- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Reposting this from here from 2023, after I stumbled across it tonight and it hits hard.
The text in the image:
I love my smart TV. I love the way it takes a long time to boot up because it’s trying to refresh the advertisements on the home screen. I delight in the way it randomly restarts because it’s downloaded an update without asking me, each of which makes the TV slower and slower with every subsequent install. I adore the way it buries the apps that I want to use, and that I use without fail every single time, below the apps that it’s being paid to promote and which I have never touched in my life and would never use without the cold metal of a glock pressed hard against my sweating temple. I am infinitely thrilled by the way the interface lags constantly, due to the need to have one thousand unnecessary animations rendered on hardware ripped wholesale from a ten year old phone. I feel myself borne aloft on wings of pure joy when I am notified that my data will be collected and analysed to determine my usage patterns. Even now I am writing this from a field of beautiful flowers and soft luscious grass as I lie and look up happily at the bright blue sky, smiling happily to know that this is the future of technology
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Maybe I got lucky with my Philips oled running Android TV, but it’s pretty quick, no ads other than recommended shows from networks, and I can choose which ones. I don’t recall it asking about data collection, but whatever the streaming services are doing it already. I like having all the streaming apps built in, then I don’t have to manage another device for this. Overall I’m surprisingly happy with it.
Fucking ads on my tv home would be an instant refund, unbelievable.
I got no ads on an lg oled, but it’s infuriatingly slow.Isponsorblock can be run on a local docker machine with the original youtube client to make the experience more bearable.
Mine isn’t any slower than the AppleTV I used before. No issues there either. My only wishes would be for it to have parental controls and let me change the screensaver.
And it won’t stay on the selected input. No signal? Gotta go back to the screen with ads.
Which brand is this? So I never have to go near it…
I have a Samsung TV from a few years ago, never connected it to the TV, so when I turn it on it just goes to the last used input (HDMI1 in my case). The bootup isn’t even that slow , maybe 5 seconds or so. Not great, but not terrible…
Same here, Samsung from 2019.
Vizio.
My 2017 Shield pro is starting to die and I’m dreading getting another TV box. Anyone have good experience with LibreElec or a similar distro? I am thinking of getting some sub $100 USFF from eBay
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What do you mean by starting to die? Have you tried factory resetting it?
My recommendation is still the 2019 Shield Pro, unless you’re all-in on the Apple ecosystem, in which case the Apple TV is pretty decent.
One issue with a PC is that you won’t be able to stream 4K or even 1080p content from services like Netflix if you run Linux, as Linux only supports Widevine L3 which is limited to 720p. Widevine L1 is needed for 4K content, and it’s only available on more “locked down” OSes (Windows, MacOS, unrooted Android, etc). Of course, that’s not an issue if you’re using Plex or some other form of non-DRM-protected content.
The HDMI Forum are also blocking open-source implementations of HDMI 2.1, so it likely won’t come to open-source Linux drivers for a long time: https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected. DisplayPort is superior to HDMI (as it does basically all the same things except it’s an open, free protocol) but TVs tend to not have DisplayPort ports since the major manufacturers are on the board that receives royalties from the usage of HDMI. That’s an argument for another day…
Good thing the Shield TV Pro can serve as a Plex server. Just don’t store your content on short thumb drives plugged directly into the device - they can overheat and corrupt, since the device appears to be using them as heat sinks. Use a USB extension cord or hub.
No HDR support kiils LibreElec right away for me.
An Android device like the Shield Pro really does seem to be the best choice. I think mine is the later model. The only thing it doesn’t seem to do is AV1 hardware decoding, and it does struggle a little with full 4K BR remuxes. Sometimes I have to reboot it before playing one.
Another Shield Pro?
Yes, I’m on CoreELEC with an Odroid N2+ but I only play content without DRM. If you’re streaming DRM protected content you will have an easier time using Android.
I just never connect my TV to the internet and never have any problems. My old Chromecast is showing its age though.
Same on the old Chromecast :(
I actually did connect my TV when I first set it up. One of the first things it did was download an update which bricked the wifi on the TV, so the problem kind of solved itself
Hah, I was going to say, I do check for updates at least once when I first get it, because I have run into TVs that shipped with HDR bugs in the stock firmware.
For the Chromecast, what happens with yours? Mine randomly restarts, or reconnects to wifi, or sometimes Plex has trouble buffering until I reboot it.
I recently bought a raspi5 to try out FCast, though currently afaik only Grayjay supports it.
For the Chromecast, what happens with yours? Mine randomly restarts, or reconnects to wifi, or sometimes Plex has trouble buffering until I reboot it.
Exactly that.
I’ve never heard of FCast, I’ll look into it
You can always get a new Chromecast (we were forced to as the ancient bullet proof one told us to “fuck off, I want to die”). The new one has a remote control and apps, which I always thought were missing from the minimalist Chromecast family of products. So look at us, now we have a shitty roku when all we wanted was a device that I could send things to from my phone. Needed and wanted nothing more, but I got it. My tone is muddled here, so I’ll make it clear that it’s worse than it used to be, and I’m annoyed I was forced to pay to downgrade.
