I have an old school boob tube tv in my room, currently with a firestick running through a converter. It’s fine i guess, but i want something else because 1, the aspect ratio is off since it expects to be hooked up to a flatscreen, and 2 the privacy problem of running something from amazon. Is there something that could work here?
Yeah, I’m unfamiliar with the state of doing encoding with a pi, I have seen that newer models have a dedicated encoder chip for h.264 but I’ve personally never used it. Even with the first model of the raspberry pi, it included a hardware decoder, and was able to run as a media player hooked up to HDMI. I’m assuming OP wants something like that, just a media player for the CRT, and not a full fledged media server which can power everything.