Can anyone recommend a hackable/open Android TV device which doesn't phone home and supports running Jellyfin, Tailscale? If possible, I'd like to get rid of any bloatware and only install the aforementioned apps plus Netflix and Amazon Prime.
The Nvidia Shield is probably your best bet on the least amount of crap on there that still gets regular updates. You can change the luancher to hide the ads and lock down as much of the phone home with Adguard.
Also when you look at majority of Android TV devices, none of them get any update. The only ones that seem to do are the Chromecast TV and Nvidia Shields. If you're in Murica, you can pickup the new Onn box for $20 but being that cheap it will probably be phoning home more.
End of the day you just want your TV to just work. If you start having to sideload Netflix/Prime/Hulu, you're gonna encounter sooner or later spending hours just to fix it.
My phone and computer don't get high res Amazon prime content either and I'm not going to bother with workarounds if downloading torrents is just as easy.
Agree having Jellyfin/Plex you primary way to consume media makes life a lot easier.
It's also trivial to sideload on it any app you want, just by changing permissions and allowing installations not from the Google store. It's also fairly simple to hide suggestions from bundled apps like Netflix etc from the homescreen - we don't use any streaming services.
Once you do that, there are zero ads on it. As opposed to other models, even flagship TVs from LG.
I actually bought this Sony model specifically due to the reviews that said this was the case. Kudos to Sony for making this. It is a tad more expensive than LG models, but it's worth it.
I've never bought one personally, but have read that Sony Xperia phones also come with a pretty vanilla version of Android. If I were in the market for an Android flagship, they'd be in the running. They're pricier but I don't mind that if it gets me an OS with as little manufacturer meddling as possible.
There are also some unofficial ROMs in XDA for other devices, and some dev also offers ROMs for Raspberry Pis in his website.
How is the Nvidia stock image beyond the home screen?
(In fact, there are also inofficial LOS builds for Raspberry Pi, too: https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi4/ )
This seems to match my requirement of "hackable" quite well, though Nvidia Jetsons are obviously not "fully open" or anything and a quick search yields various threads of people struggling a bit to get LineageOS runnning. But it does seem possible! (Not sure whether Netflix or Prime would run, though.)
Does OSMC support Netflix, Prime? And do you happen to know how well Kodi<>Jellyfin integration works? A quick search brought up either crickets (Jellyfin) or long-winded discussions such as this one: https://discourse.osmc.tv/t/how-to-all-platforms-can-i-use-n...
The easiest method I can think of is to just get one of those Android TV Chromecasts. They're not much more expensive than the Amazon TV boxes and the software actually works and gets updated.
Besides, I want to be able to switch TVs without having to worry about the TV's built-in software every single time.
Do Netflix & Prime work on Roku? I also can't find any information about running Tailscale on Roku, beyond putting it on a different network and routing all traffic through a RaspberryPi or something.
Tailscale does not run on Roku, unless you find a way to jailbreak it and side load a custom ROM, which I'm unaware of any. You would have to route all your stuff through a separate network device like a pi. But a Roku will connect to your local network, so you should be able to access anything that way.
I run Plex and Jellyfin on my home server and can connect either by local IP or through my reverse proxy domain.