I remember trying the Android TV 14 image a while ago and it was basically unusable as you describe, the new Android TV 15 image has fixed virtually all those issues for me. YMMV but IMO it's worth experimenting and seeing if it works for you, there's a chance I just got lucky though
SpatchyIsOnline
joined 8 months ago
I'm currently using a raspberry pi 5 flashed with Konstakang's Android TV image, it works pretty flawlessly and takes less than an hour to set up, assuming you have the APKs of everything you want to install. You don't need to mess around with Google play services because most TV android apps are also designed to run on firesticks which don't have it.
The one issue I have encountered is that the Jellyfin client very occasionally won't play some 4k HDR media in the default player (all my 1080p stuff works fine) so I also installed MPV and I turn on alternative player in the Jellyfin settings in the rare case something doesn't work.
I use sunshine and moonlight using a pi 5 running Android TV as the client. It works perfectly for the occasional video stream but latency for games is a bit rough. You'll probably be fine playing something relaxed like Stardew Valley but platformers (I've tried Ultimate Chicken Horse) and racing games (Mario Kart Wii running in Dolphin) are just bad enough to be unplayable. This is with both devices connected over Ethernet (albeit through a powerline adapter and my router is fairly cheap) so WiFi will probably be worse.
Not sure if sunshine and moonlight just have loads of overhead or if there's a part of my setup causing the latency.
I use Glutun for this
ReVanced mods the official YouTube apk, meaning you maintain syncing watch history, subscriptions, likes, comments etc. Which iirc NewPipe doesn't. Whether you care about that is entirely up to you though, NewPipe is certainly better if you care more about privacy