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Comment by bb123 | Hacker News Reader

Just buy an Apple TV or similar and never connect the display to the internet.

Linux PC but otherwise yeah, I just laughed when TV asked for wifi and then set it to never ask again.

It has one job, display pixels, that's it, that's all I want it to do.

Is there a way to get decent output for drmed up crap (which is rather a lot of the video content most people want to watch) on Linux these days? Last I heard, you can't get 4k on Netflix and presumably also get the shaft from other streaming providers.

Pirate Bay (allegedly)

But then you're probably going to want to set up a bunch of *arrs and a nas, and things are looking less and less like a straightforward alternative to an appletv.

I just drop mp4's/mkv's in a web root - you can play those in VLC with no issues.

VLC runs on everything anyone in my house cares about, it's so simple no one has an issue with it.

> *arrs and a nas

You may be complicating things. I make do with a 1TB hard drive and SFTP over LAN.

Old tech works just as well.

Don't even need SFTP, http works fine with VLC :)

Literally just download your torrents into a web root that is set to list indexes, copy the link into VLC and go :).

So you manually search for and download videos, manually curate your collection (including somewhat frequently clearing out space for new things), and manually keep track of what episode you're on in what show? That really does not work just as well.

> It has one job, display pixels, that's it, that's all I want it to do.

If that's all it does, it's a monitor, not a TV. A TV has a second job: to directly receive over-the-air (and/or cable) channels. That is, the presence of a tuner is what differentiates a TV from a mere monitor.

Maybe once, but not so much anymore.

Yeah 100%. It is just a dumb display. One input. I don't even use the speakers or the remote it came with.

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