> 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.
It could still be connecting anyway and using its microphone and using content recognition on what you watch. I am surprised how few people in this set of threads read about the LG spy TVs.
On my LG TV, which is pretty old, the wifi module is just a standard m.2 e-key that I can remove. I wonder if that is still the case or if they are integrated now.
There is zero evidence of this happening. There are tens of thousands of people who have posted about devices doing sketchy things who monitor their network and yet this has never been demonstrated.
Anything you own could also have a secret 5G radio built in spying on you, but that's reasoning via Russell's Teapot and pointless except to baselessly spread paranoia.
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.
I bought a Vizio TV which has this evil, undocumented "feature". It would pop-up a message after every dozen or so boots. The message can be manually dismissed with three clicks on the remote.
i
The TV also will not, under any circumstances, turn on and just display an external HDMI source even though it has a "Remember Last Source" feature. That feature does work with any internal streaming source but external sources must manually selected with the remote after each power on (also undocumented in the manual).=
I figured this out because I bought this small TV to be a wall-mounted screen in the dedicated bathroom of our home theater room. It's only job is to turn on while someone is in the little bathroom and display a copy what's on the main 150" projector screen in the next room, then turn off when they leave. The on/off is handled by a motion sensor and standard Home Assistant automation but after booting this evil thing correctly shows the Last Selected external HDMI source for 1 second, then blanks the screen. The source is already selected and working but being blacked out until the remote re-selects the same source (only if it's external). This is clearly an undocumented anti-pattern added specifically to prevent the TV being used unattended as a display screen, picture frame, digital sign etc. Why? Because Vizio (now owned by WalMart) doesn't get rev share if it's: 1) Not online, and 2) Only viewing external sources. That's why it demands manual "proof-of-life" before it'll grudgingly do what it claims on the box.
So, I programmed an ESP32 with an IR emitter so that every time the TV powers on it sends the remote presses to manually clear the "Please Connect Internet" message and select the external HDMI. Very annoying but it works fine and no one even sees the stupid messages as they're gone before they can see the screen. Fuck Vizio :-).
> The TV also will not turn on and just display an external HDMI source even though it has a "Remember Last Source" feature.
I have an Android based TV that is connected for the purposes of iPlayer/NetFlix/other, but is mainly used to play off my local media array via a Pi4 running LibreELEC (Kodi) as even though I subscribe to a couple of streaming services I still find getting things otherwise more convenient. Until a recent update it happily stayed on the HDMI source the Pi is hooked up to unless I switched it, now it (almost) always reverts to its own homepage (with the auto-playing video adverts for shows/games/services) when waking from standby.
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.
To legally 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...
> 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 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 sneaky of Google to add advertising after the fact. Years later they still haven't [1] updated the screenshots in their playstore page to show the giant 1/3 full screen ads you get now.
Replacing the Google launcher was one of the best quality of life upgrades I've ever done. Not only does it show ads for services you don't subscribe too, it's really lags while it tries to download them.
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 actually 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.
Which will all have things like reprogrammable firmware and FPGA aspects to support paywalled proprietary features.
We already support it to some extent with licensed hardware codecs (HEVC, AVC, VVC etc...), licensed DRM like HDCP, and individual device licensing for audio technologies like Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and video technologies like Dolby Vision.
I’ve just realised: could shareholders sue for this? E.g. if I’ve bought the stock pre-enshittification, then the conpany decided to prioritize short-term profit, and then some time after the stock price falls (and that’s a big “if”, sure).
HN is like 60% AI hype weirdos by volume now, and half the front page is fucking AI. AI AI AI AI AI AI
Like we don't have enough of this bullshit shoved at us from every angle, constantly. I genuinely wonder how much the public disgust with this tech just comes down to how a slice of the tech-adjacent sphere just will not SHUT UP about it.
I don't think AI will save us from the ads. Eventually they will monetize AI by mixing ads into them if they aren't doing that already. Just like streaming got ads added into after being the escape from cable tv ads. And cable tv got ads added in after being the escape from broadcast tv ads. Its a cycle.
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.
I have a Amazon Fire TV Stick 4k 2nd gen (who comes up with these names?) While the setup can be a little tricky, I've got mine on Projectivity Launcher which has no ads and I still have access to all the streaming apps and the Amazon app store (if I ever need it). There are good guides online so, if you still care, you should be able to recover your device.
