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Comment by harrigan | Hacker News Reader

For me, Jellyfin makes my smart TV (running webOS) tolerable. It turns the TV into the appliance it should have been from the start, without ads, AI assistants, or silly apps.

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Yes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to buy a non-smart TV. I don't like living in a world where my TV can crash or be down for a software update (which have both happened to me). They're also ticking time-bombs - who knows when support will be dropped and the apps will slowly break as they gradually fall out of compatibility with the external APIs they depend on. What horrors lurk in the depths of those lovelessly constructed TV OSs that call out to servers and will cause mayhem when those servers are decommissioned?

Why not just never connect it to the internet and never update the firmware?

I do wish I could just buy a dumb tv that just did TV things… but it’s simple to just use an Apple TV and never connect it. Or if I absolutely must to set it up or because there is a bug. Connect it via Ethernet briefly.

Better for privacy too.

This plus an n100 running hyorjellynix witg a firetv remote ftw.

hyorjellynix?

https://github.com/zombiehoffa/hyprjellynix

ty!

My dad had a Blu-ray player that had similar features to a smart TV (Netflix, etc). There was a licensing sever and the API was down, so everything stopped working. A single point of failure for the whole device.

That might’ve also been the September 6, 2022 Google Widevine license issue. This broke DRM protected content across most android based devices.

It wasn’t a single point of failure for a device. It was a single point of failure for the whole media ecosystem.

[0]: https://status.drmtoday.com/incidents/w2wbtnn9r67y

Keep them airgapped or use a smart HDMI stick, their support typically outperform anything from the TV vendor and you can install apps (e.g. Jellyfin) on them. If you dislike Google or Amazon there are some Linux based options.

There is also HDMI over-radio but I don't know its limits (range, bandwidth, latency).

> What horrors lurk in the depths of those lovelessly constructed TV OSs that call out to servers and will cause mayhem when those servers are decommissioned?

My Sony TVs all work without an internet connection, so I'd guess nothing?

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