I’m genuinely gonna blow up if I have to spend another second using this thing.
To start, the home screen is chock full of ads and news, literally takes up at least a 1/3 of the screen and its a big ass screen. Then the remote has this scrolly wheel that is also the select button but it scrolls really easily when you press it and if it scrolls it brings up a cursor that completely interrupts what you’re doing. This happens often while typing. Then, should you deign to search a movie on the movie machine, you are faced with multiple instances of the same movie on different platforms. If you, like me, do not know what your parents have full subscription, partial subscription, and no subscriptions to then you will have to click on one of these to find out if it is streamable for a fee, with ads, not at all, not in your zipcode (for which you need to type in your zipcode EVERY TIME), or actually available. This information is not available in the menu so you have to actually go to the application offering the movie. If it is unavailable on that platform and you want to check another platform you can press the back button which brings you back to the homescreen or you can press the home button which brings you back to the homescreen. In either case you will have to navigate to the search button, search the movie again (if you typed the movie using the remote keyboard then you can simply click the presearched title but if you used the mic you have to speak it again), and click another platform only to repeat the process.
IT GENUINELY TOOK ME OVER AN HOUR TO SEARCH UP 10 MOVIES AND NONE OF THEM WERE AVAILABLE!
Webos cons are what you listed but the pros are that it’s the most “defeatable” smarttv os if you hate ads. Google tv and Roku are insanely oppressive about serving ads and will get around almost all of the usual tricks. That said lg is one of the most consumer hostile companies out there right now so don’t install their updates because they have, on several occasions, added increasing levels of data tracking that is automatically opted in (and in the case of their computer displays added a bunch of adwares/malware bullshit that installs as “drivers”)
If you haven’t updated in a bit look and see if you can root it. Depends on the version of webos and I don’t know what’s recent but https://cani.rootmy.tv/ is generally up to date. On the webos homebrew store there are a number of apps to limit tracking and stop ads (ad free youtube with sponsor block, kill Amazon tracking, etc) and you can block updates
A more simple approach is to block lg update and ad servers on your network (you should still do this even if you root it tbh)
||snu.lge.com^ ||su.lge.com^ ||su-ssl.lge.com^ ||snu-dev.lge.com^ ||su-dev.lge.com^ ||nsu.lge.com^
Are the domains to block, formatted for adguard dns. Your router probably has the ability to block domains if you can’t/don’t want to run a local dns server like adguard or pihole. But I strongly recommend them for anyone who despises ads and wants to work toward limiting tracking and profiling (especially if you combine them with something like unbound). They aren’t perfect as ad networks figured out long ago how to work around dns filtering but they eliminate a lot and work on devices like smart tvs that can’t download things like uBlock
Disable ACR and tracking in the settings: https://smarttvs.org/disable-acr-tracking-smart-tv/ (this varies by version of webos)
Of course, the best and easiest approach is to never connect a tv to the internet. The ads are one thing, the tracking and profiling is another. It doesn’t matter if you use Jellyfin or a Blu-ray player. That’s what ACR is, it scans and fingerprints every 15 seconds or so and identifies what you’re watching regardless of source to sell to advertisers.
Great advice I’m sure but I’m not rooting my parents TV for a better user experience during the two weeks I’m dogsitting
Fair point. I set up my parents tv and gave them an Adblock dns and they somehow found a way to both update the tv firmware and factory reset the router, undoing everything. I think some tech support person talked them through it. Now they can have ads because I only have so much patience