LgTvControl Alternatives

LgTvControl reviews and mentions

• Walmart buying TV-brand Vizio for its ad-fueling customer data
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Feb 2024

  At least on my LG TV, basic non-"smart" controls are available directly via both RS-232[1] and IR remote without recourse to menus.

  The IR remote, in particular, might be a solution for your in-laws' TV, as LG-compatible IR remotes are "plug-and-play" and available for less than $10 (avoid "service" remotes for this application, as they include a button that makes it easy to accidentally factory reset the TV, which, while ultimately harmless, is annoying).

  RS-232 is particularly nice for tinkering with one's own TV, as it allows you to disable the OSD entirely, completely neutering all smart TV functions and pop-ups until the TV is turned off (or OSD is re-enabled via RS-232), and also includes video and audio controls not available on any of the IR remotes I've seen (brightness, contrast, bass, treble, etc.).

  Along with a 4-port IR-controllable USB switch[2] and an audio interface with a TOSLINK input[3], I use the RS-232 functionality as a basis for my desktop "KVM", with inputs, brightness, power, and volume controlled with an Apple Siri remote paired to a Mac.

  The only times I touch the menus are rare cases where I actually want to use the built-in smart TV apps (viz., for 4K video from services that don't support it on Mac or PC).

  [1] https://github.com/jasminetroll/LgTvControl/blob/master/Docu...

  [2] https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Sharing-Computers-Perip...

  [3] https://babyface.rme-audio.de

  Which is awesome and highly recommended, but for the present application any USB audio interface with low-latency monitoring and TOSLINK should work as well.

  And if you don't care about mixing the currently active HDMI audio source with other audio like I do, the volume on the TV's built-in speakers and non-digital audio outputs is controllable via RS-232.

• Ask Wirecutter: Can You Recommend a Not-Smart TV for Me?
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Apr 2023

  Furthermore, if you're connecting devices like PC GPUs that don't support CEC, most LG TVs have an RS-232 interface that supports all the basic "dumb TV" commands, including most of what you'd want to do with CEC or IR remote (power on/off, input select, volume, brightness, and other basic audio and video settings).

  RS-232 control also has a command to disable OSD, which has the pleasant side effect of disabling annoying smart TV bits like pop-up notifications even when the TV is connected to the Internet (and also superfluous [to me] non-smart TV pop-ups that ordinarily appear when switching inputs and adjusting visually apparent settings like brightness).

  Disabling the OSD also disables the bundled Magic Remote, though IR remotes still work (unless locked out with another command) and OSD can be re-enabled via RS-232, or by simply power-cycling the TV.

  As a bonus, input switching via IR remote (or RS-232) is noticeably faster than switching via Magic Remote, even if you set up hotkeys, as full-featured LG IR remotes have hard buttons for each input that don't require press-and-hold to activate (this includes sub-$10 service remote knock-offs on Amazon, which work perfectly fine IME, though you may want to steer away from these in a casual setting as some of the service buttons can cause undesirable behavior).

  For my own use, I wrote a trivial ASP.NET Web API wrapper around the LG RS-232,

  https://github.com/jasminetroll/LgTvControl

  While only tested on macOS controlling the TV I own (55SK9000), the documentation it's written against isn't model-specific and I'm not using any platform-specific .NET APIs, so it should work across many TV models and on any platform that supports RS-232 and .NET (.NET 6.0+ as currently configured, though it was mostly developed on .NET Core 3.1, so changing TargetFramework in the csproj file should suffice to get it running on older versions).

• Ask HN: Which discontinued app or tool would you still like to use today?
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 May 2022

  You can still buy the (current model) Apple remote separately from Apple TV; current Mac OS versions still have built in support for the basic media control buttons (pause/play, volume control, maybe a few others). And you can use tools like BetterTouchTool to customize it.

  I use mine (previous-gen Siri remote) to control volume, display brightness, display power on/off, and to switch between display inputs, the first using OSC to the RME mixer app and the rest via a trivial Web service I wrote[1] that controls the LG TV I use as a display via RS-232 (which, for UI reasons, is noticeably faster than using the TV's bundled remote for the same tasks, and much faster than using the buttons and OSD to input-switch on my previous, non-TV display).

  While I have keyboard hotkeys set up for the same operations on the Mac, I frequently USB switch my keyboard and mouse to other computers connected to the display, with HDMI audio routed via S/PDIF to the same audio interface (RME Babyface Pro), so having "always-on" copies of these controls is handy.

  Before the Apple Remote, I considered using controls on a small MIDI digital piano I have within reach for the same purpose, but this way is slightly more convenient in that I don't have to toggle the controls off when playing the piano.

  [1] https://github.com/jasminetroll/LgTvControl

• A note from our sponsor - InfluxDB
  www.influxdata.com | 2 May 2024

  Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality. Learn more →