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.
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.
HDMI cable
