Based on what data?

We had an ad that actually said “piracy funds terrorism” here in the UK. Made me laugh my arse off.

I spent years building a 20tb media archive. I got paranoid I might get caught so I turned my back up drives into encrypted Veracrypt volumes. Before I had a chance to transfer my stuff to them my piece of crap QNAP NAS died and I couldn’t decrypt their proprietary RAID encryption.

Go open source kids!

Agreed. Also it’s likely you’ll be able to use your TV’s remote with it via CEC or if not you can still use the remote app on your phone.

I’d recommend a Raspberry pi running Libreelec. Its Kodi so has a great UI with no ads or tracking, supports HDMI-CEC so you can control it with your TV’s own remote (on most models) and I haven’t found a video codec it can’t handle. Also if you decide to move to a NAS or streaming for your videos in the future it supports that as well.

Any model of pi should be able to handle video playback from USB but older ones obviously can’t handle 4k. Also a pi can’t power a mechanical USB drive so if that’s what you’re using you’d either need them to have their own power supply or use a powered USB hub.

One like this could be used to power the pi and drives at the same time: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anker-PowerIQ-Charging-Macbook-Surface-7-Ports-3/dp/B00VE4UJD4/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=2SJ87KGXVYOFK&keywords=anker+usb+hub+powered+3.0&qid=1696764826&sprefix=anker+usb+hub+powered+3.0%2Caps%2C884&sr=8-1

Whatever Happened to Harold Smith? Had to buy it in the end 😓