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gear54rus

> Buy a cheap smart TV

Why does it have to be cheap? What if I want a killer panel without all the bs?

> Use a small "air mouse" for control

An alternative is something like 'unified remote' on it, then you can even type from your phone without any pain.

> A browser with VPN for streaming in some cases.

There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button. Not sure if something like this exists. It would be ideal to send all the browser context with cookies etc so that you are logged in too and can just start playing whatever you found on PC.

Any for of cast is not an option, rendering has to happen on the TV PC box.

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Why does it have to be cheap?

It doesn't have to be --- but you may be wasting your money if you run in "store mode".

As noted above, "store mode" will usually max out the brightness, saturation and contrast while removing user control. This looks pretty "normal" with cheaper models. More expensive ones can become overbearing.

It appears to me that in some cases, the difference between cheap and more expensive is mainly the color adjustments.

In order to take advantage of economies of scale, they may use the exact same screen panel on multiple different models but limit the cheaper ones in software so it doesn't look as "bright" and "eye catching" in the store as their more expensive "killer" model.

> There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button. Not sure if something like this exists.

Chromecast does exactly this and has existed since ~2010.

> A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button

You can send a tab to another device on Firefox. It doesn't come with all the browser context, but it's pretty handy.

>There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button.

I use an NVIDIA shield on a dumb TV with firefox sideloaded (ad blockers, ect) for 95% of my streaming. You can import your cookies or other preferences or simply browse for content directly.

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