Selfhosted

Two approaches:

Network isolation/DNS blocking - put the TV on a VLAN and only permit specific ports through to a media server (whatever the TV will support). If you lack VLAN capability, run PiHole as your DNS server (it works best as DNS and DHCP, but that's just my opinion for things I like, such as proper name resolution for all devices).

Second option: (your idea with a Pi) disconnect TV from network entirely, then run something like Kodi (or whatever media center you prefer) on an old laptop, mini-PC, whatever, and have that device connect via HDMI. HDMI can passthrough the navigation controls from the TV remote (not guaranteed, but it's part of the standard). I looked into this a long time ago but the performance wasn't there yet. Today I'd probably try any distro and run Kodi on it.

Even my POS Samsung passes through enough of the controls to navigate Kodi on a 2017 laptop, while retaining power, volume, settings, etc for the TV itself.

My current setup is a Jellyfin server and Jellyfin client on the TV. I run PiHole with a blocklist for all the Samsung BS which has had the side effect of making the TV menus faster as it doesn't retrieve any "what's new" info from Samsung. Its actually kind of fun to monitor the FNS log and see the domains the TV hits, click Deny and see what breaks in the TV. On average about 30% of all DNS requests on my network get denied, and nothing of value has been lost. That's how much crap is being sent all the time.

Hope that gives you some ideas.

I use ONN Android boxes. Fairly inexpensive, but I think it's difficult to set up without a Google account (you can create a dummy account on the setup).

Side-loading is trivial. Some favorite apps: TizenTube to replace YouTube (or any of a dozen or so frontends), Projectivy launcher to replace the awful default. Add an always on VPN.

I'm still using an old Apple TV. I'm not happy about it but haven't found a good replacement yet.

There's a few interesting options for software in this thread. In terms of hardware - maybe a NUC or something? Would have to be small, quiet and relatively cheap.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.

[Thread #96 for this comm, first seen 7th Sep 2026, 18:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

My answer is... excessive. So keep that in mind. If its just you or you and another adult, just set up kodi in some form.

I wanted something that would have profiles for my kids, a remote, and easy access. Where I am currently is:

• Flex Launcher - 10' UI. The same person started Big Launcher after but never completed. I'm hoping to finagle Plasma Bigscreen into doing what I want, but I'm not there yet.
• Media is all Jellyfin, now with my older game emulation there as well.
• Logging into the machine also auths against JF, so its per user at the OS level for each member of the family. Currently working on NFC for login so my kids can tap a toy or something to get their account logged in, rather than me or my wife doing it.
• PC is an industrial pc I picked up, its light on usb ports but I added a wifi/bt card from another machine, bumped up the ram with some spares I had.
• I have a usb soundbar and usb audio processor, all audio goes through there, managed via pipewire.
• I couldn't get CEC working well on it, so I made use of an overly expensive video switcher for this purpose that I picked up a while back. Corp conferencing switcher. Now I can send CEC programmatically.
• Current remote is just an older android tablet with lineage on it. I want to replace this with a keyboard/remote combo, but haven't found what I wanted to yet. This will just get broken accidentally by a kid, so I'd prefer a remote.

The experience is pretty decent, just login and browse. In any case, this is the (overly complex) way I've addressed things for me. That said, a few notes / to-do items:

• No streaming platforms (I will not use them anyway)
• I still need to stand up a youtube front end (I don't use it much so low on the list, more for my wife)
• I want to set up something to show family photos from immich as the background
• I need better controllers for gaming. I have one 8bitdo pro wired, an old 8bitdo NES controller, and a gamecube usb adapter (but my gamecube controllers have all gone to crap now, so thats useless). I also connected up the balance board from the wii, but haven't gotten much use out of it yet.
• I want to get my AudioBookShelf on there as a dedicated setup with login by desktop account automatically, haven't even started this yet. May have to do something a bit different here too as I want a read-along style for the kids.
• I would never buy all this stuff, I used things I picked up on the free or cheap via hardware replacements through my work and tech liquidation/"recycling" companies.

There are builds for Android TV lineage os for the raspberry pi. If you are willing to put in some work for alternative apps it's a great interface with no Google integration. I've used kodi before i moved to jellyfin always found the kodi -> jellyfin integration to be clunky. Google TV would be much cleaner

@Epzillon Don't know, if it fits your needs, I'm currently running https://tvheadend.org/ and MiniDLNA https://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/ on an Odroid XU4Q with Arch Linux Arm.
My TV can direct use DLNA, so no further software is necessary.

Tvheadend is recording actual tv shows and recordings are manually converted into h264 videos afterwards and placed on the DLNA server.
Shows, which I don't want to archive, are also served by the DLNA server.

https://complexlogic.github.io/flex-launcher/

If you have nay knowledge of networking (or want to learn), start setting up restricted VLANs to isolate your smart devices. Only allow them access to specific services/devices like your media server.

For dedicated hardware, there are plenarily of options. A Raspberry Pi will work to start with, there are Linux images with Kodi such as LibreELEC and osmc (I have used both in the past and they worked fine), and Android TV images also that can run apps. I suppose you could also set up a generic Linux install and run the Jellyfin client or similar - not sure if there any turnkey options for that.

We have a couple of Apple TV boxes and they perform well, the Jellyfin apps for them have really improved in the last year or so too.