My father considers buying an Android TV box. Initially, I thought that’s a bad choice as a mini pc has much greater capabilities and control.

However, he does have a point that Android TV boxes are cheaper (~60) and work with tv cable which most mini PCs don’t have a connector for.

What are your thoughts on this?

  • hexagonwin@lemmy.today
    1·
    1 day ago

    afaik you can’t get high resolution or something. i think it can be partially mitigated by running google chrome instead of firefox or (open source) chromium but i never attempted these.

    • Andrzej3K [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      1·
      19 hours ago

      There was a brief golden age when all these services had web APIs so you could plumb them all into Kodi and have a unified experience. But yeah, these days you have to use a browser, watch in 1080, and find a way to make that into a user friendly, remote control experience. Also bear in mind that the streaming provider will change things just to fuck with you.

      Alternatively, while Android TV is far from perfect, you do get the official streaming apps in their official form, and you can stream your pirated stuff on the side. I think it makes sense to separate downloading from your tv box anyway. Alternatively, I believe there are pretty good torrent streaming options these days that may be worth looking at.

      • hexagonwin@lemmy.today
        1·
        15 hours ago

        android tv might indeed be good. something like nvidia shield tv that is officially google certified for those drm bs…

        afaik those torrent streaming stuff are based on leeching, i believe having a proper seedbox+jellyfin is a much better choice