It was very underhanded of Google to add advertising after the fact. When I have to factory reset the TV I'm reminded of how it used to be before it upgrades. Years later they still haven't [1] updated the screenshots in their Play store page to show the giant 1/3 full screen ads you get now.
Replacing the Google launcher (I used ATV Launcher Pro) was one of the best quality of life upgrades I've ever done, if you haven't already I highly recommend it.
Not only does Google show auto playing video ads for streaming services you don't subscribe to, it also shows pure auto playing video ads for things like fast food. It really lags while it tries to start up to show the ads.
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Google closes the ADB backdoor when they realise all the sweet ad dollars they're losing.
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.
When my old (2014?) "smart" LG got evicted from Netflix, as in "your TV will not be supported anymore starting August 15th 2026" I vibe-coded a Plasma BigScreen like interface with:
* Firefox in full-screen with a custom extension that makes the web UI of Netflix into something usable by a d-pad remote
* Switchfin (which has a Linux version) works pretty well out of the box
* Some custom Python+GTk apps to watch some public TV channels (they have no DRM and have a good API, so it was very easy, and I can get custom views for what my family watches)
* a nice viewer for Immich albums
* a CD player (I bought a 15EUR external USB DVD player)
Everything using a single UI paradigm, with just the things my family and I actually care for. No ads. No tracking (well, I guess Netflix still does some tracking anyway).
- Buy the biggest LG C -series OLED TV you can afford and/or fit (WebOS, no Android TV crapola to deal with)
- Never connect it to the internet, LG wants to add all kinds of AI crap to it.
- Set it to Filmmaker Mode[0] to disable all of the "improvements" it tries to do to the image
- Buy an Apple TV
Done.
The ATV can turn the TV on and off and adjust the volume. You won't need the TV remote for anything after that.
I still use my 10 year old Apple TV 4k daily and it works like new, no slowdown, every single relevant streaming platform supports it with a dedicated app. It even got every single tvOS release until this fall.
I just want to buy a "Stupid TV" I wonder if such a brand would sell very sell "JustWatch TV" people in stores seeing how quickly it turns on, and just works, no internet questions, just a TV working. Must be revolutionary, can't believe we never thought of having TVs without an entire invasive OS that slows down the entire TV...
Every smart TV I own never gets internet access, ever. I just plug a real device that connects to the internet instead, they're a much faster and better experience.
Just buy a TV and don't connect it to the Internet. I have even seen people remove the WiFi daughterboard. That's essentially your "very large monitor." You absolutely do not have to endure the adware and privacy invasion of content recognition and other spyware. Beat the TV manufacturers at their own game.
Or a TV where you can rip out the internals and replace them with some cheap dumb board. Not sure where you'd find a reputable one, though, as that's the perfect audience for hidden backdoors.
Naturally I would say, but that doesn't have speakers... but you can't even buy a TV without having to buy a soundbar or any sort of sound system anymore. Infuriating.
A pair of bookshelf speakers will always dominate whatever speakers the TV comes with. It's a mandatory replacement in any case. There isn't enough physical space in a TV for good sound. Soundbars are crap.
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.
Monitors have also gotten incredibly cheap, and there's Sceptre who sell dumb TVs that are pretty cheap. So I don't really buy that they're selling TVs at a loss.
There is no reason to be happy about father enshittification which is exactly what you are describing here. Yet another produce that is getting worst while also not getting cheaper.
Fyi. The following repo and it has been getting a lot of traction, PRs, commits, support. Better to use the one debloater that is popular, than the one made by only one person.
https://github.com/Gathin23/cleanyourtv
My dad is extremely irritated with Android TVs as a concept. He just wants to watch something and complains about it taking a few minutes on startup to even show the screen where can can select YouTube.
He does not understand that it is just like a phone. Unless you keep it on standby (which he does not want to do: wastes power), it will boot, slowly, till all the subsystems are up and running. The low powered processors, the low speed ssds, and minimal RAM makes everything worse.
