Raspberry PI (or similar) as an INTERNAL controller of a TV?

This may sound really weird and dumb (and long, on top of that) to you micro-pc gurus but this thought has been going in my head lately so I'd like to ask to someone who actually knows. Please excuse me in advance.

I have a Sony Bravia 'smart' TV, pre-Android TV (and pre-Google TV). It still works great, if I'm not wrong it just completed 10 years with me (or it's about to be 10 years old).

The thing is that, along that it takes time to "warm up" when turning it on, it has a non-updateable WebOS or something similar. An ecosystem that seemed to be rich at first now barely has a youtube app that works veeeeeeeeeery sloooooooooooow (it will hang and crash after a couple videos!) and, worst, you can't block its ads (maybe partially with a PiHole but it seems YouTube won the war in that front).

Of course I know I could just use a Chromecast or whatever, but I don't like the idea of having yet another device plugged in, an ethernet port in the TV that would render useless, and another remote control to take care of. I "still" use my TV to, well, watch TV. Like antenna/cable stuff. I don't even have a single subscription streaming service (Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc).

Plus the idea of buying a new TV kinda goes out of the window - new ones cost 4x for what I bought this one, this one still works pretty well (the issues are most software related), and the new Sony-s that arrived here don't even have the internal DVB-T2 antenna so I won't be able to watch local TV.

Ideally I'd like that when you go to the 'Home' section of the TV (where you can launch apps, navigate the gallery... that kind of stuff) it gives the control to the Pi instead, and you always could go to the 'TV' mode as usual (in other words, giving the image/sound control back to the "original" OS).

So having some idea of what a Raspberry PI is capable of, I'd like to ask if is it possible in some way to hack the TV to replace whatever system/board/etc controls the TV with a Pi? I can imagine the answer being 'no' due to propietary buses or connection incompatibilities, but will that be the case for every single TV, or is there some standarization about it?

oo1, 1 month ago

the codes sent by IR remotes are usually fairly well published - so that universal remotes can be used. Advanced programmable remotes can also setup "macro" sequences of codes mapped to a single button, so the pie can notionally do the same thing with an IR Tx module. And each button can be recorded manually by an IR reciever

So the pie could in theory control the TV via infra red , for example sending the IR code sequence to switch the tv to a video source connected to its output..

some info:
https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/22433/what-hardware-do-i-need-to-turn-raspberry-pi-into-a-tv-remote-controller
There is also an answer there about using HDMI CEC protocol.

But - I don't really see what that all that gains you in terms of UI .
I'd want a separate wireless kb/mouse for the pie anyway.
I might want to run say yt-dlp for example, maybe FreeTube might be an option on rpi for some distros - but again i'd want a keyboard to input search strings.

I'd say just plug the pie in to an input and use the tv remote to choose it as source when you want that, then pick up the wireless mouse. this probably same as the chromecast / extra remote option though.
I imagine the pie has a higher power draw, but gives you more freedom.

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