LibreElec, Umbrella addon and a premiumize subscription.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2026
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Open the TV and pull the wifi antennas off the board.
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.
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
@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
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
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.
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.
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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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.
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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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.
check out: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
Can I flash it over the TVs OS?
This is installed on existing linux, so probably no.
This looks exactly like what I was looking for! Thank you!
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've also been running Kodi on a raspbery pi and have been happy with it. Only issue I've had with the pi is I can't get the overscan settings to work with retropie. But kodi has adjustments for the screen size so it works fine.
For people like me who don’t want to sail the high seas, how do you watch Netflix, Paramount and other subscription services with Kodi? Isn’t it just easier to use a browser at this point?
Browser would be simplest. Even though I prefer Linux and do run it, Windows might be better in your case with it having the DRM support and apps to run those services at higher resolution and HDR that sticking with browser might not allow.
For my case I picked up a cheap MiniPC and install Fedora on it to use instead of the TV interface.
LibreELEC is definitely not based on Debian. I'm using CoreELEC and it works great too (same thing with different hardware support). It takes some time to understand the UI initially I admit. You'll want CatchUpTV and Youtube addons (the latter breaks regularly as Google is preventing adblocking).
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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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.
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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