alt Hacker NewsBuy any tv with CEC support (almost all of them) and never connect it to the internet. Never. Never start any app on the tv. Hook a Kodi box to the hdmi port and use that, and only that.
For the Kodi box get series-7 Intel NUC with Kabylake-era processors, gen 7. They don't run Windows 11, so come very cheap second hand, but decode h264 and hevc in hardware and drive a 4K screen like charm. You can install a modern Wifi card in the NUC and a PCIe SSD.
Then buy one of these: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/154/intel-nuc-hdmi-cec-adapter and put it in your NUC, so you can use the TV remote to control Kodi.
That's it.
Bonus, you can take your TV with you when travelling.
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Depending on your usage that may not be an option, as appliances eg a gaming console (xbox/PlayStation) can require you to update their firmware through their DRM. So unless you keep updating the TV it only shows a black screen
This is the way.
Treat the thing as a giant peripheral. Dumb monitor.
This is what I'm doing, but we also have to admit that kodi kinda sucks.
It's really unstable, I can't find a browser, can be janky, unstable and don't forget unstable.
I can't even identify if it is some plugin that is causing the instability or not. Which should not be an excuse, because poor architecture is still the project's problem.
Is anyone working on alternatives? I would accept vibecoded stuff at this point.