We seriously need some "you own your hardware" laws - before the likes of Google tighten every bolt and implement enough "security" to firmly lock the users out of their own devices.

It's dead obvious that companies like Apple and Google and Sony and John Deere lock their hardware down to protect their revenue streams - not to help the users in any way. And yet, they're peddling the lie of "security" - and have been getting away with it for decades.

Now that AI is there to give even an average user a leg up when it comes to things like "I don't want to see ads in my TV's menus, can you do something about it", the companies will see more and more reasons to implement more "security" to stop it. And modern "security" measures are hard to defeat with technical measures - so this has to be curbed with legal action instead.

They (Android TV devices, mine was a FireStick 4K Max) also don't give a fuck about displaying things that are inappropriate; ours showed banners for horror films on several occasions, during the day when my children are about and scaring them.

It's much harder to switch out the launcher on a FireStick, but I did manage it briefly before it started boot looping right around 1yr of ownership, so it's e-waste now.

Advertising company in shows ads shock!

There are stupid TVs but they're more expensive since they don't have an ad subsidy.

I'm doing what you are - just don't connect it and you can enjoy ridiculously low prices on TVs.

You are looking for a very large monitor. They are very expensive. TVs are large monitors subsidized by their adware.

It's getting hard to get a dumb TV.

Try getting a display panel, like one of those used in restaurants to display menus.

Not sure, but I heard that special Hotel TVs are basically that. They don't seem to be more expensive.

You may want that but you won't like its unsubsidised price.

Like it or not it's no longer viable to sell to consumers at "cost plus margin" - you're sold a loss-making unit and the size of the loss is based on how much LTV they expect of you.

Be happy it's cheaper for you, but be aware that as an informed consumer who's not plugging in your device you have negative LTV and are thus not the product's target customer and sadly are actually kind of leeching off their business model.

I'm sure you wouldn't do that if you had a choice. But the old business model is unviable now so no one's left except these jerks.

But hey, cheap TVs!

To his credit, there's no technical reason that a processor running tens of billions of instructions per second couldn't immediately respond to menu inputs on the next frame.

Sure, the network might add a perceptible delay, but but the interface could load right away and populate the videos titles and thumbnails as they load.

At least show him how to use SmartTube, that will improve his experience by a lot.

Modern TVs use a max of 5 watts on standby. Does he think it's higher? Maybe a watt-meter plug is a simple solution (or it may make him obsess about the power usage when turned on!)

Yes! In fact..

The first version of Google TV, an internal demo, was based on MythTV. We had MythTV running against some HDHomeRun tuners, then a transparent webview (a fork of Petit Four-era Android builds since it had great d-pad nav support) running on top of it.

"Apps" were pure JavaScript gadgets, inspired by iGoogle, with custom DOM methods for anything TV-specific: channel changes, tuning info, and so on. With the MythTV demo, we managed to make some pretty fun hybrid apps that did things like pull up related stories about the TV show you were watching (maybe sounds lame now but was kinda cool seeing it for the first time: an iframe over my TV show, holy shit what can't I do with this). Adware was never discussed; we wanted to be a free and hackable OS for the living room.

After heading in this "widgets" direction for about a year, Android had been released and we strongly believed in a strategy based on it, so made the pivot. It was pretty tough, and educational, trying to build consumer products at Google in this era and without any singular unifying vision across the company. I longed for a top-down dictator like Steve Jobs who could cut the crap.. (even if we were judged to be the crap!)

I'm guessing the ad-infested OS from OP has some lineage back to the original Google TV, but of course I'm sure it's barely recognizable now.

Remember? I'm still using it! As great as streaming is it's always an arms race with blocking the ads, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. They're now streaming the actual content off pubads.g.doubleclick.net to make sure if you block ads you don't get to see anything.

MythTV lets me record free to air and skip through the ads.

> Like "curl | bash" but... with a million times more computation.

At least with `curl | bash` the originating website needs to be compromised. With AI, there are about a million different ways for it to go wrong and blow up your entire HDD.

Ignoring the obvious security nightmare the last thing I want in an install process is nondeterministic behavior

Claude has done amazing things for my Chromecast. Plex released an update recently that broke the UI badly. File names and thumbnails were overlapping each other which made the UI unusable, I couldn't navigate. I asked Claude to get the latest .apk, and fix it - and fix it, it did, all without me having to touch a command line. It even took screenshots of the chromecast screen to verify the results. I had it add a few other things like showing the media duration below the title and fixing the delete feature.

I had problems getting the Chromecast to connect to my IKEv2 home vpn at an airbnb, so I told Claude to fix it. It figured out there was no good way to make the existing VPN client apps work on my chromecast, so it wrote a new VPN client for me that works perfectly, all in about 20 minutes without me needing to do much more than supply my certs.

It also fixed SmartTube to work on my phone, the official app only shows 5 videos, Claude fixed the .apk to show 100+ thumbnails.

Try Fulguris:

https://f-droid.org/packages/net.slions.fulguris.full.fdroid...

It's a fork of the original AOSP WebKit browser, which I've found to be much faster than Chromium-based browsers, and you can import your uBlock Origin filters.

> the issue with me having to login to JellyFin every few days for no apparent reason

I only get shown the login prompt when the network connection to my server isn't established yet. I'm on Wi-Fi and need to wait for the connection before launching the client.

Something is wonky with your setup... My Jellyfin apps stay logged in indefinitely... Phones, TV, pretty sure even my browser is perma-logged-in.

> But you need to add an HDMI-CEC dongle

Little tip, but at least with my AMD card and the right DP->HDMI cable you can get CEC tunneled over Display Port without the dongle.

Your best bet is indeed a mini PC. I think you can probably still find N100 based mini PCs pretty cheap. As for keyboard, you can find a micro 6" keyboard + touchpad (ie K808) for like $25 on Amazon.

Just try them, it's not a big investment as they all work with vanilla server. You will appreciate default Jellyfin client more :)

I'm on Moonfin right now. I tested a few of them. They all looked super good, but turned out they were all super buggy. Unusable, even. Moonfin is OK.

Yet still, I come back to Jellyfin all the time. It's missing some bells and whistles, but it works in a predictable way.