> Tip: Hand this article to an AI agent (like Claude Code) and have it guide you through the setup. It can run the ADB commands for you and adapt them to your device.
Like "curl | bash" but... with a million times more computation.
> Like "curl | bash" but... with a million times more computation.
At least with `curl | bash` the originating website needs to be compromised. With AI, there are about a million different ways for it to go wrong and blow up your entire HDD.
Claude has done amazing things for my Chromecast. Plex released an update recently that broke the UI badly. File names and thumbnails were overlapping each other which made the UI unusable, I couldn't navigate. I asked Claude to get the latest .apk, and fix it - and fix it, it did, all without me having to touch a command line. It even took screenshots of the chromecast screen to verify the results. I had it add a few other things like showing the media duration below the title and fixing the delete feature.
I had problems getting the Chromecast to connect to my IKEv2 home vpn at an airbnb, so I told Claude to fix it. It figured out there was no good way to make the existing VPN client apps work on my chromecast, so it wrote a new VPN client for me that works perfectly, all in about 20 minutes without me needing to do much more than supply my certs.
It also fixed SmartTube to work on my phone, the official app only shows 5 videos, Claude fixed the .apk to show 100+ thumbnails.
I just want to buy a "Stupid TV" I wonder if such a brand would sell very sell "JustWatch TV" people in stores seeing how quickly it turns on, and just works, no internet questions, just a TV working. Must be revolutionary, can't believe we never thought of having TVs without an entire invasive OS that slows down the entire TV...
Every smart TV I own never gets internet access, ever. I just plug a real device that connects to the internet instead, they're a much faster and better experience.
You may want that but you won't like its unsubsidised price.
Like it or not it's no longer viable to sell to consumers at "cost plus margin" - you're sold a loss-making unit and the size of the loss is based on how much LTV they expect of you.
Be happy it's cheaper for you, but be aware that as an informed consumer who's not plugging in your device you have negative LTV and are thus not the product's target customer and sadly are actually kind of leeching off their business model.
I'm sure you wouldn't do that if you had a choice. But the old business model is unviable now so no one's left except these jerks.
Monitors have also gotten incredibly cheap, and there's Sceptre who sell dumb TVs that are pretty cheap. So I don't really buy that they're selling TVs at a loss.
There is no reason to be happy about father enshittification which is exactly what you are describing here. Yet another produce that is getting worst while also not getting cheaper.
Yep. I wanted a decent sized OLED with good image quality. Couldn't find anything remotely like what I was looking for in a commercial option, so I said screw it, cashed out some credit card rewards, and bought a spyware LG TV that never gets connected to the internet. Display itself is gorgeous. Set it to start up on the last used input (the AV receiver). Video sources connect to the AVR and those get managed individually depending on what access they need to function.
Naturally I would say, but that doesn't have speakers... but you can't even buy a TV without having to buy a soundbar or any sort of sound system anymore. Infuriating.
A pair of bookshelf speakers will always dominate whatever speakers the TV comes with. It's a mandatory replacement in any case. There isn't enough physical space in a TV for good sound. Soundbars are crap.
I'm sure you're right, but it's very funny to be someone with a pretty good ear in some regards (I played in band in school and sang for many years, so I'm quite sensitive to intonation/instrument balance in music) that apparently has zero ability to mind poor speaker quality - I find the speakers on board my piece of shit 10+-year-old Samsung tv I bought from facebook marketplace perfectly adequate for general use.
It just goes to show how much taste is learned. Not even to say it's subjective (which of course it is at least in part), just that it's a skill that needs to be developed, and, at least in part, a curse. I remember thinking 480p was quite crisp quality, now I find 720p DVDs charmingly rustic.
Or a TV where you can rip out the internals and replace them with some cheap dumb board. Not sure where you'd find a reputable one, though, as that's the perfect audience for hidden backdoors.
Just buy a TV and don't connect it to the Internet. I have even seen people remove the WiFi daughterboard. That's essentially your "very large monitor." You absolutely do not have to endure the adware and privacy invasion of content recognition and other spyware. Beat the TV manufacturers at their own game.
> Just buy a TV and don't connect it to the Internet.
There are some TVs that eventually pop-up a “please connect” or similar message over any display (even if just using it to display content from another device via HDMI) if they have not been connected for some time, so that you can't permanently use them disconnected. I forget which brand(s)/models are involved, it was talked about in at least one of Louis Rossman's rants so you might find some details in the consumer rights wiki he is associated with.
There will be ways around this of course, though they might involve mucking about in a way the average TV user will not want to risk playing aroud with (rooting the device so you can alter an internal clock that is not affected by any clock you can modify on the UI, or pulling a battery backup out so everything resets (assuming the clock's state is not stored in solid state memory than needs no powered at all to maintain)).
All well & good, except how do you know until you've had it sat in your home working for × amount of time? The information is hardly easy to find, no box or advert for a TV says (except perhaps in very very small print) “will not work properly without an Internet connection”. Returning it is going to be a faf just physically, convincing the seller that the problem is a defect and not acceptable behaviour as designed is going to be fun too.
Things being too much hassle to fight is what a lot of the invasions of our privacy and other rights are based upon, hence 80-page click-through licences, difficult cancellation processes, labyrinthine stalking preference pop-overs on web sites/apps, etc.
That might fly here (UK) under the consumer rights act (which replaced the earlier sale of good act in 2015), particularly the distance selling provisions, but certainly not everywhere. Even here some would try to argue that it isn't a defect but a valid “behaviour as designed” for a product sold as internet connected so you might not get a refund purely on that basis without a jolly good set-to.
> There are some TVs that eventually pop-up a “please connect”
This seems to be supported by the below link. It isn't a "please connect," but initial setup requires a Roku account. So the conclusion is do not buy a Roku TV, or Roku anything.
Everyone here talking about how hard it is to get one.
My 2018 Samsung TV has smart features, but is not internet connected. It turns on quickly and right to the selected source - no brain cells harmed having to look at ads. It slightly bugs out sometimes, but I assume this to be a general issue.
I think to be considered a television, you still need to be able to receive OTA broadcasts. With modern digital television, that now means you need a H264 (H265, soon maybe) decoder.
