this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Android

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Anyone know about lineageos tv? It looks cool, but there might be some issues I dont know about not using it yet.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I am still using a dumb LG TV from the before times, and love it. I fear the day that I need to replace it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

I have an old "smart" Vizio TV from like 2012 (?) that has outlasted 2 new 4k smart TVs. I'll stick with this guy till it pops

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

There are still dumb TVs, they just cost the same as a smart TV.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I have an old laptop with Linux Mint hooked to my TV. Firefox with some bookmarks to different streaming services, Freetube with subscriptions, sunshine/moonlight to my gaming PC and emulators to play some retro adventures with my kids. I remote controll it with KDE Connect from my phone. Works great!
I used to fiddle with Kodi on a Raspberry Pi, but the laptop is so simple and easy to set up, I don't see myself going back.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

You don't even need a laptop for all of this, you can use your phone.

I stream games with it all the time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

My phone doesn't have HDMI, I don't know how to share the screen with my TV. Plus I have an USB drive with a lot of movies attached to the computer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

You can plug one of these things into the USB-C port of your phone and it basically turns it into a little PC.

Edit: My phone is old and was cheap, so I use an active USB-C to Hdmi converter.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

This looks like it costs more than my old laptop, which I saved from becoming e-waste. But I tend to forget we're already living in the future and hubs like this exists. So, thanks for reminding me, I'll look into it. :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

I would use a smart tv if it ran entirely on a raspberry pi compute module that I provide running only software I explicitly installed on it (like an intigrated computer only with a raspberry pi).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I have my Google TV in apps only mode. If Google can still see that I pirate literally everything I watch, and circumvent YouTube ads with it then, well, maybe it sends a message.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

I just replaced the dashboard on mine.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Just buy a computer monitor

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago

Do you know any 55 inches computer monitor?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago

Monitors are starting to move in this direction. Samsung has a notorious 5k Apple Studio competitor that wants to connect to the Internet and uses the same interface as their Galaxy smartphones.

Standby. Winter is coming for monitors as well.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 days ago

I just don't connect my Hisense to the Internet, and let my Nvidia Shield TV do all the "Smart" stuff. πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I have a TCL ROKU TV which is way too chatty on my network. It sends every single keypress on the remote to their servers (just look into the dev console which is easy enough to see what is logged). I have an adblock dns server on my network

These are just in the last 23 minutes of the hour. As I understand, it's not always doing this if they are not blocked, but when you block them, it starts to panic!

The advantage of doing this is instead of having the ad on the right side of the home menu, I have a nice translucent adbox with nothing in it.. Also, if you look up the secret codes for Roku menus, you can also toggle the ad server they use so sometimes if some slip through, you get some in house tested ones which are sometimes funny. But that's extremely rare for us.

Our next TV will probably be a display or offline only and be a streaming box with custom firmware such as Librelec or something else when the time comes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

I can't find the source, but at some point there were reports of a fridge with a WiFi module that would overheat and die if you blocked it at the router.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

If it was dumb then how would it collect your data and show you ads?

Anyway modern TVs are expensive to produce to they artificially lower the price by making money elsewhere. (Just look at the buttons on your remote)

If you want a dump TV you could look into digital signage. Spoiler: it is $$$$$

[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 days ago (3 children)

are there custom ROMs for TVs like there are for Android phones?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

LineageOS supports Chromecast with Android TV, haven't tried it myself though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Only for TV boxes as far as I can tell

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Not on that number. I think there is lineage os for shield tv but I'm not sure about anything else

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

There is and works perfectly!

[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 days ago

I recently bought a projector that I had to trick into not connecting to Wifi by telling it that it was connected to ethernet until it gave up. It will never know the wifi password. It gets an HDMI signal, it shows the HDMI signal, that is its purpose.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

I don't know what brand the author got, but Google's own software has a setting to get rid of the Google stuff: https://support.google.com/googletv/answer/10408998?hl=en

As for the performance: TV manufacturers have used terrible SoCs ever since the first chip hit TVs. That's why you shouldn't buy TVs online without evaluating them in a store. I have a TV where all of the smart crap died of years ago and it was sluggish our of the factory. But it's not just that; even devices like Chromecast slow down over time as more features get added, higher bitrates are being decoded, and more advanced video formats start to get used.

