I have a couple of TVs that I use HTPC appliances with. One’s a shield TV and the other’s a roku. I’m not super happy with either of them. The shield lags like crazy and apps crash constantly. The Roku is stable, but can’t decode h265 or av1. Both at riddled with ads. Does anyone have a solution they’re happy with? I mostly watch content from major streaming services and stream media from my NAS. I have a raspberry pi 4 that’s not in use right now, I tried to get it working as a set top box, but couldn’t get DRM content to work so I went back to the shield.
The Shield can supposedly be updated with LineageOS instead of stock, but I haven’t tried it. I also have a couple Onn 4K streamers that I debloated and swapped in FLauncher, and it’s on my TODO list to do the same with the Shield. My concern with stock OSes is of course any telemetry I’m not aware of or can’t disable. I usually setup Netguard, although I still get ads on my Shield, so its effectiveness is fairly limited.
Edit:
I found this Reddit post helpful for the Onn 4K devices:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidTV/comments/12rya0t/change_launcher_debloat_the_new_onn_4k_streaming/
I’ve also been meaning to do some debloating on my Shield as shown here, but probably worth disabling some of these first and testing a while instead of uninstalling just to make sure nothing important breaks.
The Onn debloating recommendations above only uninstalls bloatware and not system components, so it’s less concerning.