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.
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!)
I have a similar setup and want to mention Moonfin as another excellent alternative Jellyfin client besides the one recommended here, Wholphin. I just tried several and Moonfin was the only one whose UI didn't feel needlessly clunky to me.
This is similar to my setup, except I use FLauncher instead. In addition, I run Netguard on my Android TV and completely block Google Play along with a hundred other services. I only give Google Play internet access whenever I have to update a streaming app. One had connection issues the first time I set up Netguard, so I had to look at the logs and open some specific ports to get it working. But all the streaming apps work now, and the TV can't display ads. For the most part, I don't update things on the TV. It all works too well right now.
Also +1 to Wholphin! That app is phenomenal. It gives the whole family the "Netflix-like" experience.
Anybody remember MythTV and what a pain in the ass it was to setup?
"Hand this article to an AI agent (like Claude Code) and have it guide you through the setup."
Wow times have changed.
https://www.mythtv.org/
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. It also embeds ads in the stream that ffmpeg merges.
MythTV lets me record free to air and skip through the ads.
> Tip: Hand this article to an AI agent (like Claude Code) and have it guide you through the setup. It can run the ADB commands for you and adapt them to your device.
Like "curl | bash" but... with a million times more computation.
> 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.
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.
Oh wow, TIL about Wholphin. I'll have to give that a try. I wonder if this will finally resolve the issue with me having to login to JellyFin every few days for no apparent reason (it's not the server, I switched from Win to Linux and same problem).
EDIT: all that remains for this stack is a good browser that can allow usage of uBlock Origin. BrowseHere is a pain to use with its constant nags about allowing pop-ups on certain sites...
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.
Yeah I don't doubt that. My phones and PC are always fine also. I use an ONN 4K device for the TV. The first month or two was ok. Then I updated the app at one point and it's never been the same since. I've uninstalled and reinstalled and changed to Projectivy and tried some other loaders as well, and the problem just keeps coming back. We'll see if this Wholphin client changes anything.
I wish there was a reasonably cheap, sufficiently powerful TV box compatible with a free distribution Android TV. Something like Graphene/Lineage for TVs. Lineage does in fact have some TV builds, but there is basically no suitable new hardware for it AFAIK.
At the moment the best option still seems to be a somewhat old mini-PC with Linux and Plasma Bigscreen. But you need to add an HDMI-CEC dongle, and airmouse remote, and Waydroid if you want a more typical TV box experience.
The Onn 4k Pro from Walmart has a pretty powerful processor, is pretty easy to unlock, and seems to be a common target for customizing. The non-pro version definitely works with LineageOS: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/dopinder/
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.
This is pretty much the exact setup I have on my Chromecast minus button mapper since I use a Sofabaton remote for control. I ended up finding Wholpin after getting especially angry one day at the horrible way that Jellyfin deals with seeking the requires manually pressing play to start the video again.
I've been using Jellyfin for my family for years. But the number of clients is interesting.
The web experience on a desktop/laptop is pretty much the only tolerable experience.
And I appreciate that the alternative clients try and address the poor UX of the default but I still find so many of the basic behaviors missing or inconsistent.
I can't offer anything better but I find it curious.
> Google TV, the default interface on most Android TV devices, puts a large banner at the top of the home screen promoting whatever Google wants you to watch next.
You know, I don't give a shit about that, that's fine. Recommend me some stuff to watch, I'm here to watch stuff, I might even like what you're punting and give it a go. I might have forgotten there's a new season of whatever it is. I even quite like some of the inline recommendation stuff.
What made me switch to App-only mode was that ads started appearing for general consumer products. So this writeup is interesting, if/when they make app-only mode advertise shampoo at me I'll probably have a go with that launcher.
Replacing the Google launcher (I used ATV Launcher Pro) was one of the best quality of life upgrades I've ever done, if you haven't already I highly recommend it.
