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 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.
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
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network DNS Domain Name Service/System NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) Plex Brand of media server package RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer VPN Virtual Private Network
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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:
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.
plasma-bigscreen looks nice, would it go on a RPI 4? and are they spy-ey? they have google as a patron.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
check out: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
This looks exactly like what I was looking for! Thank 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 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.
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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.
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
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
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.
