Hopefully this is the right kind of question for this community, my apologies if not.
I’m looking for some sort of device that will let me load my own media from a USB / SD card, and play it to my TV. Does such a device exist? Some sort of remote controlled box that can just load mp4 / mkv files from locally hosted storage? I have been using my PC over HDMI but it can get annoying having an awkward room layout because my computer always has to be next to the TV to do this.
My TV is a dumb TV (for lack of a better name). It does have a USB port, but it only displays photos and can’t play external footage. I keep all of my downloaded media on an external HDD. I did look into the whole XBMC aka Kodi / jellyfin combo stuff for a bit.
Jellyfin on a NAS plus a cheap little box attached to the TV should be fine.
An old RPi3 could be enough. Only complications might be transcoding. If the player can’t handle the format, you might need to transcode, which could be taxing on the NAS.
That’s a great answer if one already has a NAS (which is not unlikely, given the name of the community). But if that’s not already present (or desired for other reason) then a simple media-PC with some built-in storage is simpler to set up.