Best way to play h265 on older smart tv

[Fabula]

Hi all
I have a samsung TV that is maybe 9 years and is perfectly fine except it won´t play newer downloads.

What is the simplest way to get it video from a usb drive? I am not interested in a new TV, nor doing transcoding on the fly.

Cheers

[kalniel]

Any number of smart TV hubs have USB inputs, or if you have the space, modern DVD players etc.

[DanceswithUnix]

You basically need some sort of smart box plugged in, a blue ray player being probably the easiest to get hold of.
Never tried an Android box, but that would be worth researching.
A PS5 if you can get your hands on one.

Not tried though; I'm in a similar position with a Samsung "Smart" tv that really is as dumb as it gets but still gives a nice (for 1080p) picture. But I just use streaming services, because that's easy using just about any device I come across.

[OwP]

Simplest way is to plug something in to it, I tend to use my old laptop, or cast from my PC to an xbox one.

[adamg]

Cheapest and most convenient would be an Android TV box, look for anything containing the Amlogic S905X3 and install CoreELEC on it, will set you back ~£25, fully supports flawless playback of h265 4k 10bit 60fps content and all other codecs.

[beebub]

Couldn't you just hook up an older (therefor relatively cheap) model Raspberry Pi and output to the TV? You could then play whatever you want and content only limited to what you have in storage or can stream.

[watercooled]

I could be wrong but I don't think the RaspberryPi supports hardware decoding of h265, and may not be smooth in software.

[adamg]

RPi4 can hardware decode h265 however it run's very hot at 4k output and there is no HDR support yet.

Amlogic SoC's have supported both for a number of years now and run at much more reasonable temperatures.

[watercooled]

Good to know, thanks!