@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.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2026
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LibreElec, Umbrella addon and a premiumize subscription.
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.
@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
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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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
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.
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.
Apple TV's launcher was recently "updated" to showcase whatever latest content is being pushed through Apple's own services. Which is advertisement.
What ”launcher”? The TV app? You can just move it away. There is no launcher anywhere, every service along with AppleTV+ is just a separate application
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.
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.
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“Find My” network is pretty strict by its nature, if you’re talking about that. Realistically speaking, I wouldn’t be scared of it, because I can’t see any vector from which it can be dangerous to the end user.
Nonetheless, “Find My” is an optional feature and can be fully disabled. Other Apple web-services can be blocked on a network level, if you want it for some reason. But, IMO, at this paranoia level, the only right option is OSS with a strict firewall.
check out: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
This looks exactly like what I was looking for! Thank you!
Can I flash it over the TVs OS?
This is installed on existing linux, so probably no.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Abandon ware now
Really? https://github.com/ErsatzTV/next looks pretty active to me..?
Huh. Must have gotten someone to take over, last I'd heard the maintainer was archiving it. At least according to Chris on Linux Unplugged a couple months ago.
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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