I never thought I would connect my Hisense to the internet, but it turns out that it runs an MQTT broker and responds to WoL packets, so control via Home Assistant was really easy to setup and is much better than the IR blaster I was using before as response is almost instant and I can get power state so I can sync it to the rest of my living room. Most smart TVs seem to do well behind a DNS black hole, and if you're knowledgeable enough for that then self-hosting a dnsmasq instance on an old box you have lying around and pointing the TV at it is a snap.

Most modern TVs are fully controllable via their HDMI inputs. My shield and gaming systems are perfectly capable of turning my unconnected to the Internet TV on and off.

The shield also has a HA integration.

There's no need to risk an update that puts ads on the TV.

Yep, HDMI-CEC is pretty common these days, Samsung call it Anynet+ for..reasons I guess.

Yes, but good luck finding a way to integrate CEC with Home Assistant, or anything else for that matter. Even modern GPUs don't support it. You usually have to buy a USB dongle that MITMs the connection for a disgusting amount of money. It looks like Raspberry Pis support it, but then you have an SBC and its power source dangling off of your TV just to run a single lightweight daemon that may not even fit your use case. CEC is not designed for total control, and on many TVs it's even a bit flaky. I had to disable it on mine because misbehaving devices would randomly turn the TV off and on when I didn't want it.

ESPHome+HDMI breakout board. Just use a spare HDMI port to connect to your TV.

Linux box to Samsung TV here as well. It's awesome, best of both worlds. Stable Debian with Plasma DE in my case.

It's really too bad that Plasma's big picture mode is very WIP these days; once it's stabilized it should be a good option for this kind of thing

I just run it as a desktop and boost scaling.

No one in my family has an issue with it, use a years and years old integrated wireless mouse/touchpad and happy days, everything works as you'd expect, you can use it as a regular PC (surprisingly handy sometimes) and I can adblock the crap out of everything/use unhook to decrappify YT.

I happened to have an "old" Thinkpad (T470P, 7700HQ w/ 32GB RAM and the nvidia GPU) I wasn't using so it's left on all the time, runs the TV and serves movies over HTTP for family to watch via VLC (VLC will happily "stream" over HTTP)

One of those easy to do things where I'll never go back :).

With KDE Connect you can use your phone as a touchpad+keyboard. One less thing to get lost in the couch cushions ;)

I’m forgetful but it’s quite hard to lose an entire keyboard with integrated touch pad down the cushions.

I'm going to sell this idea to Samsung and earn me some Wons:

> When showing that the user has switched to HDMI input, show the full screen information: "HDMI1, brought to you by _____ [insert advertiser here]. Best experienced with Monster HDMI cables. Gold plated for the digital clarity."

Do not create the Torment Nexus.

(<https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus>)

> I control what devices in my house connect to the internet.

That’s certainly admirable, but haven’t tv manufacturers beeen caught connecting to ANY WiFi they find, if it’s open? Amongst other various dark patterns?

Your statement here kind of characterizes it as user error, but the manufacturers are absolutely hostile actors here.

> That’s certainly admirable, but haven’t tv manufacturers beeen caught connecting to ANY WiFi they find, if it’s open?

Not yet. Wouldn't be surprising, but most of the time the problem is "person holding the remote wants it to work, connects it to wifi when it offers, doesn't know that they shouldn't".

This nonsense keeps getting repeated over and over again for years now and I have yet to find a single documented case of it happening. You'd think that with all the attention, someone would've actually documented it by now.

Enough people connect their TV/smart devices willingly to the internet that there is no need for adversarial approaches like this (which are not trivial to set up - they'd need to maintain per-country partnerships with Wi-Fi hotspot providers, pay them and hope the ROI is worth it).

Hmm I thought I had read it on an article posted here at some point, I could be wrong.

I think it originated on Reddit and it's since been parroted here in the comments on basically every smart TV thread but I have yet to see actual evidence. It seems like a trivial theory to test - disconnect from your wifi or change its password, wait for ads to suddenly reappear on the TV (evidence it got a network connection from somewhere).

Similar FUD is being spread around HDMI's Ethernet channel; a way to carry network data over an HDMI cable. I have basically never seen it in the wild on any consumer device, but even if it were, it would still require the other device to cooperate and act as a switch/router to share its connection to the TV. Yet despite that every time smart TVs and privacy comes up someone mentions this.

Scroll up a bit, we at least have a first-person claim: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45741064

Until they start installing 5G modems in the things anyway. Or put a time bomb in the OS so the TV starts shutting down if it hasn't been connected to the internet after a week.