LG's recent software update has forcibly installed Microsoft Copilot, an AI assistant, on smart TVs without removal options, sparking widespread user backlash over privacy, bloatware, and loss of control. This highlights growing tensions in smart devices, where monetization often overrides user preferences.
Incredible. What a shit idea.
Anyways, kids, remember: never let your smart devices talk to the internet. We actually love our LG OLED - it’s fantastic hardware. But it has not once, and never will, get the chance to phone home.
Totally worth mentioning, some LG OLED TVs are able to be jailbroken and run homebrew software!
https://www.webosbrew.org/
It can block firmware updates and telemetry, so no spying and no surprise “feature” additions.
I reworked my entire home network. Going from an Asus router to an opnsense firewall, just to put the HP printer and the LG TV on a VLAN with absolutely no internet access.
These two poor guys ping each other every day, in the hopes one of them gets a connection.
Sorry for that noob question: i do not grasp the idea of vlan fully: will i still be able to connect to devices in the locked down vlan (the tv, the printer) from the devices in the “normal”, open Wifi (like my phone streaming to said tv).
Right now i have a gl-iNet router (brume 2) that uses adguard to block advertising sites (and also home phoning destinations of popular brands), but not sure if that does the trick already.
But what do you use instead? The onboard apps work well and having two remotes always sucked.
I use an Apple TV with mine. You can control the TV and soundbar from its one small remote.
Thanks to HDMI-CEC you can control additional media players with your TV’s remote. Sometimes it might not be perfect for things like long presses and stuff, but for basic controls it works.
That’s my experience with an Nvidia Shield and a Raspberry with KODI. I wouldn’t really recommend the Raspberry though.
So long as the GabeCube is at a decent price it is going to be my TV’s media center. My old plan of building a new main rig and repurposing my old rig with an arc B580 upgrade went out the window for my budget when ram prices went through the roof.
Modern replacement as a kodi box for both shield and pi is ugoos am6b+. ~120$ on aliexpress (probably more with tariffs) and once you flash it with coreelec it can natively playback pretty much any format except av1. You still dual boot to android so can also run all the streaming apps too, if you want, and the android is really stripped back vs the shield (especially the later releases where ad bullshit creeped in quite a bit) though not fully degoogled because the play store is still present.
Main downside is some issues with hdmi-cec. It works 99% but power on doesn’t when in coreelec. Ugoos locked the bootloader for some reason and refuses to unlock it. Fixes for this depend on equipment and use scenario. Some people on the forum that watch tv a lot just disable power on/off cec and leave it running 24/7, it’s pretty low power. I have an avr that works with hdmi-cec and home assistant so I have hdmi-cec on/off turned on, it will turn off when I turn the tv off with remote, and when I turn the tv on the avr turns on via CEC then home assistant sends a wake-on-lan packet to the device, which turns it on. A bit of a delay, but works.
Only device on the market that can properly play back Dolby vision though, including commercial bluray players. If you download 2160p remux with the dv layer for lg oled this is literally the only thing that plays it back correctly. Alternatively just get hdr rips
I have an Ugoos am6b+, it’s a bit clunky with stuff like HDMI-CEC and the remote is cheap plastic trash. But it does its job at playing Dolby Vision REMUX files.
For everything else, I use an AppleTV 4K. It’s fast and reliable and the only box that doesn’t shove ads on the Home Screen.
AppleTV.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/the-ars-technica-guide-to-dumb-tvs/
This is a fascinating article. As someone who has never owned an apple device in my life out of principle, this is actually making me consider one.
I have two AppleTVs and while they are great at what they do, I won’t buy another. The reason is that they are still locked down to what Apple allows you to do. Want to watch YouTube? Your only realistic option is Google’s app, complete with ads. If you connect a real computer to the TV, you have significantly more control over what’s going on, but you may lose some of the convenience of a dedicated TV device. Hopefully with things like the GabeCube, more Linux OSes will be dedicated to big screen TV use.