It's not recoverable unfortunately, seems either the firmware is broken or a hardware issue. The last time it worked I factory reset it to see if that would stabilise it, but it never booted again. I contacted Amazon about replacing it, but they won't do anything because it's not registered to my account (because it was removed when I reset it).
I was also running Projectivy [sic] Launcher, but it launched a minute after the stick started which wasn't a great UX so I ended up disabling it because it annoyed the family.
Either way, I'm not worried about recovering it now; it would have been nice to use it for a few thing, but when it stopped working I just went out and bought a new TV.
And, your point is? Google explicitly stated the would be pushing updates. They never said they wouldn't change things. Also, just look at the history of their products. They inject ads into everything they make. They are an ad company, that's where their revenue comes from.
Android regularly was originally packaged as part of Google’s advertised “ Google Experience Devices” and “Android One”, where they advertised no bloatware and adware unlike other Android manufacturers.
The Nvidia shield outlasted every android tv device from Google and maintained a near pure experience as promised, for a higher upfront price.
I understand the history of Google and their products. Where they change what is offered is still not ok because you’ll never really know what you’re getting into, nor what Google may launch and cancel next.s
Lots of people have a graveyard of cancelled Google devices.
But Nvidia was able to be one of the first 4K certified Android tv devices for Netflix and keep it that way.
You're just making my point for me. Why would you ever buy a device running Google's software and expect it not to change unless it never recieves updates?
> 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.
Somebody needs to tell right-wing libertarians that this is literally a way to institute Sharia law. Maybe start a IoT company, and change the EULA to force things to be settled through Islamic courts.
This is not an exaggeration. Right now Valerie Haney has begun her fourth year of court-ordered Scientology arbitration over the billion year contract she signed to work for sub-minimum wage as a Sea Org member.
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.
It's an "implementation detail" that has a very significant effect on startup times and thus user experience. Practically no power use (even if true, which often it isn't) is still power use and there are many other reasons for not having devices powered when not needed (fire safety, lightning resistance, cybersecurity concerns).
There is also no reason to wear out flash since you only need to update the fast boot image when things actually change.
Modern bloated systems use a non-volatile equivalent of a resume from standby, for a cold start. The do a true cold boot, than save an image of RAM to flash, and load that on subsequent cold boots, without a need for a powered standby.
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 current hardware for it.
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 (sounds lame but was kinda cool seeing it for the first time). Ads were never discussed. 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.
I'm guessing the ad-infested crap 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. 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.
Projectivy, Wolphin, and Button Mapper are all on Google Play with positive reviews. SmartTube isn't on Google Play, as it bypasses ads on Google's YouTube platform, so Google won't host it, but it is hosted on GitHub where it is well received, with plenty of stars.
Each has their own installation instructions, but the article consolidates them into a list of adb commands. If that's a method you like, it's nice to have everything in one place, but they can still be installed the normal way.
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.
Why did you link to a smaller project, made by one person, when the article's recommended Projectivy, SmartTube, and Wolphin projects are all better according to the metrics you've listed?
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).
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 94.7 ms ] thread> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I promise you I won't give a shit about the unsubsidized price.
Try getting a display panel, like one of those used in restaurants to display menus.
I'm doing what you are - just don't connect it and you can enjoy ridiculously low prices on TVs.
Anything you own could also have a secret 5G radio built in spying on you, but that's reasoning via Russell's Teapot and pointless except to baselessly spread paranoia.
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.
I was a floutist as well. I think part of it is that you just get used to the level of whatever sound device you use.
You definitely want to turn "Samba Interactive TV" off.
Android TV has this. It didn't have ads for less than a year. Now the ads banner is there regardless.
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)).
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.
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...
I bought a Vizio TV which has this evil, undocumented "feature". It would pop-up a message after every dozen or so boots. The message can be manually dismissed with three clicks on the remote. i The TV also will not, under any circumstances, turn on and just display an external HDMI source even though it has a "Remember Last Source" feature. That feature does work with any internal streaming source but external sources must manually selected with the remote after each power on (also undocumented in the manual).=
I figured this out because I bought this small TV to be a wall-mounted screen in the dedicated bathroom of our home theater room. It's only job is to turn on while someone is in the little bathroom and display a copy what's on the main 150" projector screen in the next room, then turn off when they leave. The on/off is handled by a motion sensor and standard Home Assistant automation but after booting this evil thing correctly shows the Last Selected external HDMI source for 1 second, then blanks the screen. The source is already selected and working but being blacked out until the remote re-selects the same source (only if it's external). This is clearly an undocumented anti-pattern added specifically to prevent the TV being used unattended as a display screen, picture frame, digital sign etc. Why? Because Vizio (now owned by WalMart) doesn't get rev share if it's: 1) Not online, and 2) Only viewing external sources. That's why it demands manual "proof-of-life" before it'll grudgingly do what it claims on the box.
