TVs are great for entertainment, but they're ultimately screens â which means the software running them is always a secondary concern to the manufacturer. Streaming adds its own layer of complexity on top of that. There are region and geo blocks. There's DRM. There's whether your TV can actually decode a given codec. And then there's the operating system â and whether it lets you take advantage of the advertised CPU and RAM, or limits you to the bare basics.
We have a big curved Samsung QLED TV. It's curved, so you know it's not new â about 10 years old at this point, but the display is still brilliant. It was top of the shelf back then. Unfortunately, it runs an older version of TizenOS that can't be updated or upgraded. That leaves this beautiful screen confined to a basic app store, where few apps are available and the ones that are exist in their most stripped-down form. Spotify on TizenOS can't show music videos. Apple TV isn't available at all. Jellyfin, which I've grown very fond of, isn't there either.
That all changed immediately.
A single affordable piece of hardware fixed every one of those problems and turned the TV into the ultimate streaming machine.
The beautiful Raspberry Pi 4
It's' ultimate streaming box that nothing can beat
Yes. A Raspberry Pi 4 was the solution to all my woes. I know, I know â why not just get an Android TV box? The honest answer is that I already had a Raspberry Pi lying around. But even setting that aside, the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is still cheaper than most streaming boxes, and more importantly, it's considerably more capable. My unit has 4GB of RAM, a quad-core CPU, two HDMI ports, four USB ports (two of which are USB 3), and an Ethernet port â all packed into something you can pick up for $75 new, less if you go used.
The setup is simple too, though it gets simpler with…