I don't know if you can do that cheaper than a SoC, which makes adding "smartness" (even if it's bad) not that much more expensive.
The thing is "smart tvs" are actually cheaper than dumb tvs would be, specifically because they can make money on the advertising.
Anyway, google TVs (like my TCL tv) let you use them in dumb mode, which is what I do. I just have it wired to my Apple TV 4k (the least bad of the smart tv boxes that support HDCP) and thats good enough for me.
This is pretty much the exact setup I have on my Chromecast minus button mapper since I use a Sofabaton remote for control. I ended up finding Wholpin after getting especially angry one day at the horrible way that Jellyfin deals with seeking the requires manually pressing play to start the video again.
Oh wow, TIL about Wholphin. I'll have to give that a try. I wonder if this will finally resolve the issue with me having to login to JellyFin every few days for no apparent reason (it's not the server, I switched from Win to Linux and same problem).
EDIT: all that remains for this stack is a good browser that can allow usage of uBlock Origin. BrowseHere is a pain to use with its constant nags about allowing pop-ups on certain sites...
Yeah I don't doubt that. My phones and PC are always fine also. I use an ONN 4K device for the TV. The first month or two was ok. Then I updated the app at one point and it's never been the same since. I've uninstalled and reinstalled and changed to Projectivy and tried some other loaders as well, and the problem just keeps coming back. We'll see if this Wholphin client changes anything.
> the issue with me having to login to JellyFin every few days for no apparent reason
I only get shown the login prompt when the network connection to my server isn't established yet. I'm on Wi-Fi and need to wait for the connection before launching the client.
It's a fork of the original AOSP WebKit browser, which I've found to be much faster than Chromium-based browsers, and you can import your uBlock Origin filters.
> Google TV, the default interface on most Android TV devices, puts a large banner at the top of the home screen promoting whatever Google wants you to watch next.
You know, I don't give a shit about that, that's fine. Recommend me some stuff to watch, I'm here to watch stuff, I might even like what you're punting and give it a go. I might have forgotten there's a new season of whatever it is. I even quite like some of the inline recommendation stuff.
What made me switch to App-only mode was that ads started appearing for general consumer products. So this writeup is interesting, if/when they make app-only mode advertise shampoo at me I'll probably have a go with that launcher.
I have a similar setup and want to mention Moonfin as another excellent alternative Jellyfin client besides the one recommended here, Wholphin. I just tried several and Moonfin was the only one whose UI didn't feel needlessly clunky to me.
This is similar to my setup, except I use FLauncher instead. In addition, I run Netguard on my Android TV and completely block Google Play along with a hundred other services. I only give Google Play internet access whenever I have to update a streaming app. One had connection issues the first time I set up Netguard, so I had to look at the logs and open some specific ports to get it working. But all the streaming apps work now, and the TV can't display ads. For the most part, I don't update things on the TV. It all works too well right now.
Also +1 to Wholphin! That app is phenomenal. It gives the whole family the "Netflix-like" experience.
I use wolphin. Biggest thing for me is the seeking. I press < or > and it seeks, now. Default Android Jellyfin client seeking is really unpleasant. Some other smaller niceties, too.
It was very underhanded of Google to add advertising after the fact. When I have to factory reset the TV I'm reminded of how it used to be before it upgrades. Years later they still haven't [1] updated the screenshots in their Play store page to show the giant 1/3 full screen ads you get now.
Replacing the Google launcher (I used ATV Launcher Pro) was one of the best quality of life upgrades I've ever done, if you haven't already I highly recommend it.
Not only does Google show auto playing video ads for streaming services you don't subscribe to, it also shows pure auto playing video ads for things like fast food. It really lags while it tries to start up to show the ads.
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Google closes the ADB backdoor when they realise all the sweet ad dollars they're losing.
We seriously need some "you own your hardware" laws - before the likes of Google tighten every bolt and implement enough "security" to firmly lock the users out of their own devices.
It's dead obvious that companies like Apple and Google and Sony and John Deere lock their hardware down to protect their revenue streams - not to help the users in any way. And yet, they're peddling the lie of "security" - and have been getting away with it for decades.
Now that AI is there to give even an average user a leg up when it comes to things like "I don't want to see ads in my TV's menus, can you do something about it", the companies will see more and more reasons to implement more "security" to stop it. And modern "security" measures are hard to defeat with technical measures - so this has to be curbed with legal action instead.
Stockholder value is now predicated entirely on things like recurring revenue, growth, and MBA short-term profit seeking. Enshittification of existing SaaS and 'smart' products is a feature, not a bug.
Unless something drastically changes in the US stock market, any publicly traded technology company of significant size is basically mandated to prostrate themselves to the altar of fiduciary responsibility to stockholders.
Or Driving? BMW had to pivot over initial outrage, but in 2022, they launched a "Functions on Demand" program that required drivers to pay a $18 monthly or $180 annual subscription to unlock physical heated seats and heated steering wheels.
You might be giving Google's PR a bit too much credit there, at least its current PR. A large part of their reputation in the minds of the general public (who don't keep an eye on the machinations of the ad tech world) comes from inertia from their useful products particularly from times when “do no evil” was still a goal for them, and the fact that people just don't think the extra step “if this is free, how is it being paid for?” and might not even care if they did. Most people who are not into tech/business/both never even knew or cared that Google's income is mostly ad based, so they had nothing to forget in that regard.
I think you need look no further than the fact that they removed “don’t be evil” from the top of their code of conduct for evidence that their PR isn’t great. It was an essentially meaningless move and the headlines wrote themselves.
They (Android TV devices, mine was a FireStick 4K Max) also don't give a fuck about displaying things that are inappropriate; ours showed banners for horror films on several occasions, during the day when my children are about and scaring them.
It's much harder to switch out the launcher on a FireStick, but I did manage it briefly before it started boot looping right around 1yr of ownership, so it's e-waste now.
> When I have to factory reset the TV I'm reminded of how it used to be before it upgrades.
Even the idea of needing or being able to factory resetting a TV seems like such a downgrade. I haven’t regularly watched TV in some quarter of a century, and I remember channel switching being effectively instant. Nowadays when I’m at someone’s home and have to mess with the TV, it takes so long to even go up or down one channel.
