Building a DIY TV box made me realize how horrible Google TV is

Like many affordable intelligent televisions, mine operates on a frankly garbage processor that is trawling through the Google TV interface update TV a real chore. The Quadri -Cotex – A55 processors are quite standard but also cheap as they come, and associated with a 1.5 GB RAM with tight hair, it is easy to see why the user interface experience is so bad on my TV and many others.

Fortunately, there are many options to escape the limits of inexpensive television processors, including various Android television boxes and the very popular Nvidia Shield. But I’m a big fan of doing with the kit that I already have, and an old Raspberry Pi 4 has been dormant on my desk for too long.

On paper, the Raspberry Pi 4 looks like a solid candidate to execute Android TV. With four cores Cortex – A72, up to 4 GB of RAM and the integrated HDR HDR HDR decoding, PI 4 (and its successor Pi 5) should easily exceed cheap television chipsets – and even get closer to the shield. So last weekend, I started to see what I could have this aging box do.

Fortunately, I did not have to start completely from zero. The brilliant Konstakang maintains the Android Lineageos TV versions for various Raspberry Pi devices. I caught the 22 Build for my raspberry pi 4 Based on Android 15, slapped on my Spedy Samsung T2 SSD to avoid bottlenecks of the microSD card performance. I will not repeat the installation instructions, because it is as simple as flashing the .zip file, refining a line in a file and plugging into the PI.

I was instantly satisfied with Boot to be treated by the “classic” Android TV interface – no flashy advertising banners, just space for my applications. Although even I find that the Barebons look of the interface is a little austere, at least it is functional and has everything you want exactly where you need it. I cannot say the same thing on the Google TV eclectic interface, which I despise both performance points and prospects for the infestation of the ad.

The drawback is that Google services are not preinstalled (more about this in one minute), so you must manually load specific APK TV. USB storage works well and APKs are dotted for various streaming platforms. After blinking Widevine L3 for DRM, I tried to load an Amazon Prime video, and although I could connect and the application went well, I encountered indescribable reading problems. Perhaps some platforms require a more secure widevine L1, but I could not find a correction for a personalized Android TV configuration.

Jellyfin and YouTube, however, worked perfectly well – no delay in application, instant research, the search for instant playback, zero back -blast. It looks like a breath of fresh air compared to my television experience.

Unfortunately, there is another drawback: the 4K 10-bit content does not gently return to the Raspberry Pi 4. The platform has had a troubled story with FFMPEG decoding, and it is clear that Android capacities do not take advantage of its hardware acceleration as well as other platforms. However, the rise in a lower 4K binary flow HEVC file seems to work very well, and 1080p is impeccable. The configuration can be used for self-hosted media, at least.

For all the modern Android TV experience, you would like the play store, the integration of the accounts and perhaps even the modern Google TV interface. Blinking these additional Google services for Android TV 15 It is not difficult, but that is where things were going horribly badly.

You can mainly install two levels of gapps on an Android TV: the minimum version, which contains the basic Google services, and the full version provided with the Google TV user interface. I first tried the first option, for a decent transition house: the classic TV interface with access to the play store and other service integrations. However, the performances have taken some success here. The system has definitely started to stop when loading applications and the commutation of the menus, which it did not do before. However, everything continued to operate and enter the applications was certainly easier.

Out of curiosity, I then flashed the complete Gapps package, and Oh Boy, was an error. The Google TV interface really cooks my Raspberry Pi (literally, it quickly became hot to the touch), and it works like a snail. These home screen ads are not only a horror; They kill performance.

It took me an age to connect to my Google account; He simply continued to close the connection screen and send me back at the start. The Play Store has become much more scary to sail. Applications that were previously Lightning Fast have now taken several seconds to open and load content. Fortunately, once you are in an application and the main user interface is pushed to the background, the performances resume, but the menus remain slow, and I have encountered pendan and regular accidents.

The only change being the addition of Google’s television interface, it is difficult not to agree with my initial assessment that it is an inflated nightmare which makes the television equipment weak even more lethargic. Optimization is perhaps a problem for the Raspberry Pi. However, whatever the Google services, in the background – Synchronization of accounts, dissemination of ads, data harvesting and whatever other – do not agree with the low -end equipment already stretched by performing the operating system Barebons Android TV.

As a person who is mainly limited by old shows of my DIY nas, I am in the certainly rare position to rarely perceive for a streaming service and, therefore, I do not really need the swollen overpower of the Android TV ecosystem. As such, there are some much better -based options based on Linux to run on DIY TV projects – namely Libreelec and OSMC. These Kodi platforms are mainly designed around reading local media or plug into your Home Plex or Jellyfin servers. However, there are also unofficial additional modules to access your Amazon, Netflix and Youtube streaming accounts, so you don’t have to miss streaming capacities here. So I tried them too.

Although a stripped multimedia center is not for everyone, for pure reading, Libreelec and OSMC on the PI 4 erase my Google TV: navigation by the menu never jumps and the reading controls are instantly reactive – a night difference. In addition, their concentration on reading allowed them to implement reading 4K HDR on the humble Raspberry Pi, so that they also surpass my Android experience based on PI.

Although I might not have been able to build a flawless Android alternative to my slow intelligent television, I left with a radically different vision of what I really want from a living room platform.

Google TV has undoubtedly fell into the tank of service functionality, focusing strongly on flashy banners, tentacular intergrams and the generation of advertising revenue, to the detriment of hanging performance and the delivery of instant content. Each additional step that Google offers simple content reading increases the requirements of CPU and RAM. This can be of course on the platforms that have as much punch as a mid-range smartphone, but televisions are too often cheap and unable to perform Google’s Bauballs fairly well for a solid experience. The fact that Google wishes to reduce the requirements for Google TV has already defined my alarm.

Curiously, universal research and controversial content discovery options take place much smooth and probably do better work than Google’s operating system. This includes rating, comments and monitoring list in the same roof, and a single click to jump to the content of the platforms to which you are actually subscribed, while keeping a minimum on the demanding user interface.

My Google TV, in comparison, still serves generic ads for the services that I do not pay and that I am late on disguising overview of online content with sophisticated transitions. Yes, some applications surface what you want fairly quickly, but others are an unbearable labyrinth of submenus and performance problems. For example, the British ITVX application works notoriously as an absolute snail, which makes an inconsistent navigation experience.

Overall, I’m not sure that the traditional applications are really what I want from my next television platform. Yes, the idea of running Android on everything is pleasant, and it undoubtedly helps the platform that developers can target your TV and telephone almost simultaneously. However, phones and television are intrinsically different in the way we consume content, and a television-oriented platform should really focus on content as painless as possible.

Google TV obviously decided to do so, but it has not particularly achieved this objective in terms of functionalities or performance; This is just another layer operating above applications, operating on an operating system, without tight integration with the real content of which a good multimedia server ideally needs. No wonder that affordable intelligent televisions continue to function as absolute garbage.

The Google TV service model, the Ad-Heay model can suit powerful decorations, but its background and its user interface bloating over the budgetary models. I prefer to execute Kodi or Android TV Barebons on my pi to leave Google extras in my living room experience.