So long as the GabeCube is at a decent price it is going to be my TV's media center. My old plan of building a new main rig and repurposing my old rig with an arc B580 upgrade went out the window for my budget when ram prices went through the roof.

Modern replacement as a kodi box for both shield and pi is ugoos am6b+. ~120$ on aliexpress (probably more with tariffs) and once you flash it with coreelec it can natively playback pretty much any format except av1. You still dual boot to android so can also run all the streaming apps too, if you want, and the android is really stripped back vs the shield (especially the later releases where ad bullshit creeped in quite a bit) though not fully degoogled because the play store is still present.

Main downside is some issues with hdmi-cec. It works 99% but power on doesn’t when in coreelec. Ugoos locked the bootloader for some reason and refuses to unlock it. Fixes for this depend on equipment and use scenario. Some people on the forum that watch tv a lot just disable power on/off cec and leave it running 24/7, it’s pretty low power. I have an avr that works with hdmi-cec and home assistant so I have hdmi-cec on/off turned on, it will turn off when I turn the tv off with remote, and when I turn the tv on the avr turns on via CEC then home assistant sends a wake-on-lan packet to the device, which turns it on. A bit of a delay, but works.

Only device on the market that can properly play back Dolby vision though, including commercial bluray players. If you download 2160p remux with the dv layer for lg oled this is literally the only thing that plays it back correctly. Alternatively just get hdr rips

I have a Frame connected to an Apple TV. I’ve never let the Frame online to do anything. Its been perfect so far. The day it sneaks itself online through some means is the day it will probably go in the trash. I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of sludge it would download and wrap itself in if given half the chance.

But then isn't there a worry about Apple tracking everything?

This is a fascinating article. As someone who has never owned an apple device in my life out of principle, this is actually making me consider one.

just block it from being able to reach wan AND wan from being able to reach it

Whether you can access these devices or not depends on your firewall rules.

The usual (very simplifed) setup is as follows

VLANs:

• VLAN_Trusted
• VLAN_Untrusted
• VLAN_IoT

Firewall rules:

VLAN_Trusted: Can access everything, WAN (internet) as well as devices on VLAN_Untrusted and VLAN_IoT. Usually, your PC or smartphone is here

VLAN_IoT: can only access WAN (internet), but none of the other VLANs, usually connected devices, like smart appliances that you control via their dedicated apps, like Philips HUE lamps, etc

VLAN_Untrusted: Can not access anything. Usually devices that you don't want to allow to access anything, lika a TV, or a printer to prevent automatic firmware updates.

Some people also hav a VLAN_Guests, which is similar to IoT, where devices can only access the internet.

I hope this helps