Set up your TV in basic TV mode, don't buy bottom of the barrel TVs expecting a premium experience, and use some kind of replaceable, external device if you want smooth media playback. TVs and TV hardware are ridiculously cheap these days (just check the inflation correction on a VHS back in the day, VHS players and DVDs went for what equates to about 2000 dollars today!).

You get what you pay for. And if you're using ad driven stuff, you're getting a discount, so don't expect anything to get cheaper by kicking out all the data collection software.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The "You get what you pay for" excuse doesn't hold up. My 77-inch LG OLED cost over $3k USD. It's still full of ads and spies on me unless i neuter it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

$3k for a 77 inch OLED seems pretty cheap to me. You can go cheaper with Samsung TVs, but if you thought WebOS was full of ads, you haven't seen what Samsung is capable of. I can't imagine these companies making any profit on the hardware for that price.

If you want a TV without the spyware, look for digital signage displays. LG's listed price for their OLED displays is "contact us", but you can find their 77" IPS displays for about $3600 and 55" 1080p displays for about $6k. Other OLED digital signage displays can be had for cheaper, but not for 77"-OLED-for-$3k cheap.

The drive to "biggest, brightest TVs for the least amount of money" has truly ruined the consumer TV market. Even the luxury brands have realised that consumers would rather have ads shoved down their throats than pay a couple hundred dollars extra and it shows.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

The author of the article is under the mistaken impression that bundling the "smart" features into the TV increases the price. It's actually the opposite.

By injecting ads and bloatware into the TVs, the manufacturers earn more money, by far, than the cost of the features. A dumb TV would cost more.

The best solution is to decouple them; get the cheapest TV you can with the video quality/size you want, then attach your own device to stream content. I use a modified Fire Stick due to price, mostly with Stremio/Torrentio/Debrid, but there are lots of options.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (2 children)

that works until they start connecting to wifi networks that are open, or to which they somehow got to know the credentials

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

This, or show an annoying popup over the screen saying it can't connect to network and wifi needs to be configured

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Fake news, as far as I can tell. Lots of claims this is happening, but nobody has brought receipts. Considering how easy it would be to catch, and how likely illegal it is to connect to and use networks without permission, this is definitely an urban legend.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Lots of claims this is happening

I don't know of this is happening, but I don't see how a small automatic updare couldn't "add this feature"

Considering how easy it would be to catch,

how easy it would be?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Super easy. Anyone who knows networking could detect new device connections on an open network they set up. I know next to nothing about networking and I could set it up in 10 minutes, 5 of which would be finding my old router in the basement.

So I'm not going to give this a moment's thought until someone brings receipts. It's not hard to check if this is happening.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Anyone who knows networking could detect new device connections on an open network they set up.

assuming that it will connect to your network. if it connects anywhere else, good luck to figure it out. at that point you can throw a laptop with capturing all nearby wifi traffic and hope you somehow recognize the TV if it appears among the possibly dozens of other devices

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

I don't think you're understanding how trivial this is to detect:

Set up an open WiFi network in an area without any other open WiFi networks. i.e. almost anywhere outside of dense urban areas. Then you don't even need to inspect traffic, just look at connected devices in admin controls. No devices should be connected aside from your monitoring device.

There's no way the TV manufacturers are going to risk the legal quagmire that would come from this when there's no plausible way to keep it remotely secret.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Don't connect them to the internet. Problem solved.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Google TV and others require it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

??? I got a Sharp Android TV this year and it just works without connecting

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago

Nah. Not good enough for me. I thought I would just do that but the thing still has to boot android in order to show you the HDMI input. So it has to constantly suck power like a vampire in order to keep a SoC running, and if it loses power, it has to boot the system again.

I got a cheap TCL and it smells like burning plastic, even when its "off". I suspect it's because of that SoC constantly running.

Next time I'm buying a computer monitor instead of a smart-but-not-connected TV.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

These smart tvs just suck. All these integrated systems. Much better off having a seperate device like Roku or Chromecast.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

You seem to be under the impression that Roku and Chromecast don't do the exact same things.

There is no good solution because connecting a Pi or something is not as good as modern TVs without an AV1 decoder and it also doesn't have a good remote interface as far as I know.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I went down the Pi 4B with Kodi path. It wasn't very reliable. It was just sometimes when I went to watch something, it just was broken. And I had to go through troubleshooting instead of watching whatever I had turned it on for.

I ended up with an Amazon firestick. Even using Kodi (and smarttube) on that works faster and more reliably.

But then I have the Amazon firestick nosing around in everything I do lol. But I did disconnect my TV from the internet....

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