Hello!
Regarding what Gamers Nexus recently disclosed regarding LG TVs in their latest video I think its finally time to do what I can to mitigate it.
I cant root it since the firmware is too new and I cant afford a new TV either. My best bet would be blocking all LG IPs network-wide and disconnecting it from the network. (Although I understand even that might not be enough, its the best I can do right now)
I was thinking of using an old Raspberry to atleast access youtube and my media server, however I dont know what would be a good OS/distro to run this on. Preferably I would want to use something like an old PS4 controller as the remote.
Anyone here who has any suggestions or living room setups to suggest? Any and all tips are welcome.
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There’s no best answer right now, Plasma Bigscreen is making good progress.
I have to imagine they’ll soon be putting cellular antennas in the TVs to circumvent all that anyway.
That’ll be expensive so I don’t think it’ll be happening. They’ll be OK with collecting data from the 95% of their customers who don’t know how to block the TV from having internet access.
That’s true even the premium brands won’t halfway decent CPUs in them to keep the giant bloated menus from stuttering.
plasma-bigscreen looks nice, would it go on a RPI 4? and are they spy-ey? they have google as a patron.
Not running on a Pi yet, any spying would depend on the distro. There’s no dedicated Bigscreen distro yet but I’m pretty sure it’s being worked on.
So I would need to put Linux on my device then put plasma big screen over that?
Yes but I recommend waiting until someone makes a version of Linux specifically for Bigscreen because it’s not really ready yet
Not a popular answer, but Apple TV is the best out of the box experience. Zero ads, massive longevity. Mine is like 7 years old and still running the latest tvOS.
If you have the cash and inclination, Nvidia Shield is the hackers choice. Zero hardware upgrades in years tho, but software aplenty.
Just don’t let your smart TV access the internet in any situation, there’s no need. It’s just a stupid display.
Zero ads
The launcher is a massive ad for Apple’s services though.
What? There’s one icon that says “TV”. You can move it to the bottom and you won’t see any apple stuff beyond that.
Apple TV’s launcher was recently “updated” to showcase whatever latest content is being pushed through Apple’s own services. Which is advertisement.
What ”launcher”? The TV app? You can just move it away. There is no launcher anywhere, every service along with AppleTV+ is just a separate application
Launcher, home screen, app screen, whateveryouwannacallit of an Apple TV unit.
Remember, we’re talking about a replacement for shitty ad-infested “smart” TV interfaces - not an app. Apple’s TV app is not relevant here.
Apple TV the device has no ads, zero, nada.
You are very wrong. We have two Apple TV units. They absolutely have ads now. The homescreen background used to be clear, and now it’s a non-stop showcase of bullshit games, shows, and other nonsense that nobody asked for.
Wtf? Where? I have three and zero ads.
If I select a top row app, that application can “advertise” what’s new on the top half of the screen. That’s it.
If I select a top row app, that application can “advertise” what’s new on the top half of the screen.
Yes. They are advertising to you. That’s what “ad” is short for: “advertisement”.
Apple TV units have ads.
check out: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
This looks exactly like what I was looking for! Thank you!
I wonder what kind of hardware to best run this on to watch YouTube, Jellyfin, Disney+…
I do have a steam machine on the TV anyway. Is it possible to run this on Steam OS? And without having to fiddle so much when just wanting to watch TV?
A raspberry pi running Kodi has been serving me well for years.
Easy install paths include LibreELEC and osmc. I believe both are based on debian.
FWIW I chose and have been happy with osmc.
Regardless of the choice, Kodi has a plugin system for things like YouTube, you can access your media via the jellyfin plugin/app, or by pointing Kodi at your media. It has a remote app available on android and iOS, and for the most part just works.
I couldn’t find a working YouTube app on Kodi, nor any of the streaming sites (besides Disney plus oddly) nor Plex. It kinda felt like a real debrid frontend and graveyard of plugins.
Don’t use youtube if you care about your privacy.
Counterpoint: do use YouTube if you care about your privacy but want to use YouTube and understand the risk.
It’s like those people who say “I couldn’t be vegetarian because I can’t give up bacon”: ok great, be vegetarian plus bacon. Save a shit ton of cows and chickens in the process.
Good enough is still good.
For people like me who don’t want to sail the high seas, how do you watch Netflix, Paramount and other subscription services with Kodi? Isn’t it just easier to use a browser at this point?
There are third party clients for a lot of streaming services as kodi add-ons. Here for example is the add-on for P+: https://www.matthuisman.nz/2021/06/paramount-plus-kodi-add-on.html
Please keep in mind that I haven’t used these for years and can make no comment on whether they still work. There are also some inherent limitations. Quality will be caped at 720p for example because widewine Linux bullshit
LibreELEC is definitely not based on Debian. I’m using CoreELEC and it works great too (same thing with different hardware support). It takes some time to understand the UI initially I admit. You’ll want CatchUpTV and Youtube addons (the latter breaks regularly as Google is preventing adblocking).
I’ve also been running Kodi on a raspbery pi and have been happy with it. Only issue I’ve had with the pi is I can’t get the overscan settings to work with retropie. But kodi has adjustments for the screen size so it works fine.
This is the setup I’ve built so far:
I use KonstaKang’s LineageOS Android TV build running on a pi 5: https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi5/LineageOS23-ATV/
No Google play services store at all, I just use ADB to install apps
This is the launcher I use, it’s way nicer than the stock Lineage one: https://github.com/meddouribadis/arclauncher/
I use SmartTube as my YouTube client: https://github.com/yuliskov/smarttube/
I have this Bluetooth remote app on my phone for the rare occasion I need to type a password or something: https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.jqssun.btremote
I also have KDE Connect on both my phone and TV so I can play/pause media from my phone at any time and send files (like new launcher wallpapers) easily without adb.
