Imperfect, Linux-powered, DIY smart TV is the embodiment of ad fatigue

A while ago I hacked root on my LG tv, but eventually I gave up on the war against spying/ads and just unchecked all the agreements, unplugged the network from it, and hooked up a $20 Onn 4k tv box instead.

Now it does everything I want. It has an unlockable bootloader, root, can run custom roms, all the good things.

I have a laptop and an HDMI cable. The laptop is a really nice remote control. It even has its own screen and keyboard.

I gotta admit, it's pretty LoTek of him to strap a partially dismantled Lenovo laptop to the back of this thing, but... couldn't he have just used a mini PC that's designed to be mounted to the VESA mounts present on many flat-panel TVs?

I used an Apple TV for the longest time, but as more of my content shifted from pure consumption to more interactive live streams or YouTube videos that often serve as a jumping off point for research, the artificial limitations of the platform came to bear.

A Windows PC is the easiest thing for this, so I built one. LTSC with all of the annoying crap turned off, Firefox with extensions, fast, upgradable hardware. Full keyboard and trackpad, plus smaller pointer and keyboard devices scattered around.

The costs of doing so are the cost of buying a cheap used SFF PC from eBay or a new miniPC and a few hours of setup. An N100 box can be had for less than $200 USD with enough horsepower to due basically any HTPC task you want, including ones the STB makers wouldn't allow you to do like emulate old consoles or install whatever software you want.

TV has a fixed IP, which is not allowed to leave the local network. I stream my entertainment from an Nvidia Shield and when I am done both are powered off on the power strip. Problem solved.

Roku with a pihole is fairly tolerable. I do hate how they keep adding shit to my home screen that I don’t want though.

And I use MythTV[0] myself. I've gotten a lot of hate from other HNers about that ("why aren't you using $MEDIAPLATFORM instead?" "That's so old, you should use Kodi, instead" -- when Kodi is older than MythTV.).

No, it's not the slickest interface. And no, it's not the most full-featured. But it doesn't spy on me (like Kodi, Emby and/or others) and it doesn't try to show me ads either.

I don't run it off a broken laptop (a fanless minipc for the front end and a VM for the back end), like in TFA, but it works nicely and does what I need of it -- and most of all, it doesn't spy on me or try to show me ads. That's a win!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythTV

Edit: Added missing link.

Real talk -- where is the guerilla, f the system, Linux WM/DE designed for TVs?

It just seems weird that this doesn't seem to exist. Like, you get something close to it and then it becomes Kodi or something.

I still wish a Framework-like "smart" TV was a thing.

A lot of folks are choosing to buy Hisense dumb TVs and pair them with either an Nvidia Shield or Apple TV 4K

Discussed recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40869173 63 points, 19 days ago, 34 comments

I'd really like to have a more headless system like Chromecast. I'm contrast to here, to this media PC needing its own dedicated input device. Anyone in the family should be able to open their phone & manipulate the current session collaboratively.

I've been kind of ok with Jellyfin-mpv-shim on devices as display server. Jellyfin has the everloving worst most anti-filesystem ridiculous media management, and the Android client can be pretty finicky, desyncing and needing restarts, or having its themeing get messed up & becoming unreadable. But I've kind of learned to live with it. Eventually everything plays.

I also broke out BubbleUPNP again recently & it's been pretty good. Particularly after setting up a BubbleUPNP transcode service on my media server, it's become quite reliable, and has always been quite the Swiss army knife of taking whatever media you have and sending it to whatever device you want. It's not open source & not ideal for keeping track & progressing through a bunch of shows over time, but it mind of shows that the UPNP dream, conceptually, was pretty awesome.

Hoping eventually Open Screen Protocol starts materializing for real. Matter Cast is out but it's a travesty, the most un-interoperable load of crap where your tv seemingly has to already know how to go download a custom native app to work, 100% anti open anything. Open Screen Protocol looks conceptually great, like a way to have a thick client but a dumb one that only runs whatever your phone tells it to. Please please please.

I do this with hyprland lpading jellyfin and a firestick blietooth temote. It mostly works fine on an n100 beelink box

Does any of these solutions give you (unpirated of course) Netflix at 4k?

Nice subject and project, but this article is LLM-generated, right?