Not only does Google show auto playing video ads for streaming services you don't subscribe to, it also shows pure auto playing video ads for things like fast food. It really lags while it tries to start up to show the ads.
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Google closes the ADB backdoor when they realise all the sweet ad dollars they're losing.
[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
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.
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.
Compared to that, their hardware, SaaS, and other ventures are just 20% side projects.
* Firefox in full-screen with a custom extension that makes the web UI of Netflix into something usable by a d-pad remote
* Switchfin (which has a Linux version) works pretty well out of the box
* Some custom Python+GTk apps to watch some public TV channels (they have no DRM and have a good API, so it was very easy, and I can get custom views for what my family watches)
* a nice viewer for Immich albums
* a CD player (I bought a 15EUR external USB DVD player)
Everything using a single UI paradigm, with just the things my family and I actually care for. No ads. No tracking (well, I guess Netflix still does some tracking anyway).
- Buy the biggest LG C -series OLED TV you can afford and/or fit (WebOS, no Android TV crapola to deal with)
- Never connect it to the internet, LG wants to add all kinds of AI crap to it.
- Set it to Filmmaker Mode[0] to disable all of the "improvements" it tries to do to the image
- Buy an Apple TV
Done.
The ATV can turn the TV on and off and adjust the volume. You won't need the TV remote for anything after that.
I still use my 10 year old Apple TV 4k daily and it works like new, no slowdown, every single relevant streaming platform supports it with a dedicated app. It even got every single tvOS release until this fall.
[0] https://filmmakermode.com/ - also a good idea to do this to relative's TVs.
Every smart TV I own never gets internet access, ever. I just plug a real device that connects to the internet instead, they're a much faster and better experience.
I'm doing what you are - just don't connect it and you can enjoy ridiculously low prices on TVs.
Try getting a display panel, like one of those used in restaurants to display menus.
You definitely want to turn "Samba Interactive TV" off.
Android TV has this. It didn't have ads for less than a year. Now the ads banner is there regardless.
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!
I promise you I won't give a shit about the unsubsidized price.
I think it all started with a guy making a plex app [0] in rust thereby reducing the launch times of the app.
Then lots of projects started coming up including replacing the browser itself. All these projects seems to be created with claude code.
This is truly a golden age of Personal software.
[0] Reddit Post: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1x043yp/i_used_...
He does not understand that it is just like a phone. Unless you keep it on standby (which he does not want to do: wastes power), it will boot, slowly, till all the subsystems are up and running. The low powered processors, the low speed ssds, and minimal RAM makes everything worse.
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.
https://moonfin.io/
Also +1 to Wholphin! That app is phenomenal. It gives the whole family the "Netflix-like" experience.
It uses Claude to connect to your TV and clean up ads and other junk.
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.
MythTV lets me record free to air and skip through the ads.
> Tip: Hand this article to an AI agent (like Claude Code) and have it guide you through the setup. It can run the ADB commands for you and adapt them to your device.
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.
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.
EDIT: all that remains for this stack is a good browser that can allow usage of uBlock Origin. BrowseHere is a pain to use with its constant nags about allowing pop-ups on certain sites...
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.
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.
At the moment the best option still seems to be a somewhat old mini-PC with Linux and Plasma Bigscreen. But you need to add an HDMI-CEC dongle, and airmouse remote, and Waydroid if you want a more typical TV box experience.
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.
The web experience on a desktop/laptop is pretty much the only tolerable experience.
And I appreciate that the alternative clients try and address the poor UX of the default but I still find so many of the basic behaviors missing or inconsistent.
I can't offer anything better but I find it curious.
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.
You know, I don't give a shit about that, that's fine. Recommend me some stuff to watch, I'm here to watch stuff, I might even like what you're punting and give it a go. I might have forgotten there's a new season of whatever it is. I even quite like some of the inline recommendation stuff.
What made me switch to App-only mode was that ads started appearing for general consumer products. So this writeup is interesting, if/when they make app-only mode advertise shampoo at me I'll probably have a go with that launcher.