My father considers buying an Android TV box. Initially, I thought that’s a bad choice as a mini pc has much greater capabilities and control.
However, he does have a point that Android TV boxes are cheaper (~60) and work with tv cable which most mini PCs don’t have a connector for.
What are your thoughts on this?
I can attest that having full control over a mini PC feels great compared to Android TV, if you have rather niche media consumption habits. Someone in my family had below their TV a laptop hooked up to an external drive full of local media, a DVD drive, and a crappy Android TV box only ever used to play YouTube videos. Replaced it all with an old SFF PC, put GNOME with 175% scaling on it, with a mini wireless keyboard to control it.
But as others have commented, a Linux setup falls apart as soon as you want to watch the mainstream streaming services.