Hacker News Reader

Comment by erentz | Hacker News Reader

I’m kind of surprised there isn’t an OpenWRT style project out there to provide a replacement OS for common Smart TVs. At least I couldn’t find one. I’m obviously lacking in understanding the massive difficulties such a project would likely face. But it sure would be very nice to be able to replace my TVs firmware with something open source. I don’t want a dongle or extra box or extra remote. There’s a perfectly good computer in my TV. And all the Roku’s or FireTVs are rubbish and intend to invade your privacy just the same.

View on HN

We've come to expect open replacements of everything, but even OpenWRT didn't start out as an open source project. Linksys used Linux on one of their routers, and was thus forced to release their modifications to the kernel for their device.

No one’s going to target DRM-locked & proprietary (custom motherboard & SOC) Smart TVs when you can get everything you want here (except extra box) targeting an Amlogic s905 or similar box with HDMI CEC[1] that anyone can get for less than 50 USD and is 4K capable and works with absolutely any TV. See: LibreELEC.

Your “perfectly good computer” is in fact not yours (it has DRM so you are not the user, you are renting it), and it’s not perfectly good if it can’t run the software you want.

[1] This let’s you get away with just one remote including for powering on/off

I agree, it's also something I would like. I've looked a bit into this regarding Android TVs and found out that most TVs are using similar Amlogic chipsets.

What made me give up on the search for alternative software is that there doesn't even seem to be a place in which any manufacturer's models are even listed, much less anything resembling a community.

Yeah it's not worth the effort - smart TVs don't run on standardised hardware and every manufacturer has their own software so you'd have to do an absolute mountain of reverse engineering for a ton of different TVs. Plus they almost certainly require signed firmware so you also have to find an exploit to allow loading your custom firmware.

Far easier just to not connect the TV to the internet and use a third party solution like nVidia Shield instead. Fortunately pretty much no TVs will try to connect via open WiFi or 4G at the moment, though it is definitely coming.

Smart TVs have hardware backed security solutions to protect DRM keys.

Anyone who undertakes your proposal is going to have problems staying ahead of any jailbreaking mitigations when the companies motivation for security is maintaining relationships with content service providers.

There is/was SamyGo, a (partial?) OSS firmware for Samsung TVs...

Not sure how relevant or up-to-date their support is, but at least there is _something_ :)

https://www.samygo.tv

Netflix and all the other streaming apps insist on locked bootloaders.

As much as it pains me to say it - lack of demand is probably one, as much as it seems like a hot topic on HN, as it stands the vast majority of people don't care.

Afaik OpenWRT still has no auto-updating functionality so I'd rather not see something in that poor state on even more Internet connected devices.

You can upgrade packages with opkg and via the web GUI and treat it like you would any other Linux distribution when it comes to upgrades.

There are some userspace scripts that will dry-run updates and email you the results. Generally it's just new config files that differ from your current versions, usually it's just whitespace differences or settings that have changed manually.

https://github.com/tavinus/opkg-upgrade is one.

As it notes, the reasons you don't want updates on auto-pilot are those config differences, and limited space available on routers.

Wonder why there are no routers that offer built in ad blocking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com