There’s a non-bloat explanation for channel switching taking time at least.
Now that all TV is digital (even OTA), it’s subject to the same quirks as streaming video on the web, and that includes how the picture will become garbled if you render it before gathering a sufficient amount of data. To prevent that, TVs and cable boxes take a moment or two to pull in enough data to render a clean picture when switching channels, which is where the delay comes from.
this is a telephone-game explanation of keyframes. Each video stream periodically includes a keyframe or I-frame (independent frame) which is a complete encoded picture in its own right. Other frames are P-frames which are diffs from the previous frame. A stream typically includes a keyframe every few seconds. If you want to accurately decode a stream starting in the middle of it, you need to start at the next keyframe.
Some players will take an initial placeholder image such as a grey screen and start applying P-frames on top of it anyway, which gives a corrupted image that still has some information (shapes of moving characters are often recognisable) until the keyframe comes. Others wait for the keyframe and display a black screen, a frozen screen or a loading spinner until then.
Related, if you've ever seen a low-bitrate stream whose quality seems to get really bad, then slowly fill in, then get really bad again, then slowly fill in again, repeating forever, that comes from a poorly tuned encoder that's not allocating enough bits to each keyframe (so the quality is bad) and then making up the difference in subsequent P-frames.
Sony are even more egregious - unless you opt out within 30 days, you are subject to Binding Arbitration via the Sony EULA for example.
This means you have to settle Disputes between you and Sony through a neutral private arbitrator rather than a judge or jury in a public courtroom, and you give up the right to participate in any class-action tort.
EU protects it at a federated level, and no contract terms can override mandatory local statutory rights. Indeed most US-centric EULA clauses are considered invalid or unenforceable in the EU.
It gets worse - they only introduced this EULA after losing their subscriber database on multiple ocassions.
IANAL but apparently also opting out gives you less power in a mass-tort as your class will consist entirely of a contextually miniscule group.
"Sony's EULA, however, eliminates anyone from a potential class except for individuals who specifically opt out. If a person who opted out later chooses to pursue a claim, the class will, at most, consist of those persons who opted out. Nt enough people will opt out. The class is virtually guaranteed to be too small to make it worth any lawyer undertaking representation. So by opting out, you are registering yourself into a group that has no power and no meaning."
For Indies, sure. For AAA you've got egregious DRM that can compromise your system to an unimaginable degree. These flaws were so structurally dangerous that Microsoft permanently blocked SafeDisc and older versions of SecuROM from executing in Windows 10 onwards.
Capcom in 2016 should have been prosecuted imo - their attempt at "DRM" installed a kernel-level driver (capcom.sys) that intentionally disabled Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention (SMEP), allowing the kernel to execute code in user space...
The current Denuvo DRM to combat 'piracy' (always ALWAYS a pricing issue) is now encouraging both legal and high-seas users to use hypervisor-based bypasses to circumvent its many shortcomings. This is basically handing over the keys to your house in the AI age.
SmartTube is excellent for ad-free YouTube. I've seen others recommend TizenTube, which more closely follows the official YouTube app aesthetic, but to be honest, I prefer the more minimalist look of SmartTube. The fact that it can also play Shorts (where the official YT app tries to push them to your phone) is a nice bonus.
One downside for those who use it: "Free with Ads" movies on YouTube will not play on SmartTube for some reason.
> Replacing the Google launcher (I used ATV Launcher Pro) was one of the best quality of life upgrades I've ever done, if you haven't already I highly recommend it.
I use Projectivy for the same reason. Sucks, because Android TV still has some of the best flexibility in a TV-appropriate OS (compared with other options I could find at least) but their priorities don't line up with mine regarding the ads.
My dad is extremely irritated with Android TVs as a concept. He just wants to watch something and complains about it taking a few minutes on startup to even show the screen where can can select YouTube.
He does not understand that it is just like a phone. Unless you keep it on standby (which he does not want to do: wastes power), it will boot, slowly, till all the subsystems are up and running. The low powered processors, the low speed ssds, and minimal RAM makes everything worse.
Modern TVs use a max of 5 watts on standby. Does he think it's higher? Maybe a watt-meter plug is a simple solution (or it may make him obsess about the power usage when turned on!)
To his credit, there's no technical reason that a processor running tens of billions of instructions per second couldn't immediately respond to menu inputs on the next frame.
Sure, the network might add a perceptible delay, but but the interface could load right away and populate the videos titles and thumbnails as they load.
Your dad is right to not understand that. There is zero reason for any appliance to take longer than a second to turn on from zero power. Even complex systems can use fast boot techniques (i.e. hybernation) to power on quickly without any power draw while idle. All it takes is developers who care and/or consumers who demand better.
Which is an implementation detail with practically no power use on a modern SoC and significantly better than wearing out flash memory in a couple of years.
I wish there was a reasonably cheap, sufficiently powerful TV box compatible with a free distribution Android TV. Something like Graphene/Lineage for TVs. Lineage does in fact have some TV builds, but there is basically no suitable new hardware for it AFAIK.
At the moment the best option still seems to be a somewhat old mini-PC with Linux and Plasma Bigscreen. But you need to add an HDMI-CEC dongle, and airmouse remote, and Waydroid if you want a more typical TV box experience.
Your best bet is indeed a mini PC. I think you can probably still find N100 based mini PCs pretty cheap. As for keyboard, you can find a micro 6" keyboard + touchpad (ie K808) for like $25 on Amazon.
The Onn 4k Pro from Walmart has a pretty powerful processor, is pretty easy to unlock, and seems to be a common target for customizing. The non-pro version definitely works with LineageOS: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/dopinder/
Only the older non-pro one has the LineageOS wiki entry, but the faster pro version's software isn't that different, and it is easily unlocked, so it will probably accept LineageOS just as well.
I've been using Jellyfin for my family for years. But the number of clients is interesting.
The web experience on a desktop/laptop is pretty much the only tolerable experience.
And I appreciate that the alternative clients try and address the poor UX of the default but I still find so many of the basic behaviors missing or inconsistent.
I can't offer anything better but I find it curious.
Anybody remember MythTV and what a pain in the ass it was to setup?
"Hand this article to an AI agent (like Claude Code) and have it guide you through the setup."