So, I programmed an ESP32 with an IR emitter so that every time the TV powers on it sends the remote presses to manually clear the "Please Connect Internet" message and select the external HDMI. Very annoying but it works fine and no one even sees the stupid messages as they're gone before they can see the screen. Fuck Vizio :-).
I have an Android based TV that is connected for the purposes of iPlayer/NetFlix/other, but is mainly used to play off my local media array via a Pi4 running LibreELEC (Kodi) as even though I subscribe to a couple of streaming services I still find getting things otherwise more convenient. Until a recent update it happily stayed on the HDMI source the Pi is hooked up to unless I switched it, now it (almost) always reverts to its own homepage (with the auto-playing video adverts for shows/games/services) when waking from standby.
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.
To legally 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.
Only use an external device.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 is interesting, if/when they make app-only mode advertise shampoo at me I'll probably have a go with that launcher.
https://moonfin.io/
Also +1 to Wholphin! That app is phenomenal. It gives the whole family the "Netflix-like" experience.
Replacing the Google launcher was one of the best quality of life upgrades I've ever done. Not only does it show ads for services you don't subscribe too, it's really lags while it tries to download them.
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...
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.
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.
A hardware purchase occurs once, it doesn't come due for extracting or manipulating every quarter.
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...
We already support it to some extent with licensed hardware codecs (HEVC, AVC, VVC etc...), licensed DRM like HDCP, and individual device licensing for audio technologies like Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and video technologies like Dolby Vision.
You mean sharecropping? It's been around, in various forms, since pre-Roman times.
Like we don't have enough of this bullshit shoved at us from every angle, constantly. I genuinely wonder how much the public disgust with this tech just comes down to how a slice of the tech-adjacent sphere just will not SHUT UP about it.
Compared to that, their hardware, SaaS, and other ventures are just 20% side projects.
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.
I was also running Projectivy [sic] Launcher, but it launched a minute after the stick started which wasn't a great UX so I ended up disabling it because it annoyed the family.
Either way, I'm not worried about recovering it now; it would have been nice to use it for a few thing, but when it stopped working I just went out and bought a new TV.
TV seems like a minor product for Google.
Android regularly was originally packaged as part of Google’s advertised “ Google Experience Devices” and “Android One”, where they advertised no bloatware and adware unlike other Android manufacturers.
Specifically for the Nvidia shield it was advertised as having updates forever. Nvidia held the promise for 10 years: https://hothardware.com/news/shield-tv-hits-decade-android-u...
The Nvidia shield outlasted every android tv device from Google and maintained a near pure experience as promised, for a higher upfront price.
I understand the history of Google and their products. Where they change what is offered is still not ok because you’ll never really know what you’re getting into, nor what Google may launch and cancel next.s
Lots of people have a graveyard of cancelled Google devices.
But Nvidia was able to be one of the first 4K certified Android tv devices for Netflix and keep it that way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Loans, banks, phones, walking into Walmart. It’s all binding arbitration.
Third party and independent means an arbritartor who isn't vastly paid by one industry.
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...
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.
This is not an exaggeration. Right now Valerie Haney has begun her fourth year of court-ordered Scientology arbitration over the billion year contract she signed to work for sub-minimum wage as a Sea Org member.
https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/val-haney-now-up-to-17-day...
One downside for those who use it: "Free with Ads" movies on YouTube will not play on SmartTube for some reason.
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.
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.
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.
If you stubbornly decide you're smarter than that, then wait I guess?
There is also no reason to wear out flash since you only need to update the fast boot image when things actually change.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (sounds lame but was kinda cool seeing it for the first time). Ads were never discussed. 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.
I'm guessing the ad-infested crap OS from OP has some lineage back to the original Google TV, but of course I'm sure it's barely recognizable now.
It uses Claude to connect to your TV and clean up ads and other junk.
* 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).
What so you want to know more specifically?
Each has their own installation instructions, but the article consolidates them into a list of adb commands. If that's a method you like, it's nice to have everything in one place, but they can still be installed the normal way.
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_...
... 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.
... 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. :)
The apple approach would require Youtube Premium and still would not block integrated sponsor reads. It's the downside of the "golden cage"
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...