alt Hacker News- Buy an LG OLED TV. They're as gorgeous as they are notorious. I just got a 77" LG C6 and it is crazy good.
- Root it [0].
- Install Glasshouse [1] and disable all telemetry. YOU now own the glass. Now you can chromecast to the TV, use Adfree YouTube, access IP TV, etc etc etc. No point crippling your TV by pulling the wireless module and voiding your warranty.
- Install a bunch of cool apps to your TV [2] (there are many more out there besides those listed here)
- Restore to Factory Defaults if you ever want / need to unroot and get back to stock e.g. a warranty claim
The only issue is that LG recently closed the vulnerability that made rooting possible so you don't want any firmware released after 2026-10-10 like 43.21.84. Hopefully a new exploit is found that makes rooting possible once again.
BTW, you might have heard of Dev Mode on these TVs but they don't allow anywhere near the functionality that rooting provides.
[0] https://tv.slada.sk/guides/rooting-guide
Replies
If I understand well the rooting process basically asks me to tell a website my ip and exploitable tv version... Is that not basically inviting them to make me part of a botnet?
I wonder if it’s possible to hack my LG remote to use local voice models like Parakeet hosted within the LAN…? To trigger home assistant light settings, adjust blinds, switch on and off AV devices etc
Does this guide eliminate google play services? If not, then you still don't really control it. For reference, on my Pixel 6 Pro, GrapheneOS gets 2x the advertised battery life until you add Google Play Services back into a sandbox. At that point, it gets advertised battery life.
I assume the TVs Google backdoors are even worse (video scraping, etc, etc) since they are not power constrained.
Thanks for that first link, was finally able to root my B4, took less than 10 minutes.
Maybe not buy the effectively most notoriously brand and push their sales
buying expensive equipment to deliberately take advantage of a now-exploit is such a bad idea, and it's bit me more than once in the past few decades.
and ethically, what's the point in giving hostile corporate groups any money ? I get that you're breaking out of their mega subsidized and profit-locked walled garden, but 'sold units' is still a metric they'll use to positively enforce their strategies going forward, and as with all goods the vulnerabilities will get more and more exotic until totally pushed out of public availability much like the newest console gens.
Thanks for this rooting guide
How does the "chromecast" work as you described? Is it just DLNA/DIAL?
This is so cool! My next TV is definitely going to be a rootable one.
Agree … but the part that needs to be remembered
make sure it’s a model where the latest firmware is rootable and never connect it to your WiFi until you have root
Everything you need to do to get root can be done with an Ethernet connected directly to the TV and your laptop. There may be modifications needed to the root toolkits but with good prompting, agentic Llm can figure it out.
If you bought one without root… you may have a chance never connecting it.
If it’s one on your WiFi that doesn’t have a root exploit the only safe thing to do is change your WiFi password.
If you don’t own your TV assume it’s pwnd.