Wow times have changed.
https://www.mythtv.org/
The first version of Google TV, an internal demo, was based on MythTV. We had MythTV running against some HDHomeRun tuners, then a transparent webview (a fork of Petit Four-era Android builds since it had great d-pad nav support) running on top of it.
"Apps" were pure JavaScript gadgets, inspired by iGoogle, with custom DOM methods for anything TV-specific: channel changes, tuning info, and so on. With the MythTV demo, we managed to make some pretty fun hybrid apps that did things like pull up related stories about the TV show you were watching (maybe sounds lame now but was kinda cool seeing it for the first time: an iframe over my TV show, holy shit what can't I do with this). Adware was never discussed; we wanted to be a free and hackable OS for the living room.
After heading in this "widgets" direction for about a year, Android had been released and we strongly believed in a strategy based on it, so made the pivot. It was pretty tough, and educational, trying to build consumer products at Google in this era and without any singular unifying vision across the company. I longed for a top-down dictator like Steve Jobs who could cut the crap.. (even if we were judged to be the crap!)
I'm guessing the ad-infested OS from OP has some lineage back to the original Google TV, but of course I'm sure it's barely recognizable now.
Remember? I'm still using it! As great as streaming is it's always an arms race with blocking the ads, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. They're now streaming the actual content off pubads.g.doubleclick.net to make sure if you block ads you don't get to see anything. It also embeds ads in the stream that ffmpeg merges.
MythTV lets me record free to air and skip through the ads.
When my old (2014?) "smart" LG got evicted from Netflix, as in "your TV will not be supported anymore starting August 15th 2026" I vibe-coded a Plasma BigScreen like interface with:
* Firefox in full-screen with a custom extension that makes the web UI of Netflix into something usable by a d-pad remote
* Switchfin (which has a Linux version) works pretty well out of the box
* Some custom Python+GTk apps to watch some public TV channels (they have no DRM and have a good API, so it was very easy, and I can get custom views for what my family watches)
* a nice viewer for Immich albums
* a CD player (I bought a 15EUR external USB DVD player)
Everything using a single UI paradigm, with just the things my family and I actually care for. No ads. No tracking (well, I guess Netflix still does some tracking anyway).
Well, Claude did its magic and it's been vibe-coded. It's a pretty simple setup, I gave it passwordless ssh access to the box and it deploys and does a visual check via screenshots (plus I report issues or things I want to behave in some specific manner).
Yeah that's a tradeoff I had to make, for now it's a no brainer because the TV is HD anyway, in the future I'm going to upgrade to a 4K UST projector so I will need to think what to do, depending on how bad it is.
I will probably get a backup copy in 4K ro play in Switchfin but still keep my Netflix subscription.
Which is kind of ironic.
What "project"? It's just some adb commands that you can run on your TV/streaming box to disable built-in apps and change settings. The rest are just Android apps that are safe/legit.
- Buy the biggest LG C -series OLED TV you can afford and/or fit (WebOS, no Android TV crapola to deal with)
- Never connect it to the internet, LG wants to add all kinds of AI crap to it.
- Set it to Filmmaker Mode[0] to disable all of the "improvements" it tries to do to the image
- Buy an Apple TV
Done.
The ATV can turn the TV on and off and adjust the volume. You won't need the TV remote for anything after that.
I still use my 10 year old Apple TV 4k daily and it works like new, no slowdown, every single relevant streaming platform supports it with a dedicated app. It even got every single tvOS release until this fall.
> - Never connect it to the internet, LG wants to add all kinds of AI crap to it.
... Bad news, brand new 2026 LG OLEDs come with Copilot out of the box packed into the software. Ask me how we know out of absolute frustration. LG has started to super enshittify webOS packed in before you even put it online.
I can't even elderly-proof it. Apparently if you spam the mute key it suddenly will spawn a random accessibility menu you can jam settings on in the OS itself (going past the cablebox and my CEC controls). Even if I do everything I can to restrict the remote down (universal remotes, etc), I can't disable that shortcut.
... so I keep getting calls that the "TV keeps talking by itself" every time they hit a button and it fastspeaks everything on screen (VOLUMEDOWN VOLUMEDOWN VOLUMEUP VOLUMEUP MENU MENU etc) because they managed to turn on settings they shouldn't have been able to get to. :)
That filmmakermode.com site is useless. It tells you to click the logos to find out how and takes you to the homepage of the brands. No information at all.
Only solution is the one given in OP. AndroidTV with another launcher eliminates all ads successfuly AND gives you the choice to also block ads/sponsors in youtube and other streaming platforms like prime video. It's the only way to truly get rid of all ads.
The apple approach would require Youtube Premium and still would not block integrated sponsor reads. It's the downside of the "golden cage"
Nice, what held me back was missing revanced/morphe and smarttubenext. If i can get that to work without hassle, it might just be the heir to my nvidia shield.
Why replace the one corportate overlord controlling your media experience with another when you can just use a device you fully own to drive the display.
Fyi. The following repo and it has been getting a lot of traction, PRs, commits, support. Better to use the one debloater that is popular, than the one made by only one person.
https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv
I'm not a fan of AI in general, largely because I am convinced it's going to be economically devastating, but things like this actually bring me some joy.
Another one is the Vibe coded Adobe suite [1].
A lot of hardware and software companies don't seem to realize they're sowing the seeds for their own destruction.
I needed a good screen, but I hate google. So I've just turn off internet and use my PC as the source. Thankfully, I don't nitpick on browser vs native app quality (and thank god for Kodi), else I'd be fuming and cussing at Google everyday. Or doing exactly this.
For those with more capable routers, local dns adblocking, or NextDNS; you can add a static DNS entry for "androidtvwatsonfe-pa.googleapis.com" and direct that to 127.0.0.1, you will also get no ads on the stock launcher. At least on Android 11 (For the Nvidia Shield). You might have to restart the device or empty the cache for it to take effect.
I recently discovered (I knew of it but had never tried) debrid and now I resent all the time I wasted on private trackers over the years. Next step is trying an easy and stable alternative to Stremio (which has been down the hill for quite some time). This serves both my laptop and my old fire stick (which is fire os ← android tv) as of now.
Seems like we need a good aftermarket OS for our TVs now.
