I used to have players like a Popcorn Hour, later a Dune Player. But I don't need that anymore; the NAS has been enhanced with Plex, and any Chromecast, Amazon Stick, etc. serves as a player; with newer TVs, this certainly works directly (or with my current devices via DLNA, but that's inconvenient).
I'm also not very keen on external TV boxes. They cost quite a bit of money, and things like recordings have never interested me. Especially since the TV program itself is so bad that the TVs at our place are rarely used for watching TV, but as a display for streaming. The keyword "gray area" can of course be an argument, but if you're already moving in this "gray area," you can get all the content from the net anyway. And I don't really need RTL2 in HD either.