[taxmeifyoucan]

For a hacker news article, it misses the crucial option - hacking a smart TV! I have LG OLED jailbroken using rootmy.tv, it was pretty trivial. It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen, you can customize it, SSH into it, map any commands to the remote, etc.

Before I only used monitor, simple DP/HDMI input is all I wanted. But being able to take full control of the tv and connect it with other devices in the house I would normally get Rpi for is pretty convenient!

[pabs3]

You shouldn't have to hack it, you should have the right to repair the software on your device. Hopefully the Vizio lawsuit will help with that for Linux based devices, signs are looking good though.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

[godelski]

You're right, but until the laws change we should be telling everyone how and make these tools better. If we can't change the laws we can make the cat and mouse game too expensive for them to continue.

Plus, I'm pretty confident they are already doing illegal things. On my Samsung TV it wants to force update. There is no decline option, there is no option to turn off updates, only to take it completely offline. There's no way in hell these kinds of contracts would be legal in any other setting. There's no meaningful choice and contracts that strongarm one party are almost always illegal. You can't sign a contract where the bank can arbitrary change the loan on you (they can change interest but they can't arbitrarily charge how that interest is determined. Such as going from 1% to 1000% without some crazy impossible economic situation).

Someone needs to start a class action. Someone needs to push that as far as the courts will go

[pabs3]

Agreed. Its not that useful, but I have been collecting exploits here when I see any that could potentially be useful for replacing firmware on devices.

https://wiki.debian.org/Exploits

[Retr0id]

This is just about GPL compliance though (afaik LG TVs are already GPL compliant, or at least, I haven't noticed any noncompliance).

The bigger problem here is tivoization. You can build a fresh kernel from source but you have no way to install it because the bootloader is locked down.

[pabs3]

As Conservancy would say, a device with no way to modify isn't GPLv2 compliant either.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...

[darkwater]

We should really be happy that Torvalds decided to license Linux as GPL software. If it was BSD these discussions would simply not exist, and corporate power over software would be even greater. I would dare to say we would probably not even have an open source scene at all...

[paxcoder]

Unfortunately, Torvalds supported tivoization: https://lkml.org/lkml/2007/6/13/289

[selectnull]

It's not that simple.

In the email you have linked to, he does not support tivoization. He simply says that he finds the term offensive (which is really funny coming from him).

Torvalds has also publicly stated that he doesn't think that tivoization benefits users, but it's not his battle to fight. More info on that topic can be found in the linked YT (linked at the precise time he is answering the question about tivoization, but the whole video is about GPL v2 vs GPL v3).

YT video: https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU?si=RK5ZHizoidgVA1xO&t=288

[ninkendo]

Because anti-tivoization doesn’t make sense in a software license.

Imagine you make a smart toaster, and you make it entirely out of open source software. You release all the changes you made too, complying fully with the spirit of open source. People could take your software, buy some parts and make their own OSS toasters, everything’s great.

But for safety reasons, since the software controls when the toaster pops, you decide to check at boot time that the software hasn’t been modified. You could take the engineering effort to split the software into parts so that only the “pop on this heat level” part is locked down, but maybe you’re lazy, so you just check the signature of the whole thing.

This would be a gpl3 tivoization violation even though the whole thing is open source. You did everything right on the software end, it just so happens that the hardware you made doesn’t support modifying the software. Why is that a violation of a software license?

This is what makes no sense to Linus, and TBH it makes no sense to me either. Would the toaster be a better product if you could change the software? Of course. But it seems to be an extreme overreach for the FSF to use their license (and that “or any later version” backdoor clause) to start pushing their views on the hardware world.

[teekert]

Which confirms the point actually. The hoops companies have to jump through are pretty good hoops.

[pabs3]

The lawsuit is indeed about the GPL, but the right to repair (or at least replace) software really it needs to be expanded to all software. The right to repair movement is often about software-based lockdowns. Hopefully it will eventually result in those being banned.

[khimaros]

https://fossforce.com/2025/12/judge-signals-win-for-software...

[slig]

> RootMyTV (v1/v2) has been patched for years, and your TV is almost certainly not vulnerable. We recommend checking whether your TV is rootable with another method.