Yeah, i don’t like that all the more recent devices all added remotes and explicit apps you have to install and launch. Also the “newest” 4k-capable chromecast is from 2020, so I would already be upgrading to old hw that’s a worse experience.
Generally it’s not too hard to disable the smart TV part of it and just use HDMI for TVs running Android. But on Roku TVs for whatever reason you need to connect them to the internet and a Roku account at least once to unlock the picture settings. Hardware features of a TV like brightness adjustment have no business relying on some random server.
And this is why I went back to an iPod classic
I have a Samsung smart TV and the operating system on it is so annoying. It’s so slow, has dumb ads, and I can’t cast to it like at all.
I’m even more pissed that they just disabled the Steam Link app for essentially no reason; it worked great for streaming games from my PC.
I’ve been thinking it would be cool to flash a different OS onto it, but I’m not sure if that’s actually possible.
Rented a house over the holidays that had a Samsung Smart TV.
The UI is mind-bogglingly bad and slow.
The remote is also absolutely terrible and unintuitive. The keys that feel like they should be the arrow keys… aren’t. So even simple navigation through menus is painful.
I was dumb enough to get a random Samsung phone for a while. The ROM was on the SoC so it wasn’t possible to change short of getting out an atomic force microscope.
Sounds like smart TVs usually have older hardware, though, which could actually be a saving grace.
I wish there was a company like Fairphone or Framework laptops but for TVs.
These don’t seem to be particularly new panels. $600 and only 97% of the sRGB color space (= ~78% DCI-P3), meanwhile a similarly priced LG “QNED” can do 90-95% of DCI-P3. I’m not sure you can even call those TVs HDR if they’re only 8-bit color. None of these models can even remotely compare to a brand new OLED TV.
I’m surprised nobody has yet jail-broken Samsung and LG TVs and made a custom Tizen ROM
Probably too many models with too many varying components for anyone to bother trying…
Maybe that is why they make 20 slight variations of every model.
LCD panels do exist. They are just very expensive because they are not made for consumers and have no ads or data collection.
It’s almost like ads and data collection subsidize the hardware and make it cheaper…
Tbh I bought my last tv when 1080p lcd was the hot new thing and it was NOT cheap. If buying a dumb tv/“display” is just the same thing I’m used to? Fine.
That lcd is still kicking though so I won’t find out until it’s dead.
I’m actually quite happy with mine I don’t think it’s shown me a single ad, the only nuisance is it doesn’t stay connected to my WiFi and only joins when I launch an app or something.
Its a Toshiba with Vidaa Os I think, not saying it’s perfect it has all the UK channel apps but not Stremio which I would like it to have.
That said it hasn’t done a single thing ad wise to annoy me unlike my firetv cube.
For me the icing on the cake on that image is the “Translate” link which makes me wonder how you might translate this into say Klingon or CEO talk or ELI 5.
Other than that, it’s a sad state of affairs that we’ve allowed this to happen unchecked and wholesale across the planet.
It’s for people that are confused because there’s no /s at the end.
I honestly wonder how hard it would be to do a full lobotomy on a smart TV and if there would be a big enough market for that kind of service.
best thing is to never hook 'em up to the internet. provided the manufacturers don’t all start requiring internet to ‘set up’ a tv.
next best thing would be a revert of firmware or a full ‘reset’ of settings; if possible. to return it to an ‘out of box’ state–then above, never connect it to the internet.
replacing a cheap streaming device is a hell of a lot cheaper than replacing the tv once the software gets obsoleted for whatever reason.
my coworker (and boss, technically) just casually mentioned that her inlaws ‘updated’ their tvs when they were visting over the holidays. i cringed so fucking hard because i have the same model, just smaller–so i know what happens.
they had just recently hooked-up wireline internet and could actually stream stuff now… so i had just given them a new streaming stick to use instead of connecting their now 3 year old tv to the wifi.
I have heard that some TVs attempt to connect to every WiFi they can find using default credentials even if you never connect it yourself
default credentials
Wifi doesn’t have default credentials any more… These days, there’s legislation (at least in California) that requires default passwords to be randomly generated, but it’s recommended to have no default password at all and instead prompt the user for a password when setting up the device.
That’s why some access points have the default password either printed on the box or on the bottom of the device.
i wonder if they were dumb enough to just use algorithms based on mac or the default ssid or something… so if you knew the scheme and knew the password composition (characters used, or wordlist, whatever), you could come up with the ‘default’ password for a wifi point.
