Another KDE project, Plasma Bigscreen, is back from the dead with a much better UI spread across the entire shell.
Hopefully this will work with Google TV too since it’s essentially just an Android TV rebrand for Chromecast. Some of them have decent hardware though, but are held back by the all of the Google bloat. Even using apps that allow adb on Google TVs you can’t fully remove it all without soft-bricking the TV.
I’ve tried setting Kodi up on a few TVs that I’ve fixed, then put them on a VLAN so they couldn’t go online, but could still access my NAS. And even with some having hardware support for AV1, anything over 4-5Mbps or so would cause them to drop frames and lag out. The HEVC support was a little better and will usually do 10-20Mbps+ before running into issues, which is plenty for most YarTube content. So I did a little more digging and noticed that the CPU was sitting at a constant 30%+ usage just doing background bloatware bullshit. So if we had a better UI option, it would open up a lot of cheaper $200-300 4K Google TVs that can stream from a NAS or Jellyfin/Plex server without needing to transcode. Since they have hardware support for basically everything.
Univ3rse@lemmynsfw.com 2 days ago
With it being virtually impossible not to buy a “smart” TV, giving people the option to have connected software that doesn’t phone home is a great idea. I wish the average person was more aware of these types of options.