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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@Epzillon
I use #LibreElec with #Zattoo and #Netflix addon on an old Laptop. For remote control, I use a Remote with Bluetooth and Infrarot.
Currently I play around with #GamesOnWhales and its fork #Quasar for game streaming.LibreElec, Umbrella addon and a premiumize subscription.
@Epzillon I have been using Plasma Big Screen for a while now and cant be happier. I use Jellyfin as my main media source, Fred TV for my IP TV service and PWA for Youtube and Netflix. My TV has been disconnected from the internet for a while now and I dont feel my kids know the difference. I also use the Rii bluetooth remote to access Plasma Big Screen interface.
Does Fred TV work with a remote? Jellyfin was great but I couldn’t find an IPTV service that worked well with a remote. Fred TVs interface is also not great compared to something like Tivimate
Open the TV and pull the wifi antennas off the board.
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.
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.
Also, looking towards the future or for people that can find one at a decent price:
Not a raspberry pi but an Orange Pi Plus or Pro. They have a rockchip that has AV1 decoding (along with standard others) which is probably going to be the future (it is for corpo streaming already).
Put plasma big screen on it and get a Bluetooth wechip remote or something
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.
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
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.
Are apple TVs not phoning home?
If anything I’d imagine they’re one of the hardest companies to block, considering most apple users have a thousand idevices that could smuggle messages, even with all communications turned off.
Not at this scale. Remember that Apple is a hardware company first. They make money from hardware and app stores.
Google is the worlds largest ad company who dabble in hardware and services to increase their ad revenue.
They’re still a public company, and Im sure the heat is on their C suite cause they haven’t had any successful hardware releases since the M series processor was first released.
Not selling “anonymous” data would look to shareholders as thrown away profit, which they’re even able to sue for.
So I’d be insanely surprised if they weren’t surveiling their users - but unlike google and all, they own their entire closed-source software and hardware empire, so the likelihood of catching them is also valuably low.
Just to check, would Apple’s commitment to DEI policies look as thrown-away profit to shareholders?
I got an even better question for you: Is that relevant here?
Cause I don’t think it is at all, but to answer anyways I think DEI is a valuable tool to assist picking the best person for a job, independent of race - as there is a racist bias in many hiring positions. I don’t think its perfect, but honestly I don’t think anything in US is.
And I think apple cares about DEI cause their marketing team said it makes money. Full stop.
People love when their obsession might align with their morals, but its important to remember if 2028 goes Republican in US they probably won’t even do a logo change that pride month, cause all rainbow capitalism ever is is marketing.
Yes, it’s relevant, because DEI inherently limits what the company does, and yet the shareholders voted to keep it. Apparently Apple’s shareholders aren’t bigoted idiots.
if 2028 goes Republican in US they probably won’t even do a logo change that pride month
Nice job showing your ass here, because Apple never ‘changed the logo’ for the pride month. Where the fuck are they supposed to change it, on the Macbooks?
And Google spyware is all open source?
Google’s just using linux for its price, but the GPL of AOSP does a lot of heavy lifting for reverse engineering efforts like this.
edit: not that that matters at all to apple spying on users - like them scanning all Iclouds openly wasn’t even that long ago
Every cloud provider scans their storage, because the law is like that.
People have gotten their MS accounts closed when Onedrive was still called Skydrive due to automated scans finding suspicious activity
Damn, I forgot we all live in America - and so do all tech companies in the globe
People do pick up Pixel phones to install GrapheneOS on. How many people pick up Apple phones/tablets and are able to install another OS on it and have it as functional as GrapheneOS?
Same with smartwatches which from the Android side can be used offline with apps like Gadgetbridge to retrieve data without giving your watch internet access and not using the official apps.
Apple is very account and OS centric wanting to funnel everything through them. Exception has been MacOS devices which has had better luck with stuff like Asahi Linux.
“Find My” network is pretty strict by its nature, if you’re talking about that. Realistically speaking, I wouldn’t be scared of it, because I can’t see any vector from which it can be dangerous to the end user.
Nonetheless, “Find My” is an optional feature and can be fully disabled. Other Apple web-services can be blocked on a network level, if you want it for some reason. But, IMO, at this paranoia level, the only right option is OSS with a strict firewall.
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
check out: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
This looks exactly like what I was looking for! Thank you!
Can I flash it over the TVs OS?
This is installed on existing linux, so probably no.
My living room set up has been TV not connected to internet and hooking up a minipc running Fedora. Could run Windows if DRM content from streaming services is important to you.
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’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.
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
Browser would be simplest. Even though I prefer Linux and do run it, Windows might be better in your case with it having the DRM support and apps to run those services at higher resolution and HDR that sticking with browser might not allow.
For my case I picked up a cheap MiniPC and install Fedora on it to use instead of the TV interface.
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).
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.
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.
Any Linux distro with Plasma Bigscreen. My TV box is an old laptop I got for free from work running Cachy OS. I have a remote-sized keyboard/trackpad that I use to control it. I mostly just need the arrows, but the whole keyboard is there if I need to go in to the desktop OS.
I could use a recommendation for a big-screen ad-blocking YouTube app though.
