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Comment by fph | Hacker News Reader

Not an answer but a follow-up question: is there open firmware for TVs like Openwrt for routers? I have never heard of such a project, but it sounds like it would be useful.

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There is this:

https://github.com/RootMyTV/RootMyTV.github.io

Not open source OS, just a homebrew store. Not quite the same thing.

Another one for LG TVs https://openlgtv.github.io/

https://www.samygo.tv/

That project has fallen victim to people losing interest. A section for 2011 model year TVs has WIP tags for the last 9 years. This might as well have a perpetual under construction shovelling man GIF.

After I install it, then what?

Perhaps Google TV(there is both an OS and a service by that name, the OS was once called Android TV)?

Yes. I’d love this.

The software on tvs is awful. Plus many new tvs have ads baked in.

An open source OS would be a dream.

Software on TV (and worst, set top boxes) is awful is due to the fact that it is an under power CPU and limited memory. The app you saw is either web app in Webkit Embedded or similar embedded, Android app (Android TV) or Roku brightscript app.

Most of these TVs run Linux. This lawsuit by Software Freedom Conservancy is aiming for eventual creation of an OpenWRT-for-TVs project (similar to how an earlier lawsuit created OpenWRT).

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liber...

TBH though, we don't need another distro specific to certain hardware types, instead we need standard distros like Fedora and Debian to support TV hardware and use-cases.

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