For the past 10 years or so I’ve had a PC hooked up to a dumb TV to stream my TV. Now I’m officially old and have kids in elementary school. The PC is finally unbearably slow but now I have no idea what to replace it with, or frankly even what my options are. Smart TV? Casting Stick? new PC? some newfangled option i don’t even know what to google?
I use a self-built HTPC, which I built a year or two ago. It will stream whatever I want without hoping there’s an app for it, it has a blu-ray drive for my old discs (and for ripping old PC games to move over to my main machine, which lacks a disc drive), and it pulls double-duty as a data back-up server I can access from anywhere on my home network.
I challenged myself to build one that would use less wattage than my old Xbox One, which is what previously served my TV needs, and to use only second -hand parts except for storage and the PSU. It was a fun little project and it works really well!