How do I free my television?
Yes, it’s called jailbreaking. That said it basically never happens because TV’s are pretty much shitty monitors with cheap digital encoders, and you can buy an encoder and a good monitor for way way cheaper than rewriting an OS.
Get a dumb TV and plug in a cheap computer where you can pirate everything
I’m not sure they exist, but either way, just plug something in and don’t connect the TV itself to the internet.
Sceptre has some dumb TVs. You can also still get the display TVs that companies use. I’m drunk so I forget what they’re called.
Oh that’s a point, probably not cheap though, maybe not good for home cinema? Not heard of Sceptre, will check out. I’m happy just not connecting my TV mind you.
Sceptre is cheapo stuff. And at least one brand of smart TV is wardriving to find networks behind your back (again, drunk, I can’t remember which right now) and creating mesh networks with other TVs of the same type.
Cathode ray dude recently did a video on them
https://youtu.be/q9a3dCd1SQI
Usually that means trying to get Android TV working through USB, but it depends on what tv you have. If you already have an Android TV, just use a launcher like Projectivy. Most people just buy a media box: either an Android based one or apple tv and disable the “smart” tv altogether
I’d imagine you could probably get into the android developer settings and disable all the telemetry stuff through adb and install a custom launcher like projectivity and that’d be the closest you could get to running a custom tv OS at least if you can’t flash it.
That sounds, uh, fun.
Just use the TV as a display and try to dink around with some open source media player box if you want to create your own custom OS.
In principle, yes, and I believe a few small hobby projects have attempted to do this and support specific TVs. However, interest in developing a custom Smart TV platform tends to get siphoned away into a project where the output from your actual platform is displayed on the TV rather than running directly on it. Simply, it’s easier to develop and maintain support across different models.
Why would you develop a custom TV OS that runs on one TV when you could develop it for any mini PC and immediately support all TVs? You’d have to develop your OS to run on each specific TV model which will make it quite hard to reach a critical mass sufficient to attract attention from developers and users alike.
The juice isn’t really worth the squeeze. It’s not like TV vendors are publishing detailed hardware specs and drivers. Writing or even porting an OS is hard. Look at the state of the Android ROM scene, and that’s about as good as it gets when some vendors are actually attempting to open source their drivers. The difficulty is much higher and the interest lower due to the existence of a viable alternative.
With that said, motivated minds have done it anyway. You just need to have the right TV for it.
Best is to try to get the dumbest TV you can and plug in an android tv streaming box to it imo
Like a TV that flunked kindergarten? j/k
A Phony
It is possible but it needs people to develop the OS for each brand of TV and jailbreak the TVs to run another OS.
Most TVs are like phones in that they have a locked down system and their bootloader/BIOS/UEFI is also locked down which is what ultimately needs to be unlocked to allow another OS to be installed.
Why there isn’t?
Just not really many developers interested in creating an OS for it. Probably because of so many different brands and models of TVs that would require lots of work since each one is pretty different from another.
This is a damn good question that I would also love an answer to!
I would think that’d be pretty tough!
