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Any alternatives? What would you recommend instead? I'm under the suspicion that every single Smart TV vendor has the same problems.
by midrus 5y ago
Any alternatives? What would you recommend instead? I'm under the suspicion that every single Smart TV vendor has the same problems.
- _nalply 5y agoBuy a dumb screen. For example a big computer monitor. I know it's not the same but this is the only solution I know.
- studiecomput 5y agoOr just don't connect your TV to the internet and buy an external streamer.
- _nalply 5y agoA vendor could display a nag screen at inopportune moments to connect the TV. As far as I know Samsung does this.
- mod 5y agoAlso, some TVs have been known to scan for open networks, and use those without permission.
- carleton 5y agoDo you have a source on this?
- syntheticcorp 5y agoThere is none. This has been asserted for years on HN but I’ve never seen a modicum of evidence for it.
- mod 5y agoI posted it in this thread (I'm GP). I admit, I think my source was probably HN comments. I tend to trust them more than they deserve. I did a Google, and it seems a very sketchy claim.
- headass 5y agowe have a samsung tv that is exclusively used with an apple tv and it’s seemed ok this far but i’m not sure how/if i can completely kill it trying to connect as we currently have no nearby open networks but if one pops up it’ll try and connect and i detest that
- zrobotics 5y agoSetup an open wifi link w/ a separate router, search Amazon for travel router for devices under US$35. This may need to provide a response from an expected domain, just connect the TV and a PC to the open wifi (that isn't connected to the internet) and use Wireshark to see what domains the TV is trying to connect to. Setup the router dns to provide 400 responses to those queries, and problem solved. Why yes, this is a ludicrous amount of technical work to expect the average consumer to do, and it is fucking disgusting that this is even a concern. I'll continue to use my 8 year old TV, I don't need 4k for something I'm watching from 8 feet away anyway. I had to DMZ a friend's smart TV, since it was booting excessively slowly waiting for a response from the (Sony) servers, which is why I have a work around. Still, spending $35 and polluting the 2.5ghz band even more seems stupid. The TV in question had an ethernet port, but providing 400 responses on that didn't improve boot times, since it tried to find a wifi signal after that. Just stupid that a TV will be slow to turn in depending on what external servers it can contact. Edit-stated this was an LG TV, it was a Sony.
- sleepybrett 5y agoConnect it to your network and blackhole all their traffic.
- unicornporn 5y ago...and so, one day, the TV finds an open Wi-Fi hotspot and sends everything it has collected anyways.
- smnrchrds 5y agoAre we sure external streamers don't do the exact same thing? Apple TV probably doesn't. But what about Chromecast, NVIDIA Shield, Roku, and Fire TV?
- ornornor 5y agoKodi/libreelec doesn’t.
- hericium 5y agoYou'd have to assume good faith such as that the device won't connect to some insecure WiFi when one becomes available.
- mulmen 5y agoBetter find the cellular radio and rip it out too. Or just wrap the whole device in foil. Got any suggestions on external streamers that don’t have the same problem as a smart tv?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- CrendKing 5y agoCan you set up your router or PiHole to block the tracking domains? There has to be list of those.
- cma 5y agoSamsung's smart tag find network could now or in the future be used to exfiltrate data from their smart tvs that arent connected. Not high bandwidth, so it would have to be OCR or text to speech probably. Just like Amazon's Sidewalk network.
- gonehome 5y agoLast I checked LG was the best available mainstream option.
- ohthehugemanate 5y agoset up a raspberry pi or an old laptop with Kodi and use that. Don't plug your TV in to ethernet or give it wifi.
- rightbyte 5y agoThat only works if there are no open wifis around. And I would not be suprised if Samsung use Verizon's (?) spy mesh of wifi routers.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoI've always heard people claim that TVs will do this, I've never seen one actually do it. I don't believe any TV will speculatively join open wifi without asking.
- cma 5y agoIf you consider Echo Show a smart TV, it can use amazon's sidewalk network to connect without internet.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoUnfortunately, many current TVs ship with advertised-but-missing features, which are added later via a software update. In the current gen, variable framerate input is a good example of this.
- mackrevinack 5y agoim using kodi myself. i used libreElec for a few years which is basically just kodi as an OS. i switched to a OSMC recently which is a bit more expensive than a raspberry pi but the hardware and then OSMC skin is a bit nicer i mainly use it with the jellyfin plugin so all of my media is stored on a NAS and kodi just acts as the player
- ornornor 5y agoBeen very happy with our Panasonic OLED. It’s perfectly happy without an internet connection, turns on in 5 seconds flat (a feature these days if you can believe it, as most smart TVs boot a whole Linux or android and take for ever), the amount of options to adjust the image is incredible (they’re used as reference displays in movie studios for coloring movies apparently), and the picture is beautiful. Oh and not a single ad screen anywhere even if you connect it to the internet.