What with all of this snazzy AI reverse engineering that people have been doing, how far are we from getting a mostly automated system that can build a clean Android for each TV model? A lot of the difficulties in making 3rd party ROMs for phones are in details like battery life, or weird sensors. It seems like much of that would not be an issue for a TV
How long before TV manufacturers start putting in countermeasures to prevent that?
When I moved into my apartment, I went to BestBuy and I was actually able to find a "dumb TV"! They had ONE in stock, it was Insignia (their house brand) and it was sold as "open box". I love it and have had no issues with it.
That being said, I use an Nvidia Shield TV Pro connected to it, and I had to do similar steps on that to replace the launcher and install my own apps. I use "ATV Launcher Pro" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.dstudio.atv...) personally, and it's great.
Here in the UK you can buy a normal TV without any tracking. Its expensive (200-250+ pounds vs 120-150 pounds for normal spyware)
But it doesnt matter. Normal people dont care about this shit, only the Hacker News types. My wife put her foot down when I said we should get dumb TV, and we ended up getting a Samsung even though I wanted to avoid Korean companies (as they have worst privacy features), mainly because it was in our budget and available
Its feasible up to 32" to use a computer monitor and android box, but over that monitors seem to be up to 3x the price for equivalent specs versus televisions.
A 65" 4K TCL is about $400-500. Cheapest equivalent monitor is over $2k that I can find.
I'm running a very similar setup and am looking for a better way to stream games from my local gaming pc. The current steam in-home-streaming is too delayed in reaction for my liking and my nvidia shield doesn't really support the latest and greatest like av1 or pyrowave. Has anyone a good idea how i could achieve it in one machine? I don't really want to buy into a steam machine or something just to play games.
With Gigabit LAN, I'm using Sunshine on my PC and the Android Moonlight client on the TV.
For Input, I've a Logitech K400 via USB dongle on the TV and Xbox controllers via Bluetooth.
Is there a slight lag? Yes. Are the majority of games I want enjoy on the couch and play on the big TV playable? Absolutely. I wouldn't play CoD but many many games just work well even with a Little lag.
PS: can also recommend playnite, giving a unified tv/Controller experience with access to multiple game stores , local Games and emulator support.
At my house, we love our Roku devices. Pair a nice quality OLED panel (never, ever connected to the internet) with a $50 Roku stick and you're good to go. The Roku UI has been consistent, fast, and clean for 10 years now. Roku's updates somehow haven't enshittified the experience like so many other platforms do. They did introduce video ads on the home screen a few years ago, but also provided an option to disable them in the accessibility menu. We do see a static ad on the home screen but we find it tolerable for the 10 seconds it's on the screen before we open up one of our streaming apps. My only gripe is that sometimes the ads are for R-rated shows and can be not kid-friendly or provocative.
I think the main issue people have with Roku is that it also does pretty extensive tracking of you, what you watch (ACR), what devices on your network, in some cases, what you say and so on.
And they shared this collected data with a bunch of third-parties.
In other words, they do the same stuff that OLED panel that you recommended never, ever be connected to the Internet does.
I came across this klauncher on playstore when i was searching launcher for my tv. it doesn't has much downloads or may be new but it is so simple and also has a feature which doesn't allow android default launcher to takeover when pressing home and also has an option to type custom dns for ad-blocking. glad i found it.
I've done something similar earlier in the year[0] and was happy with the results, but it seems that one of the packages we disable affects the "chromecast" feature.
Not a problem if you never stream anything from other devices, but we do from time to time, so I was forced to revert everything to stock.
netsharc | 21 hours ago
> Tip: Hand this article to an AI agent (like Claude Code) and have it guide you through the setup. It can run the ADB commands for you and adapt them to your device.
Like "curl | bash" but... with a million times more computation.
Hobadee | 19 hours ago
At least with `curl | bash` the originating website needs to be compromised. With AI, there are about a million different ways for it to go wrong and blow up your entire HDD.
int0x29 | 18 hours ago
leptons | 17 hours ago
I had problems getting the Chromecast to connect to my IKEv2 home vpn at an airbnb, so I told Claude to fix it. It figured out there was no good way to make the existing VPN client apps work on my chromecast, so it wrote a new VPN client for me that works perfectly, all in about 20 minutes without me needing to do much more than supply my certs.
It also fixed SmartTube to work on my phone, the official app only shows 5 videos, Claude fixed the .apk to show 100+ thumbnails.
giancarlostoro | 20 hours ago
Every smart TV I own never gets internet access, ever. I just plug a real device that connects to the internet instead, they're a much faster and better experience.
cadamsdotcom | 19 hours ago
Like it or not it's no longer viable to sell to consumers at "cost plus margin" - you're sold a loss-making unit and the size of the loss is based on how much LTV they expect of you.
Be happy it's cheaper for you, but be aware that as an informed consumer who's not plugging in your device you have negative LTV and are thus not the product's target customer and sadly are actually kind of leeching off their business model.
I'm sure you wouldn't do that if you had a choice. But the old business model is unviable now so no one's left except these jerks.
But hey, cheap TVs!
ben-schaaf | 19 hours ago
MrDrMcCoy | 19 hours ago
ben-schaaf | 16 hours ago
LukeShu | 18 hours ago
I promise you I won't give a shit about the unsubsidized price.
orsorna | 14 hours ago
account42 | 9 hours ago
orsorna | 8 hours ago
agile-gift0262 | 9 hours ago
acheron | 8 hours ago
aembleton | 6 hours ago
BoxwoodSeed | 13 hours ago
watwut | 13 hours ago
NordStreamYacht | 19 hours ago
Try getting a display panel, like one of those used in restaurants to display menus.
adamsmark | 19 hours ago
I'm doing what you are - just don't connect it and you can enjoy ridiculously low prices on TVs.
petepete | 12 hours ago
soylentcola | 2 hours ago
giancarlostoro | 6 hours ago
keerthiko | 18 hours ago
giancarlostoro | 17 hours ago
drnick1 | 17 hours ago
timw4mail | 8 hours ago
BobaFloutist | 5 hours ago
It just goes to show how much taste is learned. Not even to say it's subjective (which of course it is at least in part), just that it's a skill that needs to be developed, and, at least in part, a curse. I remember thinking 480p was quite crisp quality, now I find 720p DVDs charmingly rustic.
