alt Hacker NewsFor 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 house I would normally get Rpi for is pretty convenient!
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> 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.
> It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen
Why would I want a Linux computer with a huge screen?
I just want a huge screen.
I’ll provide my own connected devices, independent of the screen.
I want the ability to add my own picture-in-picture display or overlay of text and other dynamic content.
Example: watching a movie but want the live score of a sports match scraped from a public website to be displayed in a corner.
OR while watching a sports match -- i want a overlay feed of text from a chat stream for a select web source
Looking forward for some public experiments / open projects in this space i could leverage. Dont have the skills to attempt it myself from scratch.
I have 2 LG OLED TVs, different sizes. Rootmytv failed to root both of them. I forgot which step and which error it was giving, but I tried everything including factory reset etc. I'm glad it's working for some people.
It took a bit of extra effort but `faultmanager-autoroot` script worked on my LG WebOS Smart Monitor
Seems like there is a big opportunity here for something a router distro to combine with a tv jailbreak. How good is the hardware? It would be nice to have my tv serve a couple purposes if it has the hardware to do it.
Did you know that a not jailbroken smart TV would spy on your HDMI, if connected to the network? I did not.
That still gives money to the people producing this garbage.
Can you actually replace the firmware with an open-source, privacy-respecting one? If you're still left running all the same proprietary background "services" and telemetry, I don't see how this kind of hack relates to any of the reasons for preferring a dumb TV.
I’ve been pretty happy with the smart apps on my LG OLED; it’s got the streaming things I want including jellyfin. Really the only one missing is steam link.
Sadly, modern Samsungs use signed Tizen and there are no roots/hacks available! Shame.
I was thinking the same. While it is not for everyone, hacking the TV to make the dumb is possible.
Is there much you can do with it? Does it still work as before, does it still have a GUI? Sounds really cool.
Jailbreaking is definitely an option, but there is value in spending money to provide a market signal instead.
Unfortunately, this is Hacker (founder of the next AirBNB) News and not Hacker (one who tinkers with devices) News
What’s the difference between that and just using the LG TV without any of the smart features? Like if you don’t connect it to the internet and only hook up something else through HDMI, isn’t it the same?
I have a no-name brand smart tv and it runs an OS called Tizen, and with a very little bit of googling, you can enable developer mode and install 3rd party apps on it. It probably doesn't solve the "spying-on-you" part, but it is nice to have the option of more apps.
How would you block ads on such a TV? The problem is you still cannot connect it to the internet without unknown privacy intrusion... Maybe to the LAN only? But then it's usefulness is still limited.
You shouldn't have to hack it, you should have the right to repair the software on your device. Hopefully the Vizio lawsuit will help with that for Linux based devices, signs are looking good though.
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html