Bought a LG TV and a Monitor three years ago. Last time I will do that. Really happy about my decision not to let the TV have access to the internet.
Yeah fist time I saw an ad on my smart monitor I reset it and never connected it to my wifi again
Good luck finding a brand NOT doing it by the time you're ready for a new one.
LG clearly stands for "Literal Garbage". The DisplayPort and HDMI ports on the gaming monitor I bought a few years ago failed approximately 6 months in.
And you think the other manufacturers are different?
Only solution is NO NETWORK. Use as a simple TV. I have 2 fairly new LGs and none are network connected. They work perfectly that way. I learnt the lesson with my 15y old Samsung SmartTV, one of the first to the market, and it wanted to use a Samsung account for almost everything, even to use the Youtube client. Nope.
These are computer monitors, not TVs. Plugging them into a Windows box triggers Windows to silently install their "driver," which silently installs a handful of other startup apps. It's an escalation of the smartTV-wifi path.
Anybody truly worried about being monitored isn't going to be running windows.
Yes.. No true Scotsman would use Windows.
Not only that but my old LG smart TV (47LM8600, I think manufactured in 2012) has literal suicide timers in its built in apps. Mine has never been connected to any network and yet it mysteriously informed me after approximately three years of ownership that all of its player apps such as Youtube, Hulu, Netflix, etc. would stop working because they were "no longer supported," all of them within the time frame of the same couple of weeks. It knew this somehow, apparently via magic, or quantum fluctuations, or psychic brain waves. Without internet connectivity.
Obviously I don't use any of those features so I didn't give a rat's ass and I still don't. But I still find that deeply suspicious.
I have used an LG monitor for about 5 years, and never install the manufacturer's software unless it looks genuinely useful. When I saw the Gamers Nexus video I went to check my installed apps, and sure there was LG's monitor app, installed silently without my knowledge.
To prevent this kind of thing in future, run gpedit.msc and enable “Prevent automatic download of applications associated with device metadata” under Computer Configuration → Administrative Templates → System → Device Installation.
What dongle or what have you do y'all use that's privacy focused? I need to disconnect my LG TV and we have an old Chromecast but that's Google...
I had an old laptop that I hooked in and configured it to boot into a fullscreen browser to our Emby server. Could just as easily have it boot into a browser with shortcuts to your streaming services.
We use one of these mini keyboard/touchpads to control it:
Lately, though, I just picked up a set of wireless HDMI adapters and just plug one of those into the closest laptop and play from there.
KDE Connect is also a control option
Weve had a similar setup for nearly 10 years and its fricken great. We built a low spec computer using old parts from our desktops, hooked it up to our tv via hdmi, and plugged in a wireless keyboard with built in trackpad to act as the remote. We get all the same AD blocking and content access as a desktop because, you know, its a desktop but in the livingroom. My personal favorite is using a second account on discord to pull up streams on the tv from the couch while joining on my phone via my primary account for voice.
I connected a raspberry pi to my TV and control it with a wireless keyboard/trackpad combo to pirate all of my shows on a greysite
The best cheap solution is a Google TV with Projectivy launcher to bypass the adware.
The best fully non-adware solution as others said seems to be a mini-pc running Linux or other cleaner environment you set up.
Yeah mini-pc is the way. Throw Linux on it and it'll last for years, trouble free
I have a Linux mini PC. There are definite pros, like controlling it via SSH from my Home Assistant, running Netflix in Firefox with adblocker... But drawbacks are no HDR, no 4k for streaming, heck, even 720p max for Hulu (and Disney, but I don't have one).
However, high sails have higher resolution too, it's just an additional step.
Linux definitely has HDR. I've been using Bazzite with Steam Big Picture mode as my TV interface for years and can use HDR just fine.
I definitely recommend piracy, but there are also ways to get streaming services to send full quality streams. I won't recommend them though, because you shouldn't have to do it in the first place for a service you're paying for. Just pirate and use a media server or something like Kodi for a nice interface for local files.
I love projectivy and how clean it is but I have had so much trouble getting the tv to launch straight into it on 2 separate Google TVs so I just don’t use it anymore really.
Yeah, I suspect Google pushes changes to the backend OS that keep breaking it on purpose, but at least we've got it to stick on our two TVs with a lot of effort and setting changes. Least worst option considering how pricy mini-PCs are, unfortunately.
I think my LGTV predates a lot of this, thankfully. I've had it since 2020, but there are still several settings (like 'ad personalization') that I have turned off, and I never connect it to the Internet on purpose.
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