I just don’t connect my Hisense to the Internet, and let my Nvidia Shield TV do all the “Smart” stuff. 🤷♂️
I have an old laptop with Linux Mint hooked to my TV. Firefox with some bookmarks to different streaming services, Freetube with subscriptions, sunshine/moonlight to my gaming PC and emulators to play some retro adventures with my kids. I remote controll it with KDE Connect from my phone. Works great!
I used to fiddle with Kodi on a Raspberry Pi, but the laptop is so simple and easy to set up, I don’t see myself going back.
You don’t even need a laptop for all of this, you can use your phone.
I stream games with it all the time.
My phone doesn’t have HDMI, I don’t know how to share the screen with my TV. Plus I have an USB drive with a lot of movies attached to the computer.
You can plug one of these things into the USB-C port of your phone and it basically turns it into a little PC.
Edit: My phone is old and was cheap, so I use an active USB-C to Hdmi converter.
are there custom ROMs for TVs like there are for Android phones?
Not on that number. I think there is lineage os for shield tv but I’m not sure about anything else
I have a TCL ROKU TV which is way too chatty on my network. It sends every single keypress on the remote to their servers (just look into the dev console which is easy enough to see what is logged). I have an adblock dns server on my network
These are just in the last 23 minutes of the hour. As I understand, it’s not always doing this if they are not blocked, but when you block them, it starts to panic!
The advantage of doing this is instead of having the ad on the right side of the home menu, I have a nice translucent adbox with nothing in it… Also, if you look up the secret codes for Roku menus, you can also toggle the ad server they use so sometimes if some slip through, you get some in house tested ones which are sometimes funny. But that’s extremely rare for us.
Our next TV will probably be a display or offline only and be a streaming box with custom firmware such as Librelec or something else when the time comes.
Just buy a computer monitor