- philsnow 5y agoCare to give the part number?
- ornornor 5y agoTheir whole OLED tv lineup shares these characteristics.
- thevagrant 5y agoI'd recommend JZ1000 or JZ2000.
- 72deluxe 5y agoI have a Panasonic from a few years ago (cheapest 4K I could find; is "smart" so has Netflix and Amazon Prime Video and other UK streaming services like More4, ITV Player, Disney+) and it does rely on contacting Panasonic for them to work. Their server went down the other year and ALL of the services on the TV stopped working - Netflix wouldn't launch any more. It does contact Panasonic but I have blocked the domains with a Pihole and closed outgoing port 53 other than traffic from the Pihole so nothing can make DNS requests directly (eg. hardcoded to 8.8.8.8). The TV itself is great though. It runs FirefoxOS I believe. The TV is not as bad as the LG I had before it which sent a web request to LG every time you pressed a button on the remote control... volume up.... web request to LG. Volume down... TV sent a web request to LG.
- ornornor 5y agoIf you’re talking about an LCD Panasonic, I can’t say anything about them other then they’re a completely different series than the OLED. Almost like a separate brand. My OLED has Netflix etc. I used the built in Netflix a few times but don’t anymore since because I don’t use Netflix altogether and not subscribed to them. I put it on a special VLAN that has no internet access but can still send and receive traffic to my home assistant instance so as far as the tv is concerned, it’s offline. But it’s never nagged me about it. And when it was fully online (when using the Netflix app), I never received any ad anywhere.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoSony TVs use Google software, and while Google spies on you too, at least they're honest about it (!), and allow you to turn it off. I also trust Google to have fewer glaring security issues than Samsung.
- vinay427 5y ago> and allow you to turn it off. Source? On Android with Google Play Services, which almost always applies to Android TV as they’re essentially the same OS, there are no UI toggles to turn off the spying. You can check this using a DNS proxy, for instance, and viewing the log after blocking Google domains using such a proxy might prove quite alarming. Android devices even with location and search tracking disabled contact Google every several minutes.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoYou can disable tracking account-wide at https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-privacy https://myaccount.google.com/data-and-privacy - scroll down to the confusingly-named "History settings". If you turn these off, particularly "Web & app history", your TV (and all other Google devices) will obey the settings if it is logged into that Google account. It will still be contacting Google's servers, but it won't be recording anything.
- aaaaaaaaata 5y agoAre you sure? Or are they just not showing you, via your UI, what they're collecting into their data pools anymore?
- LeoPanthera 5y agoIf you don't trust what companies explicitly say they are doing, then there is no solution that will satisfy you.
- prox 5y agoMaybe a beamer?
- theshrike79 5y agoLG stuff is the best, they run WebOs, not Android and are generally usable without an internet connection.
- patrickk 5y agoPrior discussion, hope it helps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29990910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29990910 TL:DR- LG CX tv, never connected to the internet, "smart" functions come from a separate device. It's also behind a pihole for what it's worth.
- js2 5y agoMy cheap Hisense U6G works fine as a dumb TV. It’s not hooked up to my network. I use an AppleTV instead. Got it because it was the best 65” TV on rtings under $1K at the time I bought it.
- mns 5y agoGot a Sony OLED (has all that Google TV stuff), connected the TV for a software update, then disable all network connections and plug in an Apple TV. I had a Samsung before that started showing me ads, which was from my point of view a huge violation of my private space and my home (it's a TV that I fully bought, and not a cheap one). Bought the Apple TV, before getting the new Sony and also disabled everything on the Samsung.
- garblegarble 5y agoI'm extremely happy with the LG C1. It's not connected to the internet (beyond initial setup so I could update the firmware). LG's setup process let me opt out of everything (including setting up broadcast TV reception, which my older Samsung 4K TV kept trying to harass me about). The only thing that initially annoyed me was the LG logo appeared at shutdown, but that can be disabled in a hidden menu. I currently use an Apple TV 4K for all my apps, it integrates perfectly with the TV using HDMI CEC and has a clean content-focused UI that's not stuffed with ads (had been considering Android TV). I will never use a Samsung TV again after my last experience of performance-crippling firmware, nagging, confusing/off-screen opt-out UIs for spyware features, attempting to bypass DNS if telemetry is blocked, and ad-stuffing (KS8000) - nor allow a TV to have a persistent network connection.