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Posted by fleahunter 4 days ago

Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options(arstechnica.com)
630 points | 523 commentspage 5
anothernewdude 3 days ago|
Are dumb TVs rare? I've never bought one, just getting TVs when other people are finished with theirs, but I'm pretty sure every one I've owned has been a dumb TV. We just connect it to the PS4 and they've all been the same.
xnx 4 days ago||
Terrible article, but a good topic. You can get rid of homescreen ads on Google(/Android/Chromecast?) TV with a custom launcher like Projectivity: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spocky.pro...
wappieslurkz 3 days ago||
I just ignore all the smart features and never connect my smart TV to the internet, and I disconnected the WiFi antennas from the main board. I use an Apple TV to feed it live TV, series and movies via apps.
DudeOpotomus 3 days ago|
this is the only way. Do not ever connect your new TV to the internet. Never, ever.
darkwater 3 days ago||
Keeping it practical and not purist, how do new smart TVs (mainly LG, it's the brand I like the most for the hardware) act with ads in a PiHole'd network? Does that block ads? Do they notice?
komali2 3 days ago||
> Any display or system you end up using needs HDCP 2.2 compliance to play 4K or HDR content via a streaming service or any other DRM-protected 4K or HDR media, like a Blu-ray disc.

This plus all the notes below about how various apps won't stream 4k in various circumstances depending on platform or web browser just lend further credence to the idea that it's best to say fuck it and deploy a jellyfin instance and sail the high seas. Or at least rip blu rays.

I mean why would I pay all these streaming services for such subpar service?

bitwize 3 days ago||
The cheat code is Sceptre dumb TVs from Wal-Mart's web site. I want Hackernews to know about this so that Sceptre and Wal-Mart can get sales and know that there's a substantial market for these devices, not shrug their shoulders and go "we may as well take these off the market and sell enshittified crap instead; it's not like our customers know or care about the difference."
Marsymars 3 days ago|
I’d be in the market but walmart.ca doesn’t list any Sceptre TVs. (Nor does any other Canadian retailer.)
stockresearcher 3 days ago||
I think they are selling off old stock and exiting the TV business. Searching various sites in the US shows only a basic 50” 4K TV. A few years ago, they had a very wide variety of offerings - I bought a 65” 4K dumb TV from them. Amazon (US) shows a wide variety of available-to-buy computer monitors, so that is probably their focus at the moment. It’s probably a lot more lucrative.
eggsome 3 days ago||
Are there any hobby projects to hack/replace the controller board to make a new/fancy TV into a dumb tv? Would be nice to be able to use a new OLED panel like that...
HiroProtagonist 4 days ago||
Pi-hole
mr_mitm 4 days ago||
I have a fire tv and run adguard, which does the same thing as pihole, and I can barely tell it's on. It may block some tracking, but I get an increasing amount of ads in the fire tv GUI, not to speak of YouTube ads.

Sometimes I wonder if the people recommending pihole actually tried it. You get much better value out of ublock, smarttube, and so on.

ProllyInfamous 4 days ago|||
This is a great suggestion. I've run two on my local network for about five years:

pi#1) My personal DNS resolver, which I manually configure on each device.

pi#2) The much less restrictive DNS resolver which my DHCP server automatically issues to all other network clients, including all phones and IoT [0]

Individual hosts can then manually configure their DNS to resolve to the local network router (or third-party DNS), which effectively bypasses both PiHoles (for that device, only).

[0] There is a method to use a firewall to capture all outbound DNS and force routing through PiHole (ifsense? I don't know), which may be necessary for hard-coded DNS-IPs. I do not know how to do this but it's not necessary on my network.

lazyeye 3 days ago||
Often devices will have the DNS server hard-coded and never connect to the pihole DNS server. This is not just to avoid ad-blocking but to make the DNS more reliable and avoiding having lots of potential support issues around faulty DNS.
encom 3 days ago||
I've never used pihole, but on any decent router you can intercept outgoing udp to port 53, and redirect it to a destination of your choosing. DNS-over-HTTP ruined that however.
mentos 3 days ago||
Don’t think it makes sense for Apple but would be cool to see them sell dumb TV screens to hook up to an Apple TV box.
b8 3 days ago|
Don't connect to the wifi on the tv and just use a Nvidia Shield Pro or ugoos/Onn.
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