Lightweight players for an older TV

On a television with 1 GB of RAM, choosing a player is not a matter of taste: it is the difference between working and not.

What makes an application heavy

• Loading artwork and metadata from the network on opening.
• Keeping background services running.
• Interfaces with animations and blurs.
• Embedded web engines for parts of the interface.

The big platforms' official apps do all four. That is why they are slow on modest hardware, and no setting will change it.

Known alternatives

Kodi. Free media centre, highly configurable, with an Android TV build. It is heavy, and it can be lightened a great deal by changing skin and switching off what you do not use.

Jellyfin. Free client for your own server. Its television app is notably light.

Plex. Similar in concept, with part of the service in the cloud.

VLC. For direct file playback, no library and no metadata. The lightest of the lot by a distance.

They install from the Play Store or from each project's official site. This site hosts and distributes no application files, and will not: here is why.

Measuring the difference

Before and after installing anything:

adb shell dumpsys meminfo | head -20

And to see what a specific app uses while you use it:

adb shell dumpsys meminfo com.example.package

That is how you turn "it feels slower" into a number.

A word about network playback

On an older television the bottleneck is often not the application but video decoding. If the hardware does not support a codec in hardware, the player does it in software and the result stutters whatever you do.

To see what your device supports:

adb shell dumpsys media.player | grep -i codec

If your television does not decode AV1 or 10-bit HEVC in hardware, no application will save you. There the answer is an external player.