LoganDark | 17 hours ago
drnick1 | 17 hours ago
imp0cat | 17 hours ago
You definitely want to turn "Samba Interactive TV" off.
troupo | 15 hours ago
Android TV has this. It didn't have ads for less than a year. Now the ads banner is there regardless.
dspillett | 11 hours ago
There are some TVs that eventually pop-up a “please connect” or similar message over any display (even if just using it to display content from another device via HDMI) if they have not been connected for some time, so that you can't permanently use them disconnected. I forget which brand(s)/models are involved, it was talked about in at least one of Louis Rossman's rants so you might find some details in the consumer rights wiki he is associated with.
There will be ways around this of course, though they might involve mucking about in a way the average TV user will not want to risk playing aroud with (rooting the device so you can alter an internal clock that is not affected by any clock you can modify on the UI, or pulling a battery backup out so everything resets (assuming the clock's state is not stored in solid state memory than needs no powered at all to maintain)).
account42 | 9 hours ago
dspillett | 7 hours ago
Things being too much hassle to fight is what a lot of the invasions of our privacy and other rights are based upon, hence 80-page click-through licences, difficult cancellation processes, labyrinthine stalking preference pop-overs on web sites/apps, etc.
cowlevel | 7 hours ago
dspillett | 7 hours ago
drnick1 | 6 hours ago
This seems to be supported by the below link. It isn't a "please connect," but initial setup requires a Roku account. So the conclusion is do not buy a Roku TV, or Roku anything.
https://support.roku.com/en-us/article/how-do-i-use-my-tv-in...
Double_a_92 | 15 hours ago
solarkraft | 11 hours ago
My 2018 Samsung TV has smart features, but is not internet connected. It turns on quickly and right to the selected source - no brain cells harmed having to look at ads. It slightly bugs out sometimes, but I assume this to be a general issue.
ThatPlayer | 11 hours ago
I think to be considered a television, you still need to be able to receive OTA broadcasts. With modern digital television, that now means you need a H264 (H265, soon maybe) decoder.
I don't know if you can do that cheaper than a SoC, which makes adding "smartness" (even if it's bad) not that much more expensive.
j45 | 8 hours ago
Only use an external device.
deaton | 8 hours ago
Anyway, google TVs (like my TCL tv) let you use them in dumb mode, which is what I do. I just have it wired to my Apple TV 4k (the least bad of the smart tv boxes that support HDCP) and thats good enough for me.
starky | 19 hours ago
y-c-o-m-b | 19 hours ago
EDIT: all that remains for this stack is a good browser that can allow usage of uBlock Origin. BrowseHere is a pain to use with its constant nags about allowing pop-ups on certain sites...
Hobadee | 19 hours ago
y-c-o-m-b | 19 hours ago
edoceo | 18 hours ago
whilenot-dev | 15 hours ago
I only get shown the login prompt when the network connection to my server isn't established yet. I'm on Wi-Fi and need to wait for the connection before launching the client.
dlcarrier | 13 hours ago
https://f-droid.org/packages/net.slions.fulguris.full.fdroid...
It's a fork of the original AOSP WebKit browser, which I've found to be much faster than Chromium-based browsers, and you can import your uBlock Origin filters.
Nursie | 19 hours ago
You know, I don't give a shit about that, that's fine. Recommend me some stuff to watch, I'm here to watch stuff, I might even like what you're punting and give it a go. I might have forgotten there's a new season of whatever it is. I even quite like some of the inline recommendation stuff.
What made me switch to App-only mode was that ads started appearing for general consumer products. So this writeup is interesting, if/when they make app-only mode advertise shampoo at me I'll probably have a go with that launcher.
ethersteeds | 19 hours ago
https://moonfin.io/
aceazzameen | 17 hours ago
Also +1 to Wholphin! That app is phenomenal. It gives the whole family the "Netflix-like" experience.
Uke | 10 hours ago
arantius | an hour ago
cube00 | 17 hours ago
Replacing the Google launcher (I used ATV Launcher Pro) was one of the best quality of life upgrades I've ever done, if you haven't already I highly recommend it.
Not only does Google show auto playing video ads for streaming services you don't subscribe to, it also shows pure auto playing video ads for things like fast food. It really lags while it tries to start up to show the ads.
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Google closes the ADB backdoor when they realise all the sweet ad dollars they're losing.
[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
ACCount39 | 15 hours ago
It's dead obvious that companies like Apple and Google and Sony and John Deere lock their hardware down to protect their revenue streams - not to help the users in any way. And yet, they're peddling the lie of "security" - and have been getting away with it for decades.
Now that AI is there to give even an average user a leg up when it comes to things like "I don't want to see ads in my TV's menus, can you do something about it", the companies will see more and more reasons to implement more "security" to stop it. And modern "security" measures are hard to defeat with technical measures - so this has to be curbed with legal action instead.
piltdownman | 11 hours ago
Unless something drastically changes in the US stock market, any publicly traded technology company of significant size is basically mandated to prostrate themselves to the altar of fiduciary responsibility to stockholders.
j45 | 9 hours ago
A hardware purchase occurs once, it doesn't come due for extracting or manipulating every quarter.
piltdownman | 8 hours ago
https://agroinformacion.com/en/agtechmachinery/john-deere-su...
Or Driving? BMW had to pivot over initial outrage, but in 2022, they launched a "Functions on Demand" program that required drivers to pay a $18 monthly or $180 annual subscription to unlock physical heated seats and heated steering wheels.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/bmw-admits-heated-seat-subscri...
cowlevel | 8 hours ago
tjpnz | 6 hours ago
mnd999 | 15 hours ago
King-Aaron | 15 hours ago
theshrike79 | 13 hours ago
Compared to that, their hardware, SaaS, and other ventures are just 20% side projects.
dspillett | 12 hours ago
thfuran | 9 hours ago
kimbernator | 8 hours ago
alias_neo | 13 hours ago
It's much harder to switch out the launcher on a FireStick, but I did manage it briefly before it started boot looping right around 1yr of ownership, so it's e-waste now.
