Custom Linux powered smart-TV breaks free from ads and tracking | Hacker News Reader

Custom Linux powered smart-TV breaks free from ads and tracking

tomshardware.com

48 pointsPotatoNinja26 comments

Reasonable prototype. What else is available in this space, as a finished product you buy and which isn't tied to some service?

I'm surprised this isn't a Raspberry Pi thing.

What features are you looking for? The Nvidia shield is still a good option.

Interesting. Last I read circa 2021:

Nvidia Shield TV Owners Are Pissed About the Banner Ads in Android TV

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27883715

Reviews of Android TV launcher after Google added ads to the homescreen

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27643208

Just throw on a different launcher.

I have been having performance problems with mine. Disney plus apparently is terrible and slows down on the nvidia shield.

Ours, too. It used to be amazing, but now it's a bit of a dog, performance-wise.

I want something better, but I don't know what it is. DIY is sounding better and better, but won't have the same app coverage...? Getting me thinking about what's possible in browser.

I've been having performance provlems with the Steam link app too. I'm not sure if that's due to poor network configuration (i'm on cable), but i'm highly suspicious, given it's fine on the steam deck (wifi)

DIY sounds terribly appealing lately, especially because I'm unhappy with both Plex and Kodi. Neither of those seems to support resuming a movie at the same spot across devices, which is mindblowing to me.

Vero[0] from the OSMC project has been around through several iterations. It's custom hardware for their media center OS, based on Debian and the Kodi media player. (They also release images for Raspberry pi.)

I don't own one, but the latest Vero V "supports a trusted video pathway with HDCP2.2 and Widevine L1 support"[1] -- which can (hypothetically, eventually) allow streaming services at full quality. SD-only streaming (or none at all) is one of the biggest drawbacks to these projects.

[0] https://osmc.tv/vero/ [1] https://osmc.tv/2023/11/vero-v-is-here/

I do own one, owned both the Vero 4k and Vero V and they have been brilliant.

OSMC do very little marketing for some reason and are extremely underrated but their customer service and support has been exceptional, new features and patches roll out regularly and the hardware itself is powerful, silent and has a minimal form factor.

Support for mapping Dolby Vision (DV) to regular HDR was recently added and it works seamlessly for the few DV-only media files I have.

The largest file I have is 4K77 (https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/) at about ~80GB with a bitrate that can hit 120mbps during particularly grainy scenes and it works perfectly on both the Vero 4k and V.

The only problem I have is anime encoded as Hi10P which stutters slightly on the Vero V during playback because hardware decoding isn't supported for 10bit H264 (Hi10p and the anime encode scene is unusual like that as 10bit is usually reserved for H265).

Had a quick look through the readme. Seems like there's quite a bit of improvements that can be done, running it with Firefox's Kiosk mode for example. Perhaps a better option would be to use a custom webview (maybe Tauri?) to have better control over the inputs.

It's a cool start regardless.

[0] https://github.com/carltheperson/earlgreytv

I don't understand why do "smart TV" even have to exist when we can just attach whatever a smart box to any ordinary TV/monitor/projector?

Yeah I agree too...

Someone found a way to solve a problem they posed as a problem.

Smart TVs consolidated buying the "extra" device for older consumers... Or maybe it's as simple as it's really that's all that is left to buy?

Yeah, that last thing. Find me a competitively priced, quality 55 inch television without smart features. Just a dumb display. I can't find any around here anymore. I just bought a 27" 4k display and slapped it on the coffee table.

These used to be called "commercial displays". I don't know if they're still sold. Costs more than a smart TV, but is dumb.

This is going to sound incredibly cynical, but I'm convinced the primary reason for Smart TVs to exist is to sell TVs.

My current TV is 17 years old. It's 720p, plasma, and yes I want to replace it. But functionally it's as good as the day I bought it. I've used it with appletvs since the first generation - if you're not into apple, there's android and amazon boxes and sticks too.

When my appletv goes EOL, I'll buy another $99 appletv - and they're usually supported for about 5 years.

I do fancy upgrading to 4k and all that jazz, but every time I go looking at my options - they're all "smart". They're rarely supported for 5 years, let alone 17. Obviously yes you're going to airgap it once it stops being supported in 2-3 years, but having to click through one OS to get to my STB's OS sounds like such an ugly kludge.