[montymintypie]

The one-click method has been patched, but there are other methods that will work if you haven't been religiously updating your TV:

[0] https://github.com/throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot

[1] https://github.com/throwaway96/faultmanager-autoroot

[ashirviskas]

Religiously updating my TV? It has been patched since spring, someone clicking by accident "yes" for the update notice that appears randomly on the middle of the screen in the past 9 months would ruin it. I was religously *not* updating my TV and it still got too new software for the exploit :')

[f001]

My tv has never nor will ever touch the internet so problem solved re: updates.

[kelnos]

My LG TV is a little over a year old now and I refuse to allow it to connect to the Internet, ever, so I guess RootMyTV would work fine for me?

[taxmeifyoucan]

It's totally possible! Check it at https://cani.rootmy.tv/. There are multiple exploits, search around

[Retr0id]

One day I will buy a new TV and develop a new one-click method... but for now I'm still rocking my B9.

[ashirviskas]

Oh, hi! Love your work! I'll be rooting for you that day (though most likely after that day, unless you're a superhuman).

[jader201]

> It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen

Why would I want a Linux computer with a huge screen?

I just want a huge screen.

I’ll provide my own connected devices, independent of the screen.

[ranguna]

Well, you can make it a PC and then turn it off, I guess. Then let the rest of us have all the fun.

[jader201]

It sounds like you still want a smart TV, just with control. Which is fine.

But for many people, we just want a monitor, maybe with speakers (I personally am fine also separating this).

I prefer separation of concerns — if I want to attach a computer to my TV, I’ll do that as a search device.

Why have a dependency on the TV hardware, when I can attach upgradable parts?

[ranguna]

> But for many people, we just want a monitor,

> you can make it a PC and then turn it off

TV manufactories can get the best of both worlds: The people that want smart TVs, get a smart TV. The people that don't want a smart TV, can disable the smart TV features. Manufactors make one model and sell to both market segments.

Why should your preferences impose on the ones that don't want what you want? I guess the preferred way would be for manufactors to have add a feature where the tv prompts you if you want to enable smart features when you boot the tv for the first time, but it's a bit difficult when manufactors get more money when they have these features enabled by default.

[jader201]

> Why should your preferences impose on the ones that don't want what you want?

The problem is that I can’t have my preference: a TV that comes without (non-essential) software installed.

This means I have no choice but to deal with required updates — or at the very least, an annoying reminder that software updates are needed — for software I never wanted in the first place.

If the software was optional — could be uninstalled, or disabled so that updates weren’t required — then I would agree with you that having all TVs be smart TVs would be fine.

But not only is it not optional, it often comes with dark patterns of imposed privacy violations and/or unwanted ads.

The OP’s solution is to “jailbreak” it with a Linux install, which the average consumer doesn’t know how to do.

Again, is fine for hackers that want to tinker with things, but the whole point of the linked article is that many people are tired of smart TVs and the annoyances that come with them.

[pessimizer]

A monitor has a processor in it that is running an OS and software. These are digital devices. The nit you're picking is silly.

If you want to buy a bare LCD panel, they're cheap. But you're going to have to add a processor to it that runs an OS (which you're free to write yourself, along with the driver) in order for it to understand any input. All that slapped together is what we call a monitor, or a television.

If you want an analog television, they'll pay you to haul it off from wherever you see it, but you're going to have to add an external computer to it in order to process the digital information that you want to display into waveforms that you can push over coaxial cables.

Not wanting a "smart tv" means people don't want a smartphone for a television, an OS that they don't have any control over. If you want to make up another definition, you're going to have to set limits to acceptable RAM, clock speed, number of processors, and I don't know why you would waste your time doing that. The number, however, will never be zero for any of these things.

[ssl-3]

It's not necessary for a display to have an operating system.

They make fixed-function chips in factories every day that do stuff like convert video signals from one format to another (including formats that LCD panels can deal with).

Like the TFP401. For illustration, here is one on a board, ready to plug into an LCD panel and use for whatever: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2218

It doesn't run an OS. It's barely even programmable, and the programmability it does have relates only to configuring pre-defined hardware functions. It doesn't have an instruction set. It can't add 1+1.

But it can bridge the gap between a consumer device that produces video and a fairly bare LCD panel. It's a very much a single-tasker.

(Do any of the current crop of consumer-oriented televisions and computer monitors use this kind of simple pathway? Most assuredly not, which is the complaint that brought us here to begin with.

But these pathways exist anyway. It's completely possible to to create an entire video display and house it in a nice-looking package, put it in a retail box, and sell it on store shelves without involving an operating system. It's not a technological limitation.)