Geezus_42 | 12 hours ago
j45 | 9 hours ago
latexr | 12 hours ago
Even the idea of needing or being able to factory resetting a TV seems like such a downgrade. I haven’t regularly watched TV in some quarter of a century, and I remember channel switching being effectively instant. Nowadays when I’m at someone’s home and have to mess with the TV, it takes so long to even go up or down one channel.
cosmic_cheese | 8 hours ago
Now that all TV is digital (even OTA), it’s subject to the same quirks as streaming video on the web, and that includes how the picture will become garbled if you render it before gathering a sufficient amount of data. To prevent that, TVs and cable boxes take a moment or two to pull in enough data to render a clean picture when switching channels, which is where the delay comes from.
cowlevel | 7 hours ago
Some players will take an initial placeholder image such as a grey screen and start applying P-frames on top of it anyway, which gives a corrupted image that still has some information (shapes of moving characters are often recognisable) until the keyframe comes. Others wait for the keyframe and display a black screen, a frozen screen or a loading spinner until then.
Related, if you've ever seen a low-bitrate stream whose quality seems to get really bad, then slowly fill in, then get really bad again, then slowly fill in again, repeating forever, that comes from a poorly tuned encoder that's not allocating enough bits to each keyframe (so the quality is bad) and then making up the difference in subsequent P-frames.
solarkraft | 11 hours ago
piltdownman | 11 hours ago
This means you have to settle Disputes between you and Sony through a neutral private arbitrator rather than a judge or jury in a public courtroom, and you give up the right to participate in any class-action tort.
cdmckay | 9 hours ago
sailfast | 9 hours ago
Loans, banks, phones, walking into Walmart. It’s all binding arbitration.
j45 | 9 hours ago
piltdownman | 8 hours ago
j45 | 9 hours ago
Third party and independent means an arbritartor who isn't vastly paid by one industry.
piltdownman | 7 hours ago
IANAL but apparently also opting out gives you less power in a mass-tort as your class will consist entirely of a contextually miniscule group.
"Sony's EULA, however, eliminates anyone from a potential class except for individuals who specifically opt out. If a person who opted out later chooses to pursue a claim, the class will, at most, consist of those persons who opted out. Nt enough people will opt out. The class is virtually guaranteed to be too small to make it worth any lawyer undertaking representation. So by opting out, you are registering yourself into a group that has no power and no meaning."
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/kk36d/lawyers_thoug...
j45 | 6 hours ago
piltdownman | 6 hours ago
Capcom in 2016 should have been prosecuted imo - their attempt at "DRM" installed a kernel-level driver (capcom.sys) that intentionally disabled Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention (SMEP), allowing the kernel to execute code in user space...
The current Denuvo DRM to combat 'piracy' (always ALWAYS a pricing issue) is now encouraging both legal and high-seas users to use hypervisor-based bypasses to circumvent its many shortcomings. This is basically handing over the keys to your house in the AI age.
billynomates | 11 hours ago
AdmiralAsshat | 8 hours ago
One downside for those who use it: "Free with Ads" movies on YouTube will not play on SmartTube for some reason.
WarmWash | 6 hours ago
soylentcola | 2 hours ago
I use Projectivy for the same reason. Sucks, because Android TV still has some of the best flexibility in a TV-appropriate OS (compared with other options I could find at least) but their priorities don't line up with mine regarding the ads.
sieve | 17 hours ago
He does not understand that it is just like a phone. Unless you keep it on standby (which he does not want to do: wastes power), it will boot, slowly, till all the subsystems are up and running. The low powered processors, the low speed ssds, and minimal RAM makes everything worse.
gib444 | 17 hours ago
150g2 | 16 hours ago
lp92 | an hour ago
imp0cat | 16 hours ago
dlcarrier | 13 hours ago
Sure, the network might add a perceptible delay, but but the interface could load right away and populate the videos titles and thumbnails as they load.
account42 | 9 hours ago
izacus | 9 hours ago
If you stubbornly decide you're smarter than that, then wait I guess?
account42 | 8 hours ago
izacus | 6 hours ago
drnick1 | 17 hours ago
At the moment the best option still seems to be a somewhat old mini-PC with Linux and Plasma Bigscreen. But you need to add an HDMI-CEC dongle, and airmouse remote, and Waydroid if you want a more typical TV box experience.
lp92 | 17 hours ago
Qdulf | 13 hours ago
amaccuish | 16 hours ago
Little tip, but at least with my AMD card and the right DP->HDMI cable you can get CEC tunneled over Display Port without the dongle.
dlcarrier | 13 hours ago
drnick1 | 6 hours ago
dlcarrier | 3 hours ago
HaloZero | 17 hours ago
triyambakam | 16 hours ago
The web experience on a desktop/laptop is pretty much the only tolerable experience.
And I appreciate that the alternative clients try and address the poor UX of the default but I still find so many of the basic behaviors missing or inconsistent.
I can't offer anything better but I find it curious.
szszrk | 15 hours ago
I'm on Moonfin right now. I tested a few of them. They all looked super good, but turned out they were all super buggy. Unusable, even. Moonfin is OK.
Yet still, I come back to Jellyfin all the time. It's missing some bells and whistles, but it works in a predictable way.
milleramp | 16 hours ago
mik3y | 15 hours ago
The first version of Google TV, an internal demo, was based on MythTV. We had MythTV running against some HDHomeRun tuners, then a transparent webview (a fork of Petit Four-era Android builds since it had great d-pad nav support) running on top of it.
"Apps" were pure JavaScript gadgets, inspired by iGoogle, with custom DOM methods for anything TV-specific: channel changes, tuning info, and so on. With the MythTV demo, we managed to make some pretty fun hybrid apps that did things like pull up related stories about the TV show you were watching (maybe sounds lame now but was kinda cool seeing it for the first time: an iframe over my TV show, holy shit what can't I do with this). Adware was never discussed; we wanted to be a free and hackable OS for the living room.
After heading in this "widgets" direction for about a year, Android had been released and we strongly believed in a strategy based on it, so made the pivot. It was pretty tough, and educational, trying to build consumer products at Google in this era and without any singular unifying vision across the company. I longed for a top-down dictator like Steve Jobs who could cut the crap.. (even if we were judged to be the crap!)
