You can get a cheap Android TV Player for about $50 that will connect to your TV via HDMI, connect to your network via Wi-Fi or even Ethernet (I suggest you the latter if you can - much better performance, no hiccups if the Wi-Fi channel you’re using is also used by a lot of other stuff) and play any MKV videos it can access on your network (so, for example, you could share them in a Windows share).
This is kinda the setup I had maybe a decade and a half ago (only back then they were called TV Media Players and it was before Android).
You can get a TV Stick which is sorta the same but smaller, hangs from the HDMI port on your TV and those never have Ethernet.
You can get any of the hardware supported by LibreELEC - the cheapest being ARM-based Single Board Computers like Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi - and install LibreELEC in it and use that. Basically works like the Android TV Player only less bloated and you control that device fully.
Personally I now have an N100 Mini-PC on my living room with Lubutu (I installed Lubunto because I thought that it would be too little PC for a more normal distro, but frankly that thing can run a normal distro just fine) with Kodi always ON and on front (so from the TV side it just looks like a Media browsing and playing interface). The reason for having a bit more generic hardware there is that the machine is ALSO my Torrent server (with QBittorrent, which you can remotey add torrents to from your personal PC using a browser plugin and remotely manage from a browser) AND it’s also my home NAS (so, same place were the media files end up stored).
It’s connected directly to my router via Ethernet so it downloads and uploads at 1Gbps. I generally manage it remotely via SSH from my own PC and have a wireless remote for it (which works just like a normal remote, except that you can’t use it to switch the machine ON, only OFF, plus do other buttons just do the normal play, stop and all the other standard functions in Kodi) so for using it as a media player in my living room it works like a dedicated TV Media Player or a Smart TV and doesn’t at all look like there’s a PC in my living room connected to my TV, but I have full control over what’s running there and it isn’t selling my personal data to anybody or shoving adverts in front of me.
They have HDMI ports if you want to directly connect them to a PC and just use it as a screen. Or an ethernet port you can use to play stuff over the network (usually by running a media server and having a client app on the TV).
Only annoying thing is having to hook up my laptop to the tv.
Do new TVs have USB ports? do they support mkv files?
You can get a cheap Android TV Player for about $50 that will connect to your TV via HDMI, connect to your network via Wi-Fi or even Ethernet (I suggest you the latter if you can - much better performance, no hiccups if the Wi-Fi channel you’re using is also used by a lot of other stuff) and play any MKV videos it can access on your network (so, for example, you could share them in a Windows share).
This is kinda the setup I had maybe a decade and a half ago (only back then they were called TV Media Players and it was before Android).
You can get a TV Stick which is sorta the same but smaller, hangs from the HDMI port on your TV and those never have Ethernet.
You can get any of the hardware supported by LibreELEC - the cheapest being ARM-based Single Board Computers like Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi - and install LibreELEC in it and use that. Basically works like the Android TV Player only less bloated and you control that device fully.
Personally I now have an N100 Mini-PC on my living room with Lubutu (I installed Lubunto because I thought that it would be too little PC for a more normal distro, but frankly that thing can run a normal distro just fine) with Kodi always ON and on front (so from the TV side it just looks like a Media browsing and playing interface). The reason for having a bit more generic hardware there is that the machine is ALSO my Torrent server (with QBittorrent, which you can remotey add torrents to from your personal PC using a browser plugin and remotely manage from a browser) AND it’s also my home NAS (so, same place were the media files end up stored).
It’s connected directly to my router via Ethernet so it downloads and uploads at 1Gbps. I generally manage it remotely via SSH from my own PC and have a wireless remote for it (which works just like a normal remote, except that you can’t use it to switch the machine ON, only OFF, plus do other buttons just do the normal play, stop and all the other standard functions in Kodi) so for using it as a media player in my living room it works like a dedicated TV Media Player or a Smart TV and doesn’t at all look like there’s a PC in my living room connected to my TV, but I have full control over what’s running there and it isn’t selling my personal data to anybody or shoving adverts in front of me.
I have a smart tv I keep offline and a usb stick with films and series I watch
Mine does and it can play video just fine. But hooking up your TV to your server via jailbreaking your TV might also be an option if it’s an LG
They have HDMI ports if you want to directly connect them to a PC and just use it as a screen. Or an ethernet port you can use to play stuff over the network (usually by running a media server and having a client app on the TV).