When my really old TV box was in it’s last legs I tried 2 different Android TV boxes, which whilst not in TV Stick format like that, have very similar hardware specs.
These things were around €50 from AliExpress.
They were frustrating, one was actually sluggish, the other not exactly fast (it really boils down to the version of the cheap ARM CPU in your device and the processor names don’t exactly make clear which ones are more or less powerful), and ran Android TV isn’t all that great at customizing it and comes with pre-installed crap and Google spyware.
Replaced them with an N100 Mini-PC running Lubuntu and with Kodi always on top. That thing runs circles around those 2, not even reaching 10% CPU usage when playing 1080p h256 videos.
Now, I also use the Mini-PC as a home server, hence Lubuntu makes sense, but for the stupidly simple solution just install LibreELEC which is a distro pre-configured to just run Kodi.
You can get a wireless remote for it, at which point it’s pretty much the same sofa experience as a TV Box or TV Stick except for the ON/OFF button (because it only works to turn the Mini-PC OFF, not to turn it back ON).
That said, that Mini-PC with 8GB memory and a 128 GB SSD was about €130 over a year ago and now it’s about €240.
I believe the Shield and Apple TV are actually more expensive and you don’t fully control what’s running in that hardware, what it does with your personal data and even if it will end up enshittified or not, unlike with a Mini-PC were you installed Linux.
My current setup is similar. the pc runs a custom build of android tv w/o google services, with the remote of the tv box. I already have checks notes 5 spare pcs, i just had no idea 2.4ghz remotes could be dirt cheap. The item you sent appears as 2 usd before taxes & shipment but doesn’t ship to my location lol. Oh and every single one of the pcs have hdd, i’ll need either a new ssd or use one of my flash drives with a live linux install as permanent is very slow from USB.
When my really old TV box was in it’s last legs I tried 2 different Android TV boxes, which whilst not in TV Stick format like that, have very similar hardware specs.
These things were around €50 from AliExpress.
They were frustrating, one was actually sluggish, the other not exactly fast (it really boils down to the version of the cheap ARM CPU in your device and the processor names don’t exactly make clear which ones are more or less powerful), and ran Android TV isn’t all that great at customizing it and comes with pre-installed crap and Google spyware.
Replaced them with an N100 Mini-PC running Lubuntu and with Kodi always on top. That thing runs circles around those 2, not even reaching 10% CPU usage when playing 1080p h256 videos.
Now, I also use the Mini-PC as a home server, hence Lubuntu makes sense, but for the stupidly simple solution just install LibreELEC which is a distro pre-configured to just run Kodi.
You can get a wireless remote for it, at which point it’s pretty much the same sofa experience as a TV Box or TV Stick except for the ON/OFF button (because it only works to turn the Mini-PC OFF, not to turn it back ON).
That said, that Mini-PC with 8GB memory and a 128 GB SSD was about €130 over a year ago and now it’s about €240.
I believe the Shield and Apple TV are actually more expensive and you don’t fully control what’s running in that hardware, what it does with your personal data and even if it will end up enshittified or not, unlike with a Mini-PC were you installed Linux.
My current setup is similar. the pc runs a custom build of android tv w/o google services, with the remote of the tv box. I already have checks notes 5 spare pcs, i just had no idea 2.4ghz remotes could be dirt cheap. The item you sent appears as 2 usd before taxes & shipment but doesn’t ship to my location lol. Oh and every single one of the pcs have hdd, i’ll need either a new ssd or use one of my flash drives with a live linux install as permanent is very slow from USB.