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.
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