Netflix/etc to my own apps (including the "Free TV" button to launch Stremio which I always enjoy).
Also (somewhat ironically) the best smart TV OS to look for on cheap/subsidized TVs is built-in Google TV. Since they can easily be configured as 100% "dumb" on startup without any ads/nags/etc (it's the first question you're asked). The TV never hits Wifi to update and the remote/menus just do normal TV stuff without any "smart" features. Otherwise, it's luck of the draw how miserable/impossible the manufacturer makes avoiding Wifi/updates.
(Or you could do the same process installing the custom launcher on the TV's built-in Googe TV, but then you're at the mercy of the CPU/RAM the OEM included in BoM some # of years ago and lose the clean seperation between dumb TV/replaceable stick).
$20 Onn stick + $199 "smart" Google TV in dumb mode goes really far these days for a locally hosted setup without ads/annoyances.
shield is still competitive. It has become a little laggy but apparently that can be fixed by swapping out the launcher.
Now you're making it sound even more interesting. What is the name of this device?
Not "just". You left out its role as a bot network exit node.
That's ... not a thing. Those sticks just glom on to free software maintained by other hardworking unpaid devs to steal residential IPs from unsuspecting buyers drawn to the "all-in-one" pitch for their sketchy VPNs and/or botnets. Then, eventually whatever API keys/endpoints they stole for streaming stop working and all you're left with is the botnet part of the deal.
This is like saying the included porn malware you got bundled with uTorrent from the first sponsored link on Google is a price worth paying to access The Pirate Bay and stick it to Netflix, lol.
Why earth would anyone voluntarily advocate for that/defend the malware authors instead of just downloading qBitorrent from Github like a normal person?!
The botnet you bring into your home is only an option people are willing to consider because of how poor the UX has gotten. It's disingenuous to frame this situation as a cavalier abrogation of duty at the sole discretion of the selfish consumer. The malware laiden set top box is a terrible solution, but it being even in the realm of consideration is due to how incredibly terrible set top boxes and streaming platforms have become. In the 2010s torrenting was something of an archaic habit done mostly by those with a strong idealogical bent - gone were the days of everyone installing napster or kazaa to have any access to digitized music that they could actually listen to without a binder of CDs.
Excessive enshittification brought on by the selfish actions of corporations is what is bringing these options back to the table for the mainstream. The consumer should be better and shouldn't bring a malware laden box into their home - but the platforms should also be better and offer reasonable pricing for their value and experience.
It's ultimately utterly destructive, of course. Wish I had a good solution.
- Too many promos of other shows before watching a show. This is often for shows I've already watched and am watching. Apple knows which shows I watch. It shouldn't need to give me promos for shows I've watched or am actively watching. - Poor UX for "Play Next Episode" functionality. If I just finished an episode of a show and I click to watch the next episode, I don't need to see the recap of the previous episode or the intro. - Speaking of intro, when you click to skip, it usually leaves you somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds from the end of the into, not actually after it.
Ideally, this would be designed in two parts: separate the file structure from the metadata discovery mechanism.
I personally want a file structure managed by the OS. Let me make folders and nested subfolders to whatever structure I prefer.
Then make the metadata discovery slightly more manual. Click a media file, click a hypothetical "add metadata" button, and then a simple search box with "is this your movie?" and click apply to import metadata from a search result. easy peasy.
The UI is clearly meant to resemble a typical media app but falls short if the end user prefers, for example, foobar2000's UI.
It seems to be tolerating whatever semi-organized structure I give it until it just faceplants on some specific show and I have to tediously reorganize the directory structure/names and manual refresh until the metadata lines up correctly.
I like that I don't feel I'm about to be rugpulled on Jellyfin and the client is pretty solid for me but the library scanning is pretty aggravating at times.
The thing I'm not OK with about Jellyfin is that the common answer for remote access involves setting up a reverse proxy or a VPN or some other darned thing that I will never be able to talk my mom into configuring her Roku to be able to use.
I have a fairly large library, which Plex never seemed to care about. Jellyfin choked. It took forever to go through it all, and I seem to remember questioning of it was working; it wasn’t clear. Plex on the other hand makes it pretty entertaining to watch covers flip over as the metadata is loaded in to see the progress. Then every app I tried on the AppleTV also seemed to have trouble. The one that worked best had to create its own local cache of everything, which required I spend hours browsing to every screen and waiting before it became reasonably smooth. After that, the layout was still pretty strange. I think it would have worked just as well to point it at a file share. Actually playing videos was hit and miss in every app I tried.
I’m still using Plex. If I need to move to Jellyfin at some point, I feel like I’ll need to build a server with a lot more power than Plex requires. Of course that’s just a theory… a theory that will be expensive to test.
For all the fanfare Jellyfin gets online, I expected it to be better. It made me question how honest the people pushing it are. But maybe they have small libraries or only tested it with 5 movies for the review. I don’t think that’s a real-world experience.
I don't love crapping on open source software, but I had the same experience recently - installed Jellyfin because I wanted to test hardware-accelerated AV1 transcoding, and the whole app experience felt rough compared to Plex. The UI/UX really needs some TLC.
The software is probably fine for what it is. I mostly meant to crap on those pushing it and claiming it’s better than Plex, when, a least for large libraries, it isn’t. It’s important people have the right expectations going in.
Plex has almost a decade of development on Jellyfin, and Plex itself was born as an OS X fork for XBMC, so it got a big head start from open source itself.
To be fair, Jellyfin page doesn't list my NAS as being supported, so I had to "manually" install it (a couple commands and clicks).
Infuse is a better Plex app than Plex is; and it supports Jellyfin and a bunch of other data sources.
It is, IMHO, a platonic ideal of what a “tv-shaped” video player app should be.
not even a mute button. and it makes me earn for the old directtv remote! that's how bad it is. Everything is so unresponsive and odd.
I like that it’s aluminum, doesn’t take batteries, and is bluetooth (or at least doesn’t require line of site). It’s the longest lasting of any remote in my house.
You’re probably thinking of earlier versions that were different.
As a Google certified Android TV, this means it will do Widevine L1 DRM decoding, give you the 4K streaming quality.
For TV I used to recommend Sony, but now they sold the whole business to China TCL. Will have to wait and see if TCL will enshittify it.