I’ve had a Chromecast for almost a decade, and it had mostly been great. They cost £30 at the time, and let you cast from most media apps, even if they didn’t really have their own UI. You could take it to a friends house / hotel, power it off of the USB port on the back of most TVs and you’d be off to the races.
Given that they are now discontinued and my old one doesn’t support 4K and casting from some newer apps (maybe a lack of AV1 / h265 support?), I’m looking for a replacement.
I’m looking for a privacy-respecting device in a vaguely stick-like format that will support casting from Android. It having support for apps is a nice to have for me.
Before you say “well if you use YouTube / Plex it’s not private because they collect data about what you watch”, sure, that may be true, but I’d rather not have the stick itself also do ACR on everything I cast as well.
Bite the bullet and get the previous generation appletv 4k.
The paradigm of use is slightly different but everything works.
I don’t know that there’s good solutions right now, at least for people like you and me; I had some android tv boxes from bestbuy but they are region locked to the US so I had to use my laptop with a VPN as a hotspot for the boxes to be able to set them up, and they have lost that configuration before causing me to do it again.
Right now I don’t have TVs but at this point I think I’d be more compelled to try and make an HTPC running Linux and using KDE’s TV mode. I’m not too versed on the tech but I’d guess that lack of… CEC (?) Would be the biggest hurdle to overcome, right? But a machine of your own design would probably handle many more codecs and games, and at better performance, than any tv box would… And a steam machine does have that tv tech, although its… a bit too expensive.
I’d love nothing more than an affordable little box that wasn’t a complete violation of your privacy or a forfeiture of your freedom to use the hardware how you see fit, but I think the high price of an HTPC or a steam machine is the literal price of our right to own our shit in this day and age.
I’m running Kodi on a Bazzite rig, with a Stremio plugin and the Roku channel for live TV. I also have VaccuumTube for YouTube. All of the above works well, especially VacuumTube.
A used Steam Deck with a dock could work. It has HDMI CEC built in and you can install the GrayJay flatpak (or any other Youtube frontend) and hook it up to a lot of video platforms. That’s what I do with mine most of the time
From what I’ve read, AppleTV is the least evil among the commercial ones.
Saving this for later as I too would like to know.
My solution was a refurbished thinkcentre running Linux. Works, but is more involved than a put of the box solution. But Bein able to customise it to the users need (my mother in this case) was pretty much the point for me.
I have a server and all, but I’d need the right software to make the casting work and perhaps get a nice GUI + remote if I want to use actual apps.
KDE Connect basically is a good remote control.
My iPhone has a screen mirroring function. If the TV does Bluetooth, you can display your entire screen and play whatever you want.
I think Android must have a similar feature, I’ve seen connection popups for Samsung devices that I denied from my TV.
If you have a non Bluetooth TV, then it won’t work.
I prefer to not rely on screen mirroring as it means I can’t check my phone without interrupting what I’m watching. Especially a problem when watching with someone else.
You could buy a cheap(ish) device dedicated for this purpose that can handle the apps you want. Think of it as a more expensive chromecast.
A separate device can also mean more privacy depending on how you configure it.
What software / OS would I run on this device to get a seamless fullscreen experience (like consoles / sticks / SteamOS)?
No clue. I don’t use any consoles or steam.
Apple TV 🤷
No ads, very little base level telemetry. Very good app support because of the large install base. I still run the first gen ATV 4k and just this latest tvOS version is the first update it didn’t get. Everything still works as normal.
Rumours say there’s a new one coming this month, but we’ll see.
If you are more of a hacker type, the Nvidia Shield is relatively ancient hardware wise but still top tier if you throw away the Google shit and spend some time with 3rd party tools.
And you can get 4k Chromecasts for like 19€ used, even the ones with the remote included.
very little base level telemetry
tcpdump on an appletv I did in 2024 disagrees. I can’t imagine it’s any better today.
And what did your tcpdump reveal?
LG levels of bullshittery? Or Sony style fingerprinting of anything on the screen?
Connections to apple streaming source CIDR blocks, connections to apple auth CIDR blocks, and a bunch of ips in apple blocks I have no idea what they do.
Apple domains are easy to identify. https://support.apple.com/en-us/101555
A lot of it associated with iTunes and apple store stuff like mzstatic.com but also https connections to unknown domains. It’s almost all https, so impossible to say what’s being sent.
The content streams are easy to pick out, because only a handful of stateful sessions go to known CDNs.
Why starting a movie or show on an apple TV requires a check to siri and search is probably explainable, but certainly 1400 requests during movie play to diagassets.apple.com (the “diagnostics” domain known to be a black hole of Apple mystery) is probably reporting data of some kind.
It goes on like that, mysterious connections that occur during video play and at startup to domains like Apple Education raise a few eyebrows.
And then there are the plugins, which do a lot of phoning home.
I don’t have any other Apple devices, and I really want to be able to cast from my apps to the device, so I can keep watching something I have started seamlessly.
Is that possible on the Apple TV?
Thanks for the reply.
For android to apple tv casting, you have to download an app on both the apple tv and the android.
Most of the apps I use directly support casting to their respective ATV apps.
YouTube 100% works with any device, but I don’t have a daily driver Android so can’t confirm other apps.
TBH most apps exist natively on the Apple TV so “casting” something to it is a non-issue. It’s more of a Chromecast thing to use your phone as the source, leaving the relatively underpowered Chromecast puck just for pure video streaming.
Apple TV on the other hand is massively overpowered for most stuff people use it for.
SYK, Apple has little telemetry because they don’t want 3rd party access. Instead, they keep all that data for themselves to build out massive user data profiles, then monetize it mostly anonymously. So while it’s “minimized” somehow, it’s not necessarily better. Apple is just better at not letting everyone get your data ASAP like google. But then again everything is hush hush so it’s hard to tell if they’re actually better.