[gosub100]

Because if you own a TV manufacturing company, you can sell more TVs if they have more features. You can get more features by including a linux SBC and integrating it. In fact, some of the paid-app makers will even _pay you_ for this "real estate". You could make a dumb-tv, but you wouldn't sell as many and you would have to charge more.

[account42]

> and you would have to charge more

Non-commodity consumer products are rarely sold at cost but rather at whatever price the market will bear.

[gosub100]

And the market will bear a lower price for a product with fewer features

[stravant]

Why wouldn't you want it to be a computer? Then it can be connected to your devices AND also do the job itself in a situation where it's awkward to connect to a device.

If already needs a computer in it to drive menus / modern display protocols. Having that computer be powerful enough to also decode content is barely an extra cost.

[fulafel]

A rooted piece of trashy IOT is trashy IOT. It's an acquired taste, the excitement of putting a black box insecure linux device on the home network to add to your home infra admin duties.

[pessimizer]

A rooted computer is the opposite of a black box. This makes no sense.

[fulafel]

Rooting gets you additional means to reverse engineer the proprietary software system but doesn't automagically lighten the box.

It's all relative of course, maybe you view anything you can Ghidra as not-black-box. (though this is kind of tangential to rooting - for a many/most devices you can get a hold of the blobs to reverse engineer without rooting anything)

[olyjohn]

If someone can get access to the TV on your local network, you're already in trouble.

[lenkite]

> Why wouldn't you want it to be a computer?

Because I can then easily upgrade my computer without upgrading my TV.

[pessimizer]

Do you have to upgrade your computer when you upgrade your router?

This entire subthread is not computer-literate. Your monitor contains a computer. A dumb display contains a computer. Your keyboard contains a computer.

You can strip the software down on them so they do nothing but take commands and drive whatever electronics you have attached to them, but it will still be software on a computer. If there's a lot of RAM and a fat processor, like on a rooted smart TV, I might (but not necessarily) make it do a little more than that.

[wiether]

For the same reason I don't want a self-heating mug.

[michaelsalim]

Why wouldn't you want that? Genuinely curious

[boerseth]

Modularity and separation of concerns can extend into other domains than software.

For me, it seems so much simpler to keep the two separate. You won't be forced to wash the heating element every time you wash the cup. Can't heat a different cup while the other is in the dishwasher, unless all your cups are self-heating. Normally, the only way for a cup to break is if it shatters, but with an inbuilt heater there's electronics that can break too. And should the cup shatter, now the heater is unusable too, or vice versa.

[wiether]

Exactly!

I have to have a kettle for other purpose (including heating water for other mugs than mine), and no self-heating mug is going to be as efficient as a kettle to heat water.

Furthermore, I also put cold or room temperature liquids in my mug. With a self-heating one, I would be carrying the heating parts for absolutely no reason.

Same goes for a TV. By keeping things separated, I can decide what I do which each device and manage their lifecycle separately. If the device reading video files is included in the TV, I can't plug it to another TV or a projector or even take it with me to use it elsewhere. While I've upgraded three times my video playing device to follow tech evolution, I've kept the same TV to plug them in.

[thaumasiotes]

The microwave in my house is built into the oven.

This provides absolutely zero advantages to the oven or to the microwave. It does cause a lot of stupid, easily foreseeable problems:

- There's only one control panel, and if the oven is currently active, some of the microwave controls get disabled.

- The microwave is awful in various ways -- regardless of whether the oven is active -- which wouldn't ordinarily be a problem, because microwaves are very cheap. But...

- It's impossible to replace the microwave, a $50 device, without simultaneously replacing the oven, a $2000 device.

[ozim]

Most likely it will not be dishwasher safe.

[ryandrake]

> Why wouldn't you want it to be a computer?

The same reason I don't want anything else in my life to be a computer. A computer is one more component that can fail and take down the whole product. I want my computer to be a computer and that's it.

[Itoldmyselfso]

How about the abdysmal security Smart TVs either have right of the shelf or for certain after they are no longer kept up-to-date? I don't want to worry having my TV act either as botnet or spying device (many come with microphones and cameras nowadays). I rather purchase additional device that has decent security that I can attach to the TV if I need to.

[Underphil]

Yeah, I'd absolutely agree here. The article didn't "miss" this option. It just isn't relevant here.

[taxmeifyoucan]

I feel you, that's exactly why I was using only monitors before! I got convinced to go for this as an acceptable compromise with much more control than some proprietary backend.