So back to my original premise - I can't help feeling that annoying me into upgrading in 3-5 years rather than clinging onto it for 15-20, is the entire point. The primary reason I want to upgrade today is to go from 720p to 4k. In 17 years I'll be touching 60, and probably won't be very fussed about 8k. If I could buy a current version of my venerable old plasma today, it'd likely be the last TV I buy. And that's not what they want. They've seen the lifecycle on phones and they want in.

(rant aside: when I got my current set, I naively thought CableCard was going to evolve into pluggable smarts. So you could buy a brain from your cable company, or apple, or msn, or tivo, and slot it into your TV. And when Real10 needed more grunt than your card had, you'd get a new card. Instead we ended up with disposable TVs.)

I have a cable card from my provider that is plugged into an HDMI Homerun Plus which gives me three tuners to watch TV on any device in the house.

Because you can unhook a "smart box" and prevent the collection of your data and the showing of ads. Also because TV manufacturers who want your data and want to push ads at you don't want the extra cost in making and selling an extra box when they can just put their consumer hostile garbage right in the TV itself.

I've thought about this a lot recently. It would be ideal to reflash the PC embedded in the back of the TV, but failing that, how hard would it be to connect the display to something like a raspberry pi. This prototype seems like the latter, and it definitely has its warts. You really need the display unit to make this functional.

I wonder how hard it is to flash the onboard components. Is there an OpenWRT equivalent for smart TVs?

Nope, and probably never will be.

Roku TVs have signed boot and boot loaders, and the attack surface is so small, they haven’t had a public root exploit in about a decade (edit: there was one in 2021 I missed.)

Google TV is just Android TV, complete with reusing Android chips and Android Secure Boot.

The other manufacturers might have more weaknesses (perhaps webOS would be more open), but it’s very vendor and board specific.

So the question: A. Who can reliably defeat secure boot; B. Who wants to write Linux drivers for every TV ever sold?, and C. Who wants custom firmware if you well never get 4K or 1080p because the DRM isn’t happy?

TVs, I mean TVs made to be TV sets, don't have PCs so to speak running them. I don't know what proportion of them use that, but there are lots of chips made to lower the chip count while providing the specific functionality needed to do a good job of rendering compressed video. So between "single chip" TVs where lower chip count is the objective and "high end processing" where a better image quality is the goal, I expect most TVs use rather dedicated solutions.

For example, chips like:

https://www.nxp.com/products/no-longer-manufactured/connecte...

https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers...

https://news.synopsys.com/home?item=122891

(who in the world thinks it's a good idea to do press releases with no date? These people is who)

https://news.synopsys.com/home?item=122565

So anyway, that doesn't mean it's impossible to free them - mods / reflash are available for some DSLRs for example. But it's more difficult.

There are however "universal" TV main boards for replacements... And these may have more documentation available? Maybe?

A personal question: if modern TVs are essentially low power computers, why not buy a low power desktop with a good enough monitor? Why people in 2024 buy TVs if it's possible to have ONE damn computer with little extras to serve video content on multiple screen, a homeserver maybe?

This is interesting. I simply do not connect my TV to the Internet and choose Apple TV, which gives me everything I need. Modern “smart TVs” are just ad terminals. That's why I think they are relatively cheap.

I was doing this too except Apple TV couldn't offer me a web browser, so now I switch between rpi for browser and ATV for everything else.

there are plenty of hdmi-sticks that can run linux without duct taping a half-disassembled laptop to the back of your TV

I thought this was going to be open hardware or at least custom firmware that could replace Tizen or webOS. Imagine my disappointment when I click and it's a laptop strapped to the back of a TV.

Does this do anything that existing solutions (OSMC, LibreELEC, Jellyfin MPV Shim) don't? From reading the source blog post it doesn't look like it. HDMI CEC, navigation without a mouse and keyboard (an airmouse is not a viable solution imo, at least use a Flirc), casting... all can be had better elsewhere with smaller, cheaper, quieter, more discrete hardware with lower power consumption.

> all can be had better elsewhere with smaller, cheaper, quieter, more discrete hardware with lower power consumption

Would you mind sharing a link to a nice write-up?

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