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Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

arstechnica.com

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Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#131

Post by montymintypie »

throwaway63467 wrote: post #118
taxmeifyoucan wrote: post #101

For a hacker news article, it misses the crucial option - hacking a smart TV! I have LG OLED jailbroken using rootmy.tv, it was pretty trivial. It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen, you can customize it, SSH into it, map any commands to the remote, etc. Before I only used monitor, simple DP/HDMI input is all I wanted. But being able to take full control of the tv and connect it with other devices in the…

Is there much you can do with it? Does it still work as before, does it still have a GUI? Sounds really cool.

I think the parent commenter is perhaps a little over-selling the LG rooting. It is definitely root, you can write whatever you want on the filesystem (at your peril), and theoretically do whatever you want, but the homebrew exploit launches a bit later in the boot chain than you'd want (so blocking update nags isn't quite reliable), and a lot of the inner system things are proprietary and require reverse engineering to extend.

It's the same system software, just with root capacity.

That being said, there's still a bunch of nice homebrew:

- Video screensavers ala Apple TV

- DVD logo screensaver

- Adfree (and sponsorblock-integrated and optional shorts-disabling) Youtube

- Remote button remapping (Netflix button now opens Plex for me)

- Hyperion (ambilight service that controls an LED strip behind the TV)

- A nice nvidia shield emulator for game streaming from my PC with low latency

- VNC server (rarely useful, but invaluable when it is)

Sponsorblock and remote remapping are killer features for me, and the rest is just really pleasant to have.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#133

Post by aceazzameen »

00N8 wrote: post #100
amelius wrote: post #34

Unfortunately cars are becoming like smart TVs in this respect.

I'll never buy a car manufactured after about 2014 for this reason. I'm planning to just keep getting repairs & upgrades done on my model year 2006 for at least the next 10-20 years. By then perhaps I will want to switch to electric, but I'll do it by electrifying something older. Cars from around 1998-2014 usually have side curtain airbags & adequate rollover durability. The only improvements since then that I'd eve…

This is the same reason why we haven't bought a new vehicle. Our 2013 Toyota is fantastic.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#134

Post by Animats »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #25
valleyer wrote: post #19

Sceptre is not in fact "a Wal-Mart brand" but rather an independent company. https://www.sceptre.com Westinghouse TVs are made by a company licensing the brand, not a "Pittsburgh-headquartered company". These seem like easy mistakes to avoid.

This is really poor research on their part.

> "Below are the brands I’ve identified as most likely to have dumb TVs available for purchase online as of this writing."

That just has to be an LLM at work.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#136

Post by Retr0id »

montymintypie wrote: post #124
slig wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RootMyTV (v1/v2) has been patched for years, and your TV is almost certainly not vulnerable. We recommend checking whether your TV is rootable with another method.

The one-click method has been patched, but there are other methods that will work if you haven't been religiously updating your TV: [0] https://github.com/throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot [1] https://github.com/throwaway96/faultmanager-autoroot

One day I will buy a new TV and develop a new one-click method... but for now I'm still rocking my B9.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#138

Post by wccrawford »

JayGuerette wrote: post #96

I'm confused. Every TV is a dumb TV if you don't give it your Wifi password.

My 2 year old LG complained every time I turned it on that I hadn't hooked it to the internet. No way to disable it.

Now that it's connected, it shows an ad at that time, in the same way. Can't win.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#139

Post by ashirviskas »

montymintypie wrote: post #124
slig wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RootMyTV (v1/v2) has been patched for years, and your TV is almost certainly not vulnerable. We recommend checking whether your TV is rootable with another method.

The one-click method has been patched, but there are other methods that will work if you haven't been religiously updating your TV: [0] https://github.com/throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot [1] https://github.com/throwaway96/faultmanager-autoroot

Religiously updating my TV? It has been patched since spring, someone clicking by accident "yes" for the update notice that appears randomly on the middle of the screen in the past 9 months would ruin it. I was religously *not* updating my TV and it still got too new software for the exploit :')
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