Not for the faint of heart
fine learning experience, but this thing does nothing you’d use your TV for.
the cheapest and best solution is to grab a busted-up laptop from your marketplace. broken screens, keyboards, missing batteries, whatever, you won’t use none of those things. make sure it’s skylake (6th gen) or newer for hardware video acceleration and on-board LAN and HDMI, the rest is unimportant. you’ll have an insanely powerful and power-efficient platform that you control 100% of and can tweak to your heart’s desire, expand, fix, etc. I’d be surprised if you can’t find several for under $40, power brick included.
my go-to setup is auto-launching jellyfin player in TV mode with macast running in the background (DLNA sink you can send youtube videos and the like). since you’ll have computing power to spare, this can also be a server, whatever you desire.
this used to be a job for raspberries, but them things are insanely expensive now and necessitate ever more expensive shit. please don’t even joke about letting noname android boxes loose on your LAN.
But, what about remote controls?
There are air mice that you can buy with keyboards on it or a keyboard trackpad combo.
I use this one with my htpc: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B06XHF7DNQ
Here I was hoping they had rooted it and installed their own Linux in it, and instead they just installed a Terminal and some tools on the Android OS that the things runs.
This is as much Linux as installing Cygwin in Windows is Linux.
It’s not really though. This just describes installing Termux and some X11 gubbins to make it emulate a linux machine, but it’s still running some parasite-ridden Android OS. It would be much more interesting to get it running bare metal Linux with all the creepy “smart TV” baggage removed.
Don’t ever buy a “smart” TV. Buy the dumbest TV you can find with a good Display Port or HDMI and connect your NAS or Raspberry Pi or similar.
Put LibreELEC on that Pi or a Mini-PC => instant modern Media Player (using Kodi)
Algo get one of these and you get the same experience as a dedicated Media Player, minus the enshittification.
any miniled or oled “dumb” TVs?
No smart TV is smart without network.
You want a hospitality or hotel TV, they aren’t exclusively sold to that market but they won’t be in a box store either.
Don’t do the digital signage TV, it’ll have an atrocious refresh rate.
The term you might want to search for is digital signage but there’s not really a ton of those with OLED because it doesn’t make sense for those usually
Also “Hospitality Displays” like these, though hat one twice the price of the equivalent consumer TV and not OLED.
From looking around a bit the only large OLED displays I found were transparent digital displays.
“Workstation” is a real stretch.
- The hardware in those things is underpowered to say the least.
- The way X11 is implemented there is no acceleration so that’s going to suck to use.
- The connectivity is atrocious. Maybe WiFi and Bluetooth if the package removals doesn’t wreck things and even then no guarantee you’ll be able to pair anything, and maybe one usable USB-A 2.0 port.
A fun project for sure, I’d have a blast doing something like this. But the expectation you’d have something actually useful afterward is not realistic. If you want a workstation you’re far better served by bolting a NUC-style computer to the back if the TV and using that.
The hardware in those things is underpowered to say the least.
yeah, 2…4GB of RAM, wtf
Really interesting, but it shows you that it’s not gonna be tomorrow that my Philips smart TV is gonna become a Linux TV.
I already bricked it one when switching the base launcher and removing too many apps. After struggling to set it up perfectly to watch movies on LibreELEC in perfect conditions, I ain’t tinkering with it as long as it remains my only TV.
Maybe one day we’ll get Linux friendly smart TV and cars…
Luckily your Philips smart TV can become an unconnected TV that’s only connected to a NUC, raspberry pi, or other similar computer, running linux.