I'm guessing the ad-infested OS from OP has some lineage back to the original Google TV, but of course I'm sure it's barely recognizable now.
cube00 | 15 hours ago
MythTV lets me record free to air and skip through the ads.
aidenn0 | 16 hours ago
willmacdonald | 14 hours ago
It uses Claude to connect to your TV and clean up ads and other junk.
darkwater | 14 hours ago
* Firefox in full-screen with a custom extension that makes the web UI of Netflix into something usable by a d-pad remote
* Switchfin (which has a Linux version) works pretty well out of the box
* Some custom Python+GTk apps to watch some public TV channels (they have no DRM and have a good API, so it was very easy, and I can get custom views for what my family watches)
* a nice viewer for Immich albums
* a CD player (I bought a 15EUR external USB DVD player)
Everything using a single UI paradigm, with just the things my family and I actually care for. No ads. No tracking (well, I guess Netflix still does some tracking anyway).
tmseidman | 6 hours ago
darkwater | 59 minutes ago
What so you want to know more specifically?
proaralyst | 5 hours ago
darkwater | an hour ago
polyterative | 13 hours ago
nticompass | 9 hours ago
vincengomes | 13 hours ago
I think it all started with a guy making a plex app [0] in rust thereby reducing the launch times of the app.
Then lots of projects started coming up including replacing the browser itself. All these projects seems to be created with claude code.
This is truly a golden age of Personal software.
[0] Reddit Post: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1x043yp/i_used_...
theshrike79 | 13 hours ago
- Buy the biggest LG C -series OLED TV you can afford and/or fit (WebOS, no Android TV crapola to deal with)
- Never connect it to the internet, LG wants to add all kinds of AI crap to it.
- Set it to Filmmaker Mode[0] to disable all of the "improvements" it tries to do to the image
- Buy an Apple TV
Done.
The ATV can turn the TV on and off and adjust the volume. You won't need the TV remote for anything after that.
I still use my 10 year old Apple TV 4k daily and it works like new, no slowdown, every single relevant streaming platform supports it with a dedicated app. It even got every single tvOS release until this fall.
[0] https://filmmakermode.com/ - also a good idea to do this to relative's TVs.
kotaKat | 12 hours ago
... Bad news, brand new 2026 LG OLEDs come with Copilot out of the box packed into the software. Ask me how we know out of absolute frustration. LG has started to super enshittify webOS packed in before you even put it online.
actionfromafar | 12 hours ago
kotaKat | 11 hours ago
... so I keep getting calls that the "TV keeps talking by itself" every time they hit a button and it fastspeaks everything on screen (VOLUMEDOWN VOLUMEDOWN VOLUMEUP VOLUMEUP MENU MENU etc) because they managed to turn on settings they shouldn't have been able to get to. :)
account42 | 9 hours ago
actionfromafar | 8 hours ago
deanc | 11 hours ago
Uke | 10 hours ago
kimbernator | 8 hours ago
Uke | 7 hours ago
The apple approach would require Youtube Premium and still would not block integrated sponsor reads. It's the downside of the "golden cage"
mattrad | 6 hours ago
Uke | 2 hours ago
account42 | 9 hours ago
theshrike79 | 6 hours ago
machomaster | 12 hours ago
jmyeet | 11 hours ago
I'm not a fan of AI in general, largely because I am convinced it's going to be economically devastating, but things like this actually bring me some joy.
Another one is the Vibe coded Adobe suite [1].
A lot of hardware and software companies don't seem to realize they're sowing the seeds for their own destruction.
[1]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/10/11/theres-a-vibe-cod...
tyingq | 10 hours ago
michelb | 12 hours ago
nicolas_ | 9 hours ago
InfinityByTen | 12 hours ago
nullify88 | 11 hours ago
[OP] CraftThatBlock | 7 hours ago
damowangcy | 11 hours ago
crossroadsguy | 10 hours ago
Lerc | 10 hours ago
What with all of this snazzy AI reverse engineering that people have been doing, how far are we from getting a mostly automated system that can build a clean Android for each TV model? A lot of the difficulties in making 3rd party ROMs for phones are in details like battery life, or weird sensors. It seems like much of that would not be an issue for a TV
How long before TV manufacturers start putting in countermeasures to prevent that?
wodenokoto | 10 hours ago
nticompass | 9 hours ago
That being said, I use an Nvidia Shield TV Pro connected to it, and I had to do similar steps on that to replace the launcher and install my own apps. I use "ATV Launcher Pro" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.dstudio.atv...) personally, and it's great.
I also use "Send Files to TV" (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yablio.sen...) so I can download files on my phone and send them to the TV.
shantnutiwari | 9 hours ago
But it doesnt matter. Normal people dont care about this shit, only the Hacker News types. My wife put her foot down when I said we should get dumb TV, and we ended up getting a Samsung even though I wanted to avoid Korean companies (as they have worst privacy features), mainly because it was in our budget and available
piltdownman | 8 hours ago
A 65" 4K TCL is about $400-500. Cheapest equivalent monitor is over $2k that I can find.
Uke | 8 hours ago
jkahrs595 | 8 hours ago
train_robber | 8 hours ago
Tyr42 | 8 hours ago
Uke | 7 hours ago
some_developer | 8 hours ago
For Input, I've a Logitech K400 via USB dongle on the TV and Xbox controllers via Bluetooth.
Is there a slight lag? Yes. Are the majority of games I want enjoy on the couch and play on the big TV playable? Absolutely. I wouldn't play CoD but many many games just work well even with a Little lag.
PS: can also recommend playnite, giving a unified tv/Controller experience with access to multiple game stores , local Games and emulator support.
bmk44 | 7 hours ago
runjake | 7 hours ago
And they shared this collected data with a bunch of third-parties.
In other words, they do the same stuff that OLED panel that you recommended never, ever be connected to the Internet does.
But don't take my word for it:
https://docs.roku.com/published/userprivacypolicy
4d4m | 7 hours ago
manwithmanyface | 6 hours ago
celsoazevedo | 6 hours ago
Not a problem if you never stream anything from other devices, but we do from time to time, so I was forced to revert everything to stock.
[0] https://www.celsoazevedo.com/replace-launcher-chromecast-goo...
hnburnsy | 3 hours ago