Sorry if this doesn’t belong here, more than happy to be pointed in the right direction if it doesn’t.
I wanna do movie nights with friends where we watch movies together in the living room on my TV. I have a DVD player and VCR I got from the thrift shop as well as a few movies for both. However, I was thinking it would also be fun to expand the options available by downloading a bunch of public domain movies to play on the TV. Only issue is figuring how I’d work that all out.
The TV lacks any network connectivity features. While it has a USB slot, it can literally only detect pictures and set them up for slideshows. Even tried putting some video files on to test and it won’t detect at all. Also because my computer is a desktop, connecting it directly to the TV from the other room is a no-go.
Is there some sort of device that serves this kind of purpose? Like something I can download videos to, and then connect it to my TV in a similar sense you would a DVD or VCR and be able to choose the content on the device using a remote? I’d really appreciate the help and pointers if this is something that exists.
There are tons of options. Chromecasts, Apple TVs, Amazon Fire TV, Nvidia Shield are all commercial options and I recommend none of them.
The traditional broke student choice for this is to just get a laptop that has a HDMI out or the ability to spit out HDMI over USB C and plug that straight to the TV. That I can recommend. Especially if your goal is not to stream the media but to instead play a bunch of locally downloaded files.
Beyond that you’re going out of your way to set up bigger self-hosting stuff and if we’re talking “upgrading from a VCR to playing offline videos on my TV” it sure sounds like we aren’t there yet.