There's no best answer right now, Plasma Bigscreen is making good progress.
I have to imagine they'll soon be putting cellular antennas in the TVs to circumvent all that anyway.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2026
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That'll be expensive so I don't think it'll be happening. They'll be OK with collecting data from the 95% of their customers who don't know how to block the TV from having internet access.
That's true even the premium brands won't halfway decent CPUs in them to keep the giant bloated menus from stuttering.
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Not a popular answer, but Apple TV is the best out of the box experience. Zero ads, massive longevity. Mine is like 7 years old and still running the latest tvOS.
If you have the cash and inclination, Nvidia Shield is the hackers choice. Zero hardware upgrades in years tho, but software aplenty.
Just don’t let your smart TV access the internet in any situation, there’s no need. It’s just a stupid display.
Zero ads
The launcher is a massive ad for Apple's services though.
What? There’s one icon that says “TV”. You can move it to the bottom and you won’t see any apple stuff beyond that.
Apple TV's launcher was recently "updated" to showcase whatever latest content is being pushed through Apple's own services. Which is advertisement.
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Are apple TVs not phoning home?
If anything I'd imagine they're one of the hardest companies to block, considering most apple users have a thousand idevices that could smuggle messages, even with all communications turned off.
Not at this scale. Remember that Apple is a hardware company first. They make money from hardware and app stores.
Google is the worlds largest ad company who dabble in hardware and services to increase their ad revenue.
They're still a public company, and Im sure the heat is on their C suite cause they haven't had any successful hardware releases since the M series processor was first released.
Not selling "anonymous" data would look to shareholders as thrown away profit, which they're even able to sue for.
So I'd be insanely surprised if they weren't surveiling their users - but unlike google and all, they own their entire closed-source software and hardware empire, so the likelihood of catching them is also valuably low.
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check out: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
This looks exactly like what I was looking for! Thank you!
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A raspberry pi running Kodi has been serving me well for years.
Easy install paths include LibreELEC and osmc. I believe both are based on debian.
FWIW I chose and have been happy with osmc.
Regardless of the choice, Kodi has a plugin system for things like YouTube, you can access your media via the jellyfin plugin/app, or by pointing Kodi at your media. It has a remote app available on android and iOS, and for the most part just works.
I couldn't find a working YouTube app on Kodi, nor any of the streaming sites (besides Disney plus oddly) nor Plex. It kinda felt like a real debrid frontend and graveyard of plugins.
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@Epzillon I have been using Plasma Big Screen for a while now and cant be happier. I use Jellyfin as my main media source, Fred TV for my IP TV service and PWA for Youtube and Netflix. My TV has been disconnected from the internet for a while now and I dont feel my kids know the difference. I also use the Rii bluetooth remote to access Plasma Big Screen interface.
Does Fred TV work with a remote? Jellyfin was great but I couldn't find an IPTV service that worked well with a remote. Fred TVs interface is also not great compared to something like Tivimate
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For the real "TV feeling", try ErsatzTV. It basically creates multiple real-time streams of TV shows and movies from your media library. You can switch between them like channels.
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Also, looking towards the future or for people that can find one at a decent price:
Not a raspberry pi but an Orange Pi Plus or Pro. They have a rockchip that has AV1 decoding (along with standard others) which is probably going to be the future (it is for corpo streaming already).
Put plasma big screen on it and get a Bluetooth wechip remote or something
Hey welcome to the hobby!
We personally have the whole TV on a Vlan, so it can't acces anything at all. While our server/HA can still send a WOL command to it, and jellyfin can stream our movies to it. I run all of it on top of TrueNas, most as an app or else an VM.
I have never tried to set something up for YouTube specifically, since that runs on a Chromecast (for now...)
Let me know how your journey goes
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This is the setup I've built so far:
I use KonstaKang's LineageOS Android TV build running on a pi 5: https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi5/LineageOS23-ATV/
No Google play services store at all, I just use ADB to install apps
This is the launcher I use, it's way nicer than the stock Lineage one: https://github.com/meddouribadis/arclauncher/
I use SmartTube as my YouTube client: https://github.com/yuliskov/smarttube/
I have this Bluetooth remote app on my phone for the rare occasion I need to type a password or something: https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.jqssun.btremote
I also have KDE Connect on both my phone and TV so I can play/pause media from my phone at any time and send files (like new launcher wallpapers) easily without adb.
Two approaches:
Network isolation/DNS blocking - put the TV on a VLAN and only permit specific ports through to a media server (whatever the TV will support). If you lack VLAN capability, run PiHole as your DNS server (it works best as DNS and DHCP, but that's just my opinion for things I like, such as proper name resolution for all devices).
