Comment by drnick1
2 days ago
Best hackable smart TV should be a Linux box connected to a monitor or to a "smart" TV via HDMI without Internet access. The best thing about this setup is that you can stream Youtube ad-free though clients like VacuumTube. You can also open a browser and head straight to the high seas. Plus countless other things that are arbitrarily restricted or made difficult in locked down environments, all without your viewing habits being sent to the mothership, data brokers, and possibly the government.
The main downside is that there is currently no great "ten foot" UI for this use case on Linux. But the KDE Bigscreen project is being revived and could offer a definitive solution for free TVs.
one should use a mini pc or similar for this; raspberry pi won't handle video so well imo.
Agreed, I don't have first-hand experience with Pi's, but I have seen reports that they struggle with 4K playback, even at 30fps. An advantage of the Pi however is that it supports HDMI-CEC.