For the real “TV feeling”, try ErsatzTV. It basically creates multiple real-time streams of TV shows and movies from your media library. You can switch between them like channels.
Abandon ware now
Really? https://github.com/ErsatzTV/next looks pretty active to me…?
Huh. Must have gotten someone to take over, last I’d heard the maintainer was archiving it. At least according to Chris on Linux Unplugged a couple months ago.
Hey welcome to the hobby!
We personally have the whole TV on a Vlan, so it can’t acces anything at all. While our server/HA can still send a WOL command to it, and jellyfin can stream our movies to it. I run all of it on top of TrueNas, most as an app or else an VM.
I have never tried to set something up for YouTube specifically, since that runs on a Chromecast (for now…)
Let me know how your journey goes
That sounds like a good plan. I’m fairly new to the network game, how did you setup the firewalls between TV VLAN and your home network. I would like to have home assistant and jellyfin to access the TV (e.g. HA sees ‘running’ status of TV, TV can connect to jellyfin) but block the rest.
Did you use port-based blocking in your firewall?
Two approaches:
Network isolation/DNS blocking - put the TV on a VLAN and only permit specific ports through to a media server (whatever the TV will support). If you lack VLAN capability, run PiHole as your DNS server (it works best as DNS and DHCP, but that’s just my opinion for things I like, such as proper name resolution for all devices).
Second option: (your idea with a Pi) disconnect TV from network entirely, then run something like Kodi (or whatever media center you prefer) on an old laptop, mini-PC, whatever, and have that device connect via HDMI. HDMI can passthrough the navigation controls from the TV remote (not guaranteed, but it’s part of the standard). I looked into this a long time ago but the performance wasn’t there yet. Today I’d probably try any distro and run Kodi on it.
Even my POS Samsung passes through enough of the controls to navigate Kodi on a 2017 laptop, while retaining power, volume, settings, etc for the TV itself.
My current setup is a Jellyfin server and Jellyfin client on the TV. I run PiHole with a blocklist for all the Samsung BS which has had the side effect of making the TV menus faster as it doesn’t retrieve any “what’s new” info from Samsung. Its actually kind of fun to monitor the FNS log and see the domains the TV hits, click Deny and see what breaks in the TV. On average about 30% of all DNS requests on my network get denied, and nothing of value has been lost. That’s how much crap is being sent all the time.
Hope that gives you some ideas.
Before I fully understood what pihole was doing, it does not block out going things, it was amazing to see how much ad poop was trying to get to my TV. As I got more and more into this very inexpensive hobby of home labing /s I decided just to remove the TV from my wifi and my pihole went from blocking in the high 60% range to something more like the mid 30% range.
Me personally, I just use a Linux distro (ive used Ubuntu and popos, both have been fine) and use whatever flavor of streaming service I can access. Sometimes you’re hit with lower resolution but I’d rather that than get spied on and be fed ads by my hardware.
Ive also gone back to physical media and use a DVD player. I’m just buying series I like one by one.
This video used a combination of physical media and streaming services. They relied on waydroid and with some workarounds, it worked well for them:
Seriously, I just use my TV as a big computer monitor, connected to a cheap old computer running Linux mint.
Torrent, jellyfin, streaming. Unless you need cable, this works great.
Hell even if you want some kind of cable service, IP TV exists.
IMO no real reason to use android TV or a smart TV right now.
Open the TV and pull the wifi antennas off the board.
It’s been a while for me (I don’t upgrade things that work and I try to buy things that last a long time…)
But, Hotel Mode might still be a thing, and it might bypass some “smart” stuff on the TV
I used that to make my TV start on the correct external HDMI port for my MythTV instance running on Arch Linux (btw) with dual TV tuners in.
The TV is rarely used to watch live TV and it’s certainly not connected to any networking.
Just another approach that I’ve not seen mentioned here
Old laptop, debian, Firefox, g60s remote. Done.
Im on a 2013 m93p thinkcenter tiny. Still goes hard
I use ONN Android boxes. Fairly inexpensive, but I think it’s difficult to set up without a Google account (you can create a dummy account on the setup).
Side-loading is trivial. Some favorite apps: TizenTube to replace YouTube (or any of a dozen or so frontends), Projectivy launcher to replace the awful default. Add an always on VPN.
Not sure why you got downvoted. I use similar Mi boxes. I hate google but the tv has a throw away tv email. I would love to not have google involved.
I then have productivity launcher which i quite like. If i am wrong happy to be pointed in the right direction. generally use stremio/jelly/smartube
Probably because those android set-top boxes are usually malware top to bottom.
Yeh, agree. But for a lot of people they are the easiest option after Amazon/google/apple etc
Not everyone is techy enough to have means to pull components together and configure, And then put up with semi reliable solutions. People need to acknowledge this rather than downvote. It’s weird.
Its Lemmy, don’t expect too much.
Jellyfin for shows and movies, Chora for Navidrome Music, and it works as a perfect little access to your homeserver.
I haven’t found an Android box that runs without Google services.
Kodi on a Pi is just meh at best imo.
I’m still using an old Apple TV. I’m not happy about it but haven’t found a good replacement yet.
There’s a few interesting options for software in this thread. In terms of hardware - maybe a NUC or something? Would have to be small, quiet and relatively cheap.
I just saw this video a few minutes ago and it seems like a pretty good approach.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=nROKp0BpFek
It looks very similar to a post here from several months ago.