Second option: (your idea with a Pi) disconnect TV from network entirely, then run something like Kodi (or whatever media center you prefer) on an old laptop, mini-PC, whatever, and have that device connect via HDMI. HDMI can passthrough the navigation controls from the TV remote (not guaranteed, but it's part of the standard). I looked into this a long time ago but the performance wasn't there yet. Today I'd probably try any distro and run Kodi on it.
Even my POS Samsung passes through enough of the controls to navigate Kodi on a 2017 laptop, while retaining power, volume, settings, etc for the TV itself.
My current setup is a Jellyfin server and Jellyfin client on the TV. I run PiHole with a blocklist for all the Samsung BS which has had the side effect of making the TV menus faster as it doesn't retrieve any "what's new" info from Samsung. Its actually kind of fun to monitor the FNS log and see the domains the TV hits, click Deny and see what breaks in the TV. On average about 30% of all DNS requests on my network get denied, and nothing of value has been lost. That's how much crap is being sent all the time.
Hope that gives you some ideas.
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Me personally, I just use a Linux distro (ive used Ubuntu and popos, both have been fine) and use whatever flavor of streaming service I can access. Sometimes you're hit with lower resolution but I'd rather that than get spied on and be fed ads by my hardware.
Ive also gone back to physical media and use a DVD player. I'm just buying series I like one by one.
This video used a combination of physical media and streaming services. They relied on waydroid and with some workarounds, it worked well for them:
Seriously, I just use my TV as a big computer monitor, connected to a cheap old computer running Linux mint.
Torrent, jellyfin, streaming. Unless you need cable, this works great.
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@Epzillon
I use #LibreElec with #Zattoo and #Netflix addon on an old Laptop. For remote control, I use a Remote with Bluetooth and Infrarot.
Currently I play around with #GamesOnWhales and its fork #Quasar for game streaming.
Open the TV and pull the wifi antennas off the board.
My answer is... excessive. So keep that in mind. If its just you or you and another adult, just set up kodi in some form.
I wanted something that would have profiles for my kids, a remote, and easy access. Where I am currently is:
- Flex Launcher - 10' UI. The same person started Big Launcher after but never completed. I'm hoping to finagle Plasma Bigscreen into doing what I want, but I'm not there yet.
- Media is all Jellyfin, now with my older game emulation there as well.
- Logging into the machine also auths against JF, so its per user at the OS level for each member of the family. Currently working on NFC for login so my kids can tap a toy or something to get their account logged in, rather than me or my wife doing it.
- PC is an industrial pc I picked up, its light on usb ports but I added a wifi/bt card from another machine, bumped up the ram with some spares I had.
- I have a usb soundbar and usb audio processor, all audio goes through there, managed via pipewire.
- I couldn't get CEC working well on it, so I made use of an overly expensive video switcher for this purpose that I picked up a while back. Corp conferencing switcher. Now I can send CEC programmatically.
- Current remote is just an older android tablet with lineage on it. I want to replace this with a keyboard/remote combo, but haven't found what I wanted to yet. This will just get broken accidentally by a kid, so I'd prefer a remote.
The experience is pretty decent, just login and browse. In any case, this is the (overly complex) way I've addressed things for me. That said, a few notes / to-do items:
- No streaming platforms (I will not use them anyway)
- I still need to stand up a youtube front end (I don't use it much so low on the list, more for my wife)
- I want to set up something to show family photos from immich as the background
- I need better controllers for gaming. I have one 8bitdo pro wired, an old 8bitdo NES controller, and a gamecube usb adapter (but my gamecube controllers have all gone to crap now, so thats useless). I also connected up the balance board from the wii, but haven't gotten much use out of it yet.
- I want to get my AudioBookShelf on there as a dedicated setup with login by desktop account automatically, haven't even started this yet. May have to do something a bit different here too as I want a read-along style for the kids.
- I would never buy all this stuff, I used things I picked up on the free or cheap via hardware replacements through my work and tech liquidation/"recycling" companies.
I have a setup very similar to this. Although I’m fully on the Plasma Bigscreen bandwagon. But then again, I don’t have many custom services such as NFC login/custom background image logic like you do, and I doubt Plasma Bigscreen would play nice with that stuff. A couple of things I learned through my many attempts of setup:
- HDMI CEC doesn’t work on pretty much all x86 devices except for like some particular mini PCs, the Framework desktop, and the Steam Deck dock. Most ARM devices do though which is how I got around this by just using an Orange Pi 5. Another option is tunneling over DisplayPort if your device has a DisplayPort and you have a supported DP-HDMI adapter. Then finally, there’s also the PulseEight USB adapter if nothing else works.