Companies are probably doing the easiest thing, and it seems easier to make it completely random. I can imagine something very basic like a giant spreadsheet of all the devices being produced, and running some formula to enter a random value into every cell in a particular column.
but then they have to keep that data–and you just know they keep all those passwords. (support call… q:i dunno what the password is/can’t read the sticker. a:gimme x or y off your unit, and i’ll look it up for you).
but if they do it programmatically, all they’d need is the code to recreate any password if given the constant used to create it (the ssid or mac or sn, for instance).
hopefully they would use something that can’t be obtained off the wifi broadcast, like the sn on the unit.
Hmm, yeah, good point. It could be based off a hash of the serial number or something similar.
They’ll just connect via yourneighbors’ smart tv
Oh yeah, that makes sense, thanks!
provided the manufacturers don’t all start requiring internet to ‘set up’ a tv
That’s an important caveat. And it appears that increasingly manufacturers are adding that requirement.
Yup. I bought a roku tv last Nov for a spare bedroom. Thing would not operate without a wifi connection and roku account.
You’d still have the TVs default OS running on a potato. I’m thinking more along the lines of replacing that with a bare bones old school OS that was responsive.
True, but a 3 year old TV with original firmware would have been pre-adpocalypse. My never-connected LG boots pretty quick when it was last on an HDMI port before turning off.
I have mine disconnected from the network, but a certain non-techie member of my household (who doesn’t understand this stuff) keeps re-connecting it when they want Netflix to work, even though I’ve shown them how to do this without connecting the TV to the network.
I’ve set up mine to automatically start on a specific HDMI port, that fixed the issue for confused family members.
To find the feature though was not easy. Had to look up how to access the hotel mode hidden menu. Apparently LG has extra features it only wants hotels to be able to use.
Apparently LG has extra features it only wants hotels to be able to use.
It’s more that hotels will buy in bulk if a TV has the features they want - and those “hotel mode” controls being hidden from typical hotel guests is one of those features.
I connected it once, then set it in the router as „enable child protection -> disable internet access“, gave it a static IP address and also blacklisted that address on my pi hole so that DNS won’t work for it. Then I immediately disconnected it. The router recognizes the TV with its MAC address when it gets reconnected and immediately bans internet access when it gets reconnected.
Connect the TV to wifi, then go into your router’s settings and block it. It’s usually under “Access Control” or “Security”.
I have simply blocked internet access (but not local network access) for mine. I only use it for jellyfin and Nintendo Switch tho.
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i haven’t even turned on my tv in over a year because of that bullshit. i’ve just been using a monitor + laptop + 2.1 pc speakers.
Same, but I go the other route. Laptop to wall sized tv and sound system.
We still watch free, over-the-air TV, so need the tuner. Free PBS and NHK for the win.
You can get an HD Homerun. It’s a network tuner so you plug the antenna in it and then, you can watch tv on pretty much any device through the app (pc, google tv, android, iOS, etc). You can even record, pause live tv, etc…
Well that’s way beyond the original question, sorry to derail the thread ;)
Never heard of that option so thanks for the info! That could be the missing piece if I ever get a non-Smart TV.
Meanwhile, the marketing department reading this: “Boss! It’s working! The people are actually enjoying it!!”
“Also, can someone get the engineering team on the phone to figure out that glock thing?”
Don’t worry, silicon valley is already making headway into government (where all the big guns and the monopoly on force is).
I remember the ancient times when you could buy something, turn it on, then have it do what you want it to do. Setting the clock was the difficult part. Other than that, it just worked.
Get in car after SO used it. Her BT connects. She goes into BT settings and disconnects. The phone auto reconnects. She turns BT off. The phone turns it back on. She is stuck in a loop. I can never connect phone ever again.
Technology is amazing.
Learning ESPHome has been the most liberating thing. Take back control of your home. Local first. Privacy respecting.
I may never recover from this rabbit hole. ESPhome works with so much of the crap I already have.
Esphome is limiting though. Want to have a sensor that spawns a camera stream only on PIR detection, and then sleeps? Forget about it, those two will run in parallel, and the debug messages are terrible.
I find it more liberating to write in C, and then setup my own mqtt protocols when I want for HA to interact with
I agree. A few years ago I wanted to activate a fan based on temperature in a server cabinet, and offer a REST and MQTT APIs (for HA). It was impossible with ESP Home for some reason, if you added the Bosch 280 sensor you couldn’t use MQTT. Very arbitrary limitations.
It took me less than 2 hours to build it with an ESP32 + Arduino. It’s all libraries that you just need to put together at this point, barely any logic at all.
I spy a research rabbit hole in my near future … 🐰
Edit: ESPHome is a system to control your microcontrollers by simple yet powerful configuration files and control them remotely through Home Automation systems.
Maybe give https://nowsci.com/only-sensor a shot? I built the guides/schematics/models for ESPHome devices as a learning experience for myself.
@[email protected] I felt the same way. Now I just keep making new things for it, currently on garage door opener, blinds opener, and may even automate turning on my DIY solder fume extractor.
