Someday someone will invent a way to let you watch video files on your TV and it'll just work and it won't do weird things like "you can't watch stand up comedy" (plex) or "only 30% of your files will play" (dlna) or "if you have a video split into two halves, it can only see the first half" (jellyfin)
That'll be a cool day.
clearly some should crowdfund the VLCBox
it's a little box that runs VLC (WITH UPDATES) and nothing else. it just talks to ethernet or wifi and shoves videos out an HDMI port
@foone Hilariously I bought a little TV box like this some 15-20 years ago, at Aldi, and other than not literally using VLC (I think...) it was basically exactly this.
It had an HDMI port, and an ethernet port, and some USB sockets. You'd plug in a storage device, and it would play arbitrary video files off it, in arbitrary formats, with a remote. Or you'd configure a Samba share, and it'd do the same thing off that. And that was *it*.
I think this was before Chromecast, Jellyfin, Plex, smart TVs, smartphones(?), etc. existed...
Should still have it somewhere. But it doesn't do HD.
@joepie91 @foone i remember an old CRT tv we had that could do that