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Comment by midrus | Hacker News Reader

Any alternatives? What would you recommend instead? I'm under the suspicion that every single Smart TV vendor has the same problems.

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Been very happy with our Panasonic OLED. It’s perfectly happy without an internet connection, turns on in 5 seconds flat (a feature these days if you can believe it, as most smart TVs boot a whole Linux or android and take for ever), the amount of options to adjust the image is incredible (they’re used as reference displays in movie studios for coloring movies apparently), and the picture is beautiful. Oh and not a single ad screen anywhere even if you connect it to the internet.

Care to give the part number?

Their whole OLED tv lineup shares these characteristics.

I'd recommend JZ1000 or JZ2000.

I have a Panasonic from a few years ago (cheapest 4K I could find; is "smart" so has Netflix and Amazon Prime Video and other UK streaming services like More4, ITV Player, Disney+) and it does rely on contacting Panasonic for them to work. Their server went down the other year and ALL of the services on the TV stopped working - Netflix wouldn't launch any more.

It does contact Panasonic but I have blocked the domains with a Pihole and closed outgoing port 53 other than traffic from the Pihole so nothing can make DNS requests directly (eg. hardcoded to 8.8.8.8).

The TV itself is great though. It runs FirefoxOS I believe.

The TV is not as bad as the LG I had before it which sent a web request to LG every time you pressed a button on the remote control... volume up.... web request to LG. Volume down... TV sent a web request to LG.

If you’re talking about an LCD Panasonic, I can’t say anything about them other then they’re a completely different series than the OLED. Almost like a separate brand.

My OLED has Netflix etc. I used the built in Netflix a few times but don’t anymore since because I don’t use Netflix altogether and not subscribed to them. I put it on a special VLAN that has no internet access but can still send and receive traffic to my home assistant instance so as far as the tv is concerned, it’s offline. But it’s never nagged me about it. And when it was fully online (when using the Netflix app), I never received any ad anywhere.

Yes yours is the posher model! Mine is a LCD - just dug out the model number and it's TX-49EX600B. I languish in LCD land. (And it's 49" - no idea why I thought it was 42").

Nothing wrong with it. If it does the job and you’re happy with it ,why change. I got an OLED because I didn’t mind paying the price as we use the screen a lot but that’s just me.

> Their server went down the other year and ALL of the services on the TV stopped working - Netflix wouldn't launch any more.

> It does contact Panasonic but I have blocked the domains with a Pihole and closed outgoing port 53 other than traffic from the Pihole so nothing can make DNS requests directly (eg. hardcoded to 8.8.8.8).

I don't understand - you've blocked it from contacting Panasonic; does that mean that none of the services work any more? Or is there another domain that it has to keep in contact with that you've allowed? If so, why block the Panasonic domain when you allow it to chat to some other third party?

Sorry to be vague. I blocked various domains that the TV wanted to use in order to send data back, eg.

ichnaea.netflix.com collect-eu-fy2017.myhomescreen.tv x2.vindicosuite.com

But it is allowed to access other domains such as: nrdp.prod.ftl.netflix.com api-global.netflix.com vcs.vdspf.com push.prod.netflix.com uiboot.netflix.com appboot.netflix.com auth-ctv.digitaluk.co.uk c09.api.freeviewplay.net secure.netflix.com

Nothing on the network other than the Pi can get out of port 53 (DNS).

Hmm, I wonder if all these connections can be used to see if someone is watching live TV without a licence.

Panasonic JZ OLED series is amazing. They released an update which has full working support for 4K 120hz VRR (useful for Xbox / gaming) .

I had been looking at Sony before that and saw that they had promised their users for a couple years to release the same 4k 120hz VRR update for a number of bravia models. to date they either didn't release it, or released flawed implementation. There were so many complaints online it steered me clear of Sony.

I then went into the store thinking to buy LG but Panasonic looked very nice. I watched a ton of reviews from HDTVtest on YouTube and took a gamble with the Panasonic. The calibration of the set is very much better than my old Samsung. Night and day.

In the end it was cheaper and I've been very happy.

Buy a dumb screen. For example a big computer monitor. I know it's not the same but this is the only solution I know.

Or just don't connect your TV to the internet and buy an external streamer.

A vendor could display a nag screen at inopportune moments to connect the TV. As far as I know Samsung does this.

Also, some TVs have been known to scan for open networks, and use those without permission.

Do you have a source on this?

There is none. This has been asserted for years on HN but I’ve never seen a modicum of evidence for it.

I posted it in this thread (I'm GP).

I admit, I think my source was probably HN comments. I tend to trust them more than they deserve.

I did a Google, and it seems a very sketchy claim.

we have a samsung tv that is exclusively used with an apple tv and it’s seemed ok this far but i’m not sure how/if i can completely kill it trying to connect as we currently have no nearby open networks but if one pops up it’ll try and connect and i detest that

Setup an open wifi link w/ a separate router, search Amazon for travel router for devices under US$35. This may need to provide a response from an expected domain, just connect the TV and a PC to the open wifi (that isn't connected to the internet) and use Wireshark to see what domains the TV is trying to connect to. Setup the router dns to provide 400 responses to those queries, and problem solved.

