Hacker News Reader

Comment by rustcleaner | Hacker News Reader

Never ever connect your "Smart"-TV to your network, or if you have an incurable impulse to then make sure it's on a firewalled gateway-less VLAN. Take the money you save buying the thing (compared to what a profitable "dumb" version would cost) and buy a surplus corporate mini-workstation system, and slap LibreELEC/Kodi or whatever on it, and use that device as your "smart" device. No good for you can ever come from bringing the TV onto the internet... ever!

(Also: never paypig, never subscribe!)

View on HN

This, but LibreELEC or other Kodi distributions suck. They are too limited. Until recently, the best solution was to run a full Linux DE, but now there is Plasma Bigscreen[0] for that. This is basically a DE optimized for couch use with a remote. You can run Kodi as an app, but also stream from a browser, or play games with Steam, etc.

[0] https://plasma-bigscreen.org/

This looks great, it just needs some hardware to run on with a nice remote. Does any hardware like that exist?

An Xbox/PlayStation controller is cheap and high quality.

An airmouse remote, ideally with a keyboard on the back, works very well. It's particularly useful if you want to run "apps" that that not specifically designed for ten-foot use, and expect mouse or keyboard input.

Via KDE Connect, you can also use your smartphone as touchpad to control the cursor or to act as remote keyboard.

Why not ever subscribe? I mean, yeah, subscriptions are getting pricey these days, but you can subscribe to one network, watch the things you want, then cancel and go to another.

There's plenty you can trash Amazon for, but at least on Prime Video, you can subscribe to the other services through them, watch on any browser, and reliably cancel easily when you're done.

I've heard this wisdom before, usually with an apple TV positioned as the alternative, but I've had that setup before and didn't enjoy having to use 2 remotes instead of one.

A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.

Having 2 remotes is so much easier than trying to flash custom firmware on the TV

You don't necessarily have to flash a custom firmware. Rooting the TV and killing the ad processes is usually sufficient.

this is a solved problem on basically any modern tv: HDMI-CEC lets your appletv control your tv without using the tv remote.

why were you using 2 remotes? did you have other systems attached to the television, such as a game console, or cable?

the Apple TV provides hdmi cec, which should control your television through the hdmi cable.

Put the TV remote in a drawer and only use the Apple TV remote. With CEC enabled, that one remote will control power and volume for the TV and any connected audio devices. It'll also switch to the proper input when the Apple TV is turned on.

I only use one remote. The tv remote. I just enable HDMI-CEC

I keep the Apple TV remote around for extremely rare situations where that doesn’t work but even then, my cell phone has a built in Apple TV remote as well, which makes it even less necessary

> A better solution would be to root the damn TV and neuter its spyware/adware crap.

That sounds like a lot of work. I don't want to sign up to this much work for every product I own that I want an iota of control over.

So I would argue if this is "better" by any stretch of the word

The only time mine were ever connected to the internet was to update the software, and for that the easiest thing I thought was to host a temporary wifi hotspot (using a phone).

My concern is your telemetry may have been stored up to that point, then forwarded upon connecting.

I connect every few months (with cable) to check for firmware updates and the like. Otherwise agree it stays offline.

Surely they will just make it mandatory, at some point?

I remember seeing reports a few years ago about some TV that would constantly complain if it wasn’t connected. I don’t know what brand it was.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com