hyperion.ng VS FastLED

You can DIY your own with a IC-based RGB/RGBW strip and a rPi or x86 PC + ESP microcontroller using software like Hyperion or HyperHDR, combined with WLED.

You might be able to run an app on your TV, but unless you root it, you will be limited to DRM-free streams. If you have a spare Wyze and HDMI capture card, this is probably the easiest way to grab the video stream. There's no need to run piOS; Hyperion will run fine under Linux, MacOS or Windows using the latest release.

What other ambient light implementations are out there? A cursor look suggest hyperion.ng maybe?

Yeah the github page is a much better starting point.

Creating an ambilight effect requires you to have something that can read the screen to determine what lights to show, so that basically requires decoding and processing a video stream in real time which is beyond the capabilities of most typical MCU's like those used for WLED. There is a project called Hyperion but that requires a full Raspberry Pi and a USB HDMI capture card. There are lots of tutorials for this on YouTube

This is the official repo: https://github.com/hyperion-project/hyperion.ng

Any reason you decided to "reinvent the wheel" instead of using an existing solution like Prismatic or Hyperion?

I used the examples from here https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/wiki/Multiple-Controller-Examples

Sweet. Then pretty much any arduino or other microcontroller would take care of what you need. The strips only take one output pin plus power and ground so just about everything will work for driving them. They act like a long shift register so the single pin is all that's needed to load the full strip with whatever patterns you want regardless of the length. You just have to tell it how many LEDs there are in total is all. Check out the FastLED library. You can learn more about it there and/or install the library in the IDE by pressing "ctrl shift I" for windows or "command shift I" for mac and search for it in the upper search area and install it right there. It comes with working examples too so all you would have to do is install the library, load one of the new example sketches that came with it, and probably edit the example to change the NUM_LEDS count to match what you're working with.