IINA on Mac, free & open source, has been perfect for everything for years:

https://github.com/iina/iina

While traveling I was so pissed with the Apple TV player's performance on less-than-lightspeed internet connections, I ragecancelled my subscription and just yo ho ho'ed the last couple episodes of Severance

I have a server that runs a bunch of containers (bittorrent client on a VPN, Home Assistant, etc.) and hosts SMB shares. I acquire content that goes on the shares which then get consumed by various devices.

- Kodi on a TV that has been stripped of as much of Google as I could find, streams from the shares

- VLC on my PC, streams from the shares

- VLC on my phone which is always VPN'd to my local network and streams from the shares

- VLC on iPads on which I usually drag and drop some shows/movies ahead of time so I am not wifi-dependent

omg - just use ultra.cc + kodi with https connection on a fire stick - so simple