[zeristor]

Begs the question, how long before smart monitors.

[shantara]

Unfortunately, they already exist - the M-series smart monitors, made by Samsung (who else?). They made a splash a few months ago when they started showing popups over people’s screen content nagging them to update or register for some service during the normal monitor-like usage

[albert_e]

I want the ability to add my own picture-in-picture display or overlay of text and other dynamic content.

Example: watching a movie but want the live score of a sports match scraped from a public website to be displayed in a corner.

OR while watching a sports match -- i want a overlay feed of text from a chat stream for a select web source

Looking forward for some public experiments / open projects in this space i could leverage. Dont have the skills to attempt it myself from scratch.

[afavour]

Honestly your best bet is going to be buying a mini PC and hooking it up to any TV of your choice as the only input. Most bespoke hardware is too locked down to make anything like that possible.

[whatsupdog]

I have 2 LG OLED TVs, different sizes. Rootmytv failed to root both of them. I forgot which step and which error it was giving, but I tried everything including factory reset etc. I'm glad it's working for some people.

[scoot]

The first line of the homepage says "RootMyTV (v1/v2) has been patched for years, and your TV is almost certainly not vulnerable.", so that's hardly surprising

[taxmeifyoucan]

What I didn't mention is that I specifically looked for older TV on the second hand market to find a hackable model.

I mean, I didn't wanted to buy a brand new one anyway, it's very expensive and I don't need latest AI features. I found a year old model with firmware that was listed as supported by the jailbreak at the time

[wltr]

I’d do exactly as you did. It’s pity it didn’t work for you. I’m on the market to buy a TV (not hurrying though), so I’m not sure what to do here. I’d like to have Dolby Vision (otherwise why would I want a TV if my computer display is good enough for everything else), so perhaps that worsens things. As otherwise I’d just pick any TV, even FullHD (not 4K), and even not smart (attaching some SBC with Kodi to the back). But ideally I’d prefer to jailbreak it and have Kodi installed without any extra device. Now I’m puzzled whether these lists of ‘compatible’ TVs are trustworthy.

[amelius]

For the real hackers:

https://www.panelook.com/

Global Panel Exchange Center

[ssl-3]

Holy Toledo.

That's like Alibaba, except for small(ish) quantities of LCDs of any possible description.

[Teknomadix]

It took a bit of extra effort but `faultmanager-autoroot` script worked on my LG WebOS Smart Monitor

[jmward01]

Seems like there is a big opportunity here for something a router distro to combine with a tv jailbreak. How good is the hardware? It would be nice to have my tv serve a couple purposes if it has the hardware to do it.

[taxmeifyoucan]

It's a modest ARM CPU, I wouldn't rely on it for a router but it can run Rpi Hole! Also Home Assistant integration, I use the TV remote to control LEDs/lights around the apartment

[jmward01]

I totally forgot about the remote. That really opens up possibilities for home assistant type stuff. I hadn't looked at this space a lot before. I see some articles on how to jailbreak various devices but nothing about standardized distros to put on things out there. Something like dd wrt but for TVs could be pretty amazing. A project that is designed to give you a good interface, is privacy aware and hacker friendly (things that aren't just entertainment like home assistant stuff) would get a lot of interest. There has to be a reason this isn't a thing. I am guessing it is 99% a hardware reason. Maybe that is changing though? Modern devices have to have more capability so I bet the hardware on newer tvs is getting pretty strong.

[cess11]

Nice!

[wolrah]

Most smart TVs only have 100mbit ethernet, even "high end" TVs like LG OLEDs. They'd be terrible routers.

[ori_b]

That still gives money to the people producing this garbage.

[broof]

I don’t know the finances, but I wouldn’t be surprised if their margins are low enough that their profit comes from advertising and data gathering post sale. So all this bloatware and advertising is subsidizing a high quality product and if you can strip out the unwanted stuff you’re probably getting a good deal at the expense of the company

[ori_b]

You're showing the company that shoving advertising and data gathering into products will help them make products that sell.

What you buy is what companies put out into the world.

[autoexec]

Often what you buy is either all you can afford or all that that has been made available to you. There are plenty of companies, industries even, which refuse to give consumers what they'd prefer simply because it's more profitable for them not to. Too often consumers are left with choosing the best of terrible options or just making due with what they can can.

[ori_b]

Which is why making this trash profitable for them is a problem.

