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theshrike79

My basic advice for media consumption in 2026:

- Buy the biggest LG C -series OLED TV you can afford and/or fit (WebOS, no Android TV crapola to deal with)

- Never connect it to the internet, LG wants to add all kinds of AI crap to it.

- Set it to Filmmaker Mode[0] to disable all of the "improvements" it tries to do to the image

- Buy an Apple TV

Done.

The ATV can turn the TV on and off and adjust the volume. You won't need the TV remote for anything after that.

I still use my 10 year old Apple TV 4k daily and it works like new, no slowdown, every single relevant streaming platform supports it with a dedicated app. It even got every single tvOS release until this fall.

[0] https://filmmakermode.com/ - also a good idea to do this to relative's TVs.

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Now force Apple to let me install my own software however I see fit and i'll buy one in a heartbeat. Until then, they can fuck off.

Do you have a suggestion for an alternative to an Apple TV which includes your criteria? That is, good interface, no ads.

Only solution is the one given in OP. AndroidTV with another launcher eliminates all ads successfuly AND gives you the choice to also block ads/sponsors in youtube and other streaming platforms like prime video. It's the only way to truly get rid of all ads.

The apple approach would require Youtube Premium and still would not block integrated sponsor reads. It's the downside of the "golden cage"

Sponsor Ads can be blocked on the Apple TV YouTube app using iSponsorBlockTV on a home server: https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV

Nice, what held me back was missing revanced/morphe and smarttubenext. If i can get that to work without hassle, it might just be the heir to my nvidia shield.

That filmmakermode.com site is useless. It tells you to click the logos to find out how and takes you to the homepage of the brands. No information at all.

Why replace the one corportate overlord controlling your media experience with another when you can just use a device you fully own to drive the display.

How can I "fully own" the device I use to run 3rd party streaming apps?

> - Never connect it to the internet, LG wants to add all kinds of AI crap to it.

... Bad news, brand new 2026 LG OLEDs come with Copilot out of the box packed into the software. Ask me how we know out of absolute frustration. LG has started to super enshittify webOS packed in before you even put it online.

As long as you can switch to HDMI1

I can't even elderly-proof it. Apparently if you spam the mute key it suddenly will spawn a random accessibility menu you can jam settings on in the OS itself (going past the cablebox and my CEC controls). Even if I do everything I can to restrict the remote down (universal remotes, etc), I can't disable that shortcut.

... so I keep getting calls that the "TV keeps talking by itself" every time they hit a button and it fastspeaks everything on screen (VOLUMEDOWN VOLUMEDOWN VOLUMEUP VOLUMEUP MENU MENU etc) because they managed to turn on settings they shouldn't have been able to get to. :)

You elderly proof it by hiding the TV remote and having everything controlled by the device driving the display.

And if you want to be really sure, use stuff like Raspberry Pi with libcec to drive HDMI port selection. The world is weird!

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