CleanYourTV
Check out this GitHub repo: CleanYourTV - it's worth your time!
I Hate Smart TVs
Looking back, I should have just bought a display panel that would show input from my PC, a game console, or whatever device. Instead I got a smart TV - a Hisense Android TV.
Initially I tried to just treat it as a third monitor and drive it from my PC with a long HDMI cable. I don't really know why, but this sucked. I thought I bought a decent cable, but the framerate never came through. Also, it didn't behave like a monitor. Sometimes my other monitors would freak out when it was connected, or my whole PC would hang. IDK. Eventually I gave up with this approach to watching TV. I caved, gave it access to the internet, signed in to my old Google account on the TV, and logged in to some streaming services.
However, this still sucks! Every time I use my TV, I hate the interface. It's slow and buggy. Google is shoving some content and ads down my throat that I don't care about. Every time I power it on it wants to update. All this makes me want to just sit at my desk if I want to watch anything.
Debloating
Then I saw this blog post on Hacker News, and I found the world of Android TV modding without root. I don't love the idea of putting random software I can't monitor on my TV OS that I also can't monitor, but oh well. I keep it in a restricted subnet with nothing else anyways. Soon after, I discovered CleanYourTV. It worked like a charm. This was the first time I've just pasted a huge block of instructions into an LLM like a third party "skill" and just let it crank. Also it was the first time I let an LLM connect from my PC into another device on my local network. I don't have the time or desire to learn about Android TV packages, so it's sweet that Claude can just do it for me. Check out these before and after pics! My TV is so much faster and cleaner now.
Before
After
Further Improvements?
I'd love to put some FOSS OS on the TV, but I really don't want to brick it.
Maybe I should just have Claude continue to strip it down until it's nothing but an HDMI menu? I wonder if that would fix the issues I'm having with connecting it to my PC monitors. I doubt it would fix the framerate.
I'd rather have a keyboard with some arrow keys than a remote and a microphone connected to Google's servers. Maybe I'll try to set up a bluetooth keyboard and throw the remote in a drawer somewhere.