I use Kodi on a Shield to play any local files I want to watch, which reside on a USB-attached SSD.

Results have been pretty good, although it suffers from some non-intuitive UI design... the sort of which also plagues other media applications I've tried.

Let me try it on my computer... OK, specifically, Kodi says, "your library is currently empty. To populate it... enter "Files" section, add a media source, and configure it."

So I did that, and navigated to a directory that contains some video files. There's no way to "add" it. Clicking on it opens it. And so on for contents. If you click on a video file, it just plays it.

Then there's no control for going back to the home screen. You can go up to a parent directory, but once at the top you're stuck there. On an Android TV you have a Back button on your remote, but there's no control for it on the computer UI.

This is disappointing.