A smart home succeeds when nobody notices it, and a TV behaves when it does what it is told and nothing else. These guides cover both: the considerate automations a family actually loves, and the two battles every LG webOS owner eventually fights — making it change input reliably, and making it stop talking to the internet behind your back.
Not the colour-changing-lights demos — the considerate, invisible ones: curtains that remember their position after a film, lights that know dark from daytime, a house that knows the cleaner’s day, a camera that never watches the family, and an assistant you can tell “in twenty minutes”. Each with the design rule that makes it lovable.
Ask an LG webOS TV for HDMI 2 the obvious way and some evenings it opens a streaming app instead — because on webOS every input is secretly an app, and a freshly woken TV ignores the first commands it accepts. The method that works: launch the input as the app it is, inside a retry loop that doubles as the wake-on-LAN path, until the TV’s own state agrees. With a full console–receiver–TV script that only ever reports what it verified.
LG webOS TVs reverse-resolve every device on the network dozens of times an hour and heartbeat the ad and smart-home clouds every few minutes. The fix in three layers: read the TV’s own DNS log first (the region prefixes are what the community lists get wrong), block by client group with an allow list that keeps updates and the app store alive, then make the TV unable to route around Pi-hole — a DNS redirect and DoT/DoH blocks, shown for pfSense, OPNsense and any Linux router. Plus the switches on the TV itself, and what DNS cannot stop.