[pxc]

Can you actually replace the firmware with an open-source, privacy-respecting one? If you're still left running all the same proprietary background "services" and telemetry, I don't see how this kind of hack relates to any of the reasons for preferring a dumb TV.

[bee_rider]

Agreed.

This “proprietary telemetry” is basically malware, just, it was put on the thing at the factory. Once a system is fully rooted by malware, the least-bad option is to nuke it entirely and install from scratch.

In this context where the locked-down device probably also doesn’t have a fully open source kernel and drivers, this becomes a bit tricky. Better just to use a device that doesn’t have malware on it in the first place.

[gala8y]

Did you know that a not jailbroken smart TV would spy on your HDMI, if connected to the network? I did not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45737312

[mikepurvis]

I’ve been pretty happy with the smart apps on my LG OLED; it’s got the streaming things I want including jellyfin. Really the only one missing is steam link.

[sander1095]

Have you tried moonlight? An alternative to steam link. You can use install it on the lg tv by sideloading the app.

Alternatively, you can plug in a Raspberry Pi that runs steam link :)

[steine65]

My LG C2 hardware isn't powerful enough to stream higher than 60hz at 1080p, if I remember correctly. It also needs a LAN cord for consistency since the tv wifi adapter is not good. Instead I put moonlight on my steam deck and plugged that into the tv.

[mikepurvis]

Oh yeah I’m aware of various “plug in a thing” options, just thinking it wild be nice to have to, particularly if a single controller paired to the TV itself could operate the outer shell as well as Xbox and steam streaming.

[upfrog]

Jailbreaking is definitely an option, but there is value in spending money to provide a market signal instead.

[gosub100]

I have a no-name brand smart tv and it runs an OS called Tizen, and with a very little bit of googling, you can enable developer mode and install 3rd party apps on it. It probably doesn't solve the "spying-on-you" part, but it is nice to have the option of more apps.

[throwaway63467]

Is there much you can do with it? Does it still work as before, does it still have a GUI? Sounds really cool.

[montymintypie]

I think the parent commenter is perhaps a little over-selling the LG rooting. It is definitely root, you can write whatever you want on the filesystem (at your peril), and theoretically do whatever you want, but the homebrew exploit launches a bit later in the boot chain than you'd want (so blocking update nags isn't quite reliable), and a lot of the inner system things are proprietary and require reverse engineering to extend.

It's the same system software, just with root capacity.

That being said, there's still a bunch of nice homebrew:

- Video screensavers ala Apple TV

- DVD logo screensaver

- Adfree (and sponsorblock-integrated and optional shorts-disabling) Youtube

- Remote button remapping (Netflix button now opens Plex for me)

- Hyperion (ambilight service that controls an LED strip behind the TV)

- A nice nvidia shield emulator for game streaming from my PC with low latency

- VNC server (rarely useful, but invaluable when it is)

Sponsorblock and remote remapping are killer features for me, and the rest is just really pleasant to have.

[rssoconnor]

I used my rooted TV to root my PS4. I'm not even joking.

https://youtu.be/NzBBfGnAWM0

[taxmeifyoucan]

I am doing the same! I have been jailbreaking PS4 for few years and Modded Warfare is where I learned about the LG TV jailbreak

[_pdp_]

I was thinking the same. While it is not for everyone, hacking the TV to make the dumb is possible.

[SilverElfin]

What’s the difference between that and just using the LG TV without any of the smart features? Like if you don’t connect it to the internet and only hook up something else through HDMI, isn’t it the same?

[port11]

Sadly, modern Samsungs use signed Tizen and there are no roots/hacks available! Shame.

[immibis]

Unfortunately, this is Hacker (founder of the next AirBNB) News and not Hacker (one who tinkers with devices) News

[andrepd]

How would you block ads on such a TV? The problem is you still cannot connect it to the internet without unknown privacy intrusion... Maybe to the LAN only? But then it's usefulness is still limited.

[nolok]

Pi hole is enough for me on a modern Samsung

[andrepd]

So, entirely orthogonal to the issue of rooting the TV?

[duskdozer]

hosts file block?

[andrepd]

Block what? Which domains? How do you know what the TV will connect to?

[dh2022]

Block everything except for what you want. For e.g. block everything but Netflix.

[prmoustache]

It can be complicated when streaming companies use same cloud vendors and thus share same ip ranges as the traffic you want to protect yourself from.