- I’ve been using Waydroid for any application that doesn’t support Linux natively like YouTube or most streaming services (although I only use YouTube and Jellyfin for all of my content). You can use Waydroid Android TV which launches a near-native Android TV translation layer running Lineage OS which is de-googled and privacy protecting by default. You can launch the normal Android interface which has the entire Android TV UI, or you can enable multi window mode and just launch specific Android apps directly from whatever Linux launcher you use and they launch and work like normal Linux apps with TV controls. Very useful since Android has a much larger TV app ecosystem.
Tech liquidation/recycling companies? I'd like to hear more about that
When companies decommission their hardware, they go to a large scale "recycler". Most of the time that means pulling the drive on the PCs and maybe dropping another in before reselling it for less.
Some companies also recycle things like digital signage players, which could be purpose built hardware and mostly useless or purpose built software and fairly useful if you know what to check for. Or sometimes speakers, audio dsp's, monitors, etc.
Other times when a company is being liquidated (like being sold off to pay for debts), it'll get auctioned off. You don't get to look at the details much (maybe one device pulled out in front of the crate the rest are in), you are buying in quantity, etc, but there can be good finds there.
I'm big on making use of perfectly good hardware with just a few years on them.
@curbstickle @Epzillon What's the "overly expensive video switcher" that you're using? I have an android TV with broken CEC (a Pi running Libreelec works fine one my other tv, but not this one).
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Old laptop, debian, Firefox, g60s remote. Done.
Im on a 2013 m93p thinkcenter tiny. Still goes hard
Im on a 2013 m93p thinkcenter tiny. Still goes hard
Heh. That's my gaming machine. Win 8.1, 2x4 GB sticks, i5-4785T, 2x Xbox 360 controllers, SSD.
I can play retro games, emulation (Wii, Gamecube, PS 2 era), indy's and PC AAA upto about 2015ish. Boots in under 5 seconds, smooth 60fps @ 720p (which is good enough for me). For a $100 "piece of ewaste", it goes hard AF.
Keep your GTA 6; Lego City Undercover local co-op is where it is at.
It's been a while for me (I don't upgrade things that work and I try to buy things that last a long time...)
But, Hotel Mode might still be a thing, and it might bypass some "smart" stuff on the TV
I used that to make my TV start on the correct external HDMI port for my MythTV instance running on Arch Linux (btw) with dual TV tuners in.
The TV is rarely used to watch live TV and it's certainly not connected to any networking.
Just another approach that I've not seen mentioned here
I use ONN Android boxes. Fairly inexpensive, but I think it's difficult to set up without a Google account (you can create a dummy account on the setup).
Side-loading is trivial. Some favorite apps: TizenTube to replace YouTube (or any of a dozen or so frontends), Projectivy launcher to replace the awful default. Add an always on VPN.
Not sure why you got downvoted. I use similar Mi boxes. I hate google but the tv has a throw away tv email. I would love to not have google involved.
I then have productivity launcher which i quite like. If i am wrong happy to be pointed in the right direction. generally use stremio/jelly/smartube
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I'm still using an old Apple TV. I'm not happy about it but haven't found a good replacement yet.
There's a few interesting options for software in this thread. In terms of hardware - maybe a NUC or something? Would have to be small, quiet and relatively cheap.
There are builds for Android TV lineage os for the raspberry pi. If you are willing to put in some work for alternative apps it's a great interface with no Google integration. I've used kodi before i moved to jellyfin always found the kodi -> jellyfin integration to be clunky. Google TV would be much cleaner
I could never get those Android TV builds to work with CEC which kind of defeats the purpose for me. I'll try it out with the next update. Librelec had no issues.
@Epzillon Don't know, if it fits your needs, I'm currently running https://tvheadend.org/ and MiniDLNA https://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/ on an Odroid XU4Q with Arch Linux Arm.
My TV can direct use DLNA, so no further software is necessary.
Tvheadend is recording actual tv shows and recordings are manually converted into h264 videos afterwards and placed on the DLNA server.
Shows, which I don't want to archive, are also served by the DLNA server.
My living room set up has been TV not connected to internet and hooking up a minipc running Fedora. Could run Windows if DRM content from streaming services is important to you.
Any Linux distro with Plasma Bigscreen. My TV box is an old laptop I got for free from work running Cachy OS. I have a remote-sized keyboard/trackpad that I use to control it. I mostly just need the arrows, but the whole keyboard is there if I need to go in to the desktop OS.
I could use a recommendation for a big-screen ad-blocking YouTube app though.
I just saw this video a few minutes ago and it seems like a pretty good approach.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=nROKp0BpFek
It looks very similar to a post here from several months ago.
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