Why yes, this is a ludicrous amount of technical work to expect the average consumer to do, and it is fucking disgusting that this is even a concern. I'll continue to use my 8 year old TV, I don't need 4k for something I'm watching from 8 feet away anyway.

I had to DMZ a friend's smart TV, since it was booting excessively slowly waiting for a response from the (Sony) servers, which is why I have a work around. Still, spending $35 and polluting the 2.5ghz band even more seems stupid. The TV in question had an ethernet port, but providing 400 responses on that didn't improve boot times, since it tried to find a wifi signal after that. Just stupid that a TV will be slow to turn in depending on what external servers it can contact.

Edit-stated this was an LG TV, it was a Sony.

Connect it to your network and blackhole all their traffic.

...and so, one day, the TV finds an open Wi-Fi hotspot and sends everything it has collected anyways.

Are we sure external streamers don't do the exact same thing? Apple TV probably doesn't. But what about Chromecast, NVIDIA Shield, Roku, and Fire TV?

Kodi/libreelec doesn’t.

You'd have to assume good faith such as that the device won't connect to some insecure WiFi when one becomes available.

that is illegal in some countries.

For big corp, illegal means possible increase of costs of doing business to a value calculated in advance.

Better find the cellular radio and rip it out too. Or just wrap the whole device in foil.

Got any suggestions on external streamers that don’t have the same problem as a smart tv?

Can you set up your router or PiHole to block the tracking domains? There has to be list of those.

The problem is some TV related software ( like Chromecasts and i suppose Android TV / Google TV ) use hardcored DNS servers, so a DNS level filter doesn't help.

You can block port 53 (DNS) at the firewall and allow only traffic from and to the PiHole.

Samsung's smart tag find network could now or in the future be used to exfiltrate data from their smart tvs that arent connected. Not high bandwidth, so it would have to be OCR or text to speech probably. Just like Amazon's Sidewalk network.

Sony TVs use Google software, and while Google spies on you too, at least they're honest about it (!), and allow you to turn it off.

I also trust Google to have fewer glaring security issues than Samsung.

> and allow you to turn it off.

Source? On Android with Google Play Services, which almost always applies to Android TV as they’re essentially the same OS, there are no UI toggles to turn off the spying. You can check this using a DNS proxy, for instance, and viewing the log after blocking Google domains using such a proxy might prove quite alarming. Android devices even with location and search tracking disabled contact Google every several minutes.

You can disable tracking account-wide at https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-privacy - scroll down to the confusingly-named "History settings".

If you turn these off, particularly "Web & app history", your TV (and all other Google devices) will obey the settings if it is logged into that Google account.

It will still be contacting Google's servers, but it won't be recording anything.

Are you sure?

Or are they just not showing you, via your UI, what they're collecting into their data pools anymore?

If you don't trust what companies explicitly say they are doing, then there is no solution that will satisfy you.

My cheap Hisense U6G works fine as a dumb TV. It’s not hooked up to my network. I use an AppleTV instead. Got it because it was the best 65” TV on rtings under $1K at the time I bought it.

I'm extremely happy with the LG C1. It's not connected to the internet (beyond initial setup so I could update the firmware). LG's setup process let me opt out of everything (including setting up broadcast TV reception, which my older Samsung 4K TV kept trying to harass me about). The only thing that initially annoyed me was the LG logo appeared at shutdown, but that can be disabled in a hidden menu.

I currently use an Apple TV 4K for all my apps, it integrates perfectly with the TV using HDMI CEC and has a clean content-focused UI that's not stuffed with ads (had been considering Android TV).

I will never use a Samsung TV again after my last experience of performance-crippling firmware, nagging, confusing/off-screen opt-out UIs for spyware features, attempting to bypass DNS if telemetry is blocked, and ad-stuffing (KS8000) - nor allow a TV to have a persistent network connection.

Got a Sony OLED (has all that Google TV stuff), connected the TV for a software update, then disable all network connections and plug in an Apple TV. I had a Samsung before that started showing me ads, which was from my point of view a huge violation of my private space and my home (it's a TV that I fully bought, and not a cheap one). Bought the Apple TV, before getting the new Sony and also disabled everything on the Samsung.

LG stuff is the best, they run WebOs, not Android and are generally usable without an internet connection.

Last I checked LG was the best available mainstream option.

set up a raspberry pi or an old laptop with Kodi and use that. Don't plug your TV in to ethernet or give it wifi.

That only works if there are no open wifis around. And I would not be suprised if Samsung use Verizon's (?) spy mesh of wifi routers.

I've always heard people claim that TVs will do this, I've never seen one actually do it. I don't believe any TV will speculatively join open wifi without asking.

If you consider Echo Show a smart TV, it can use amazon's sidewalk network to connect without internet.

Unfortunately, many current TVs ship with advertised-but-missing features, which are added later via a software update. In the current gen, variable framerate input is a good example of this.

im using kodi myself. i used libreElec for a few years which is basically just kodi as an OS. i switched to a OSMC recently which is a bit more expensive than a raspberry pi but the hardware and then OSMC skin is a bit nicer

i mainly use it with the jellyfin plugin so all of my media is stored on a NAS and kodi just acts as the player

Prior discussion, hope it helps:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29990910

TL:DR- LG CX tv, never connected to the internet, "smart" functions come from a separate device. It's also behind a pihole for what it's worth.

Maybe a beamer?

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