How do I free my television?
It should be a thing because most (all?) “smart TVs” run some variety of Linux, which, as Free Software, is supposed to guarantee the device owner’s right to modify the software running on the thing. However, in most (all?) cases, the practical ability to do that has been destroyed by subverting encryption functions against the owner in a process called Tivoization.
In other words:
- No, it isn’t really a thing,
- It’s wrong for it not to be a thing, and
- You should be pissed off about it.
Thanks for teaching me a new concept to be angry about, I guess.
I mean, they did it with phones too. Android is just Linux. That was one of the main attractions, for me at least.
At first, many people and groups supplied their own phone OSes. There was a whole thriving community ecosystem. Then they started to make it really hard, locking bootloaders and including critical pieces of hardware that didn’t or couldn’t have open source drivers (look up WinModems for a very early example of this technique, it remains really effective) or otherwise required extremely convoluted methods to access and the phone might function marginally without some of these fully functional, but at least you could still install a custom ROM on it if you were stubborn enough.
But even that wouldn’t last. Nowadays they’ve made it literally impossible to defeat the security on most phones, in the name of keeping hackers and criminals out, but really a big part of their motivation is blocking these pirate OSes that let you actually control the hardware and software in your phone, doing criminally nefarious things like stopping them from downloading ads (the horror!) and preventing them from funneling all your data and activities back to Big Brother (how rude!) and worst of all updating it with modern functionality after they’ve declared it “obsolete”. The goal going forward is to sell you things that you don’t and can’t control, so they can shut them down or make them gradually more and more useless and make you buy new ones forever. They want you to have a subscription for everything including physical objects without realizing that you’ve been forced to subscribe to their regularly-scheduled-disposable-device-replacement-plan for no actual reason.
They’re coming for computers too, or at least they’ll try. They want control of everything we interact with. For profit, mostly, but I wouldn’t rule out other motives. It’s a powerful thing when you have control of everything people see and do.
STOP IT!! I WAS ABOUT TO HAVE A GOOD DAY TODAY!!
Count me in for #3.
It’s interesting to see some of the back-and-forth on this topic between different proponents of free software.
I listened to this talk by Linus Torvalds a while back and it relates to the GPL license used by the Linux kernel and why the kernel hasn’t changed to GPLv3. Apparently Linus doesn’t find this practice by Tivo and other hardware manufacturers to be an issue.
Yes, it’s a damn shame that Linus is weak on property rights.
Because that’s what this actually is, by the way: violating the device owner’s property rights in order to prioritize the manufacturer’s temporary monopoly privilege over the software – which was only created for the sole and express purpose “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts” in the first place – above them.
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.
Get a dumb TV and plug in a cheap computer where you can pirate everything
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.
It’s much easier to run a HTPC on something small like a Raspberry Pi, or an NVIDIA Shield. The hardware on your TV is probably the bare minimum to run its own smart features, and replacing the firmware doesn’t guarantee that the TV isn’t still phoning home with your data.
If you literally replaced the firmware, what else could possibly be phoning home?
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.
I have another question.
Can we reprogramme the remote buttons that open Netflix, YouTube etc., so that they open other apps like Jellyfin or something?
you can! (at least on googles android tv, not sure about amazon’s bastardized version) I use an app called button remaster, available from the play store, to switch my chromecasts youtube button to smart tube and netflix button to stremio
Those companies paid to have their buttons on the remote. Your TV manufacturer is not going to threaten their sponsorship deal by letting you use those buttons for anything else.
I don’t know how remotes work, physically, but they gotta send some sort of code to the TV. If your TV’s OS can intercept that message it can choose its own response mapped to whatever you want to happen. Something akin to remapping keys in your keyboard.
I would assume, anyway. I could be wrong.
This is a damn good question that I would also love an answer to!
Yes. What brand or model number do you have?
I was thinking that if somebody knows how to do that, they probably also have an opinion on which brands of TV are better or worse for it.
I don’t own a TV right now but plan to in the future.
I would think that’d be pretty tough!
