3w ago

I love my smart TV (From Mastodon) - Repost

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

136 comments

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.
- Learning ESPHome has been the most liberating thing. Take back control of your home. Local first. Privacy respecting.
  
  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.
  
  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
- 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.

Its only a matter of time.
- Is Sony actually a good guy for holding this patent so that no one else can go and do this shit either?
  
  either
  Is there any indication that they won't implement this shit at some point?
  Also, should we be trying to come up with the most insane "features" in this vein that we can imagine (knowing full well that some corporation will come up with them eventually), and then patent them to protect humanity from them?
  Is there any organization that collects patents just to block them (in the consumer's favor)? A kind of white-hat patent troll? And, if not, should we create one?
  
  As if they'd ever let you skip adverts, even by dancing for them like a monkey.
- Insert verification can copy pasta
  
  Sir, yes sir!

These fucking televisions have less ram than my fucking 8 year old phone
At some point it's just better to factory reset this bitch and paste an RPI in the back with my own android TV so it can actually run with 8gb ram 256gb space

There is a brand that makes dumb TVs.
https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.html
- Good luck finding them though, we've never found a place either offline or online that sells them.
- At only double the price of an equivalently priced smart one! Bargain _/s
  
  The smart ones are sold at cost or at a loss, and your privacy is then sold to subsidize the profits. A dumb tv costs more money up front (since it's not subsidized by your privacy), but it costs far less in overall value. It's a tradeoff that the consumer needs to make. The lovely thing, is that (for now, at least) it is still a choice we can make.
- Good to know about, thanks a lot!
  
  Keep in mind that these are low-end TVs with, according to reviewers, generally subpar picture and sound quality, with quality issues that make them worse to look at than even old TVs. If you just need "a TV" and your only concerns are that the device is flat, the image in color and some sort of noise is escaping the speaker holes, they'll do, but don't expect anything more than that. To me at least, it makes more sense to not connect a smart TV to the network and use a separate streaming device attached to it.
  I would even buy a slightly older used dumb TV from a reputable manufacturer over one of these sketchy things, since it's not like LCD TVs are finicky technology - they tend to last for an incredibly long time in my experience, easily 15 years or more. On my parents' 2008ish Toshiba (1080p and every analog and digital input in the known universe, which, in combination with an excellent analog upscaler, makes it awesome for old games consoles - but it's of course no looker in terms of colors by modern standards), the only thing that has broken so far is the spring of the power button, so I bent a wire press it in and a switch at the plug to be able to turn it off completely.
  This is getting a bit off-topic, but a relative of mine replaced her flatscreen TV from 2002 (!) just two years ago - and it was still working fine, but since it only had an analog tuner and SD resolution, she was looking for an upgrade. I got her a small 4K OLED from Samsung (since discontinued) and she's very happy with it (even the "smart" features are quite inoffensive), although I did have to get her a soundbar as well, because if there's one thing that has regressed on TVs, it's sound quality, in part due to how ever thinner and lighter designs have reduced speakers to little more than phone speakers on some devices.

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.

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.

I wish there was a company like Fairphone or Framework laptops but for TVs.
- 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....
- https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.html
  
  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.
- 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...

Luckily the YouTube app gets way worse with each update. Mine now tries to dark pattern you into signing in, and now features extra ads when you pause a video.
I'm switching to sideloaded SmartTube on a GoogleTV with Chromecast dongle.
- I've been using smart tube on my fireTV for about 6 months now and it's amazing. No ads, so many playback options that YouTube doesn't offer, built in sponsor block is a godsend.

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.
- 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.

Last I looked, we could still buy commercial displays. They're dumb TVs. They cost more, of course.
- Can you give a recommendation? I too looked for big displays and found commercial ones to be used as digital billboards but the specs weren’t all that good (no oled, no hdr).
  
  https://www.techforless.com/products/NEC/40-44_Inch_Monitors/M431.html?id=7nvNn3Vc This one is HDR.
- We have a Samsung "smart" TV, hooked up to an AppleTV box. The TV's original remote is in a drawer somewhere, forever unused.
  I have the apps that I need, the tiny Siri Remote turns on the TV and handles volume, and, apart from the aggressively, insanely, mind-blowingly horrible on-screen "keyboard" / text input (we don't have Apple phones we can use to mitigate this, sadly. Also, what the fucking fuck, Apple?!) we're happy. For now. I trust Apple to make the experience incrementally worse as a fact of life.
  Not perfect, but leagues better than dealing with Samsung's interface.

Ah! I was reading that post yesterday https://lemmy.world/post/22309068 as I am looking for a 55’ 4K oled dumb display.
So far no joy.
Apparently some manufacturers makes internet mandatory at first boot and even if you block or disconnect it later it will nag you for firmware update every now and then.
The only possibility I have found for an EU customer at the moment is Sony Bravia. Yup Sony sucks but apparently Bravia’s let you choose to refuse the terms of service and not use the smart things, thus making them dumb tv.
But maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s not the case anymore or maybe they will decide to change that.
That sucks, if any of you knows about a commercial display/computer monitor/dumb tv in oled 4K hdr 55’ available in Europe, I might fall a little bit in love with you.
- AFAIK, LG still do not require internet access on first startup.
  At least on their medium/high end lines (C and G series).
  This was a hard requirement for me. Mine has never been on the internet.
  
  That’s good to know, thanks.
  But after my message this morning I decided to try out my xgimi projector in the living room instead of the bedroom.
  It is perfect like that and I will give the tv (old LG 1080p). A bedroom is not a home cinema anyway, because you don’t want crumbs in the bed 🙄
- I recently got the Bravia XR-55A95L probably going through the same thought process as you. You can indeed just skip all the TOS and set it up as a Basic TV.
  However: The software is crap. Complete garbage. Random reboots - I already had to reset it once completely because it no longer showed a picture (and then set it up again). Every day it will show you a notification that it’s not connected to the internet DESPITE having networking disabled completely.
  I tried to update the TV from USB and it failed every time. I eventually gave in and connected it to the internet to update it only to see that I‘m already on the newest version (which I assume is also why updating from USB failed with a generic error).
  I never had this much trouble with a device that costs as much as a MacBook or a high end gaming PC and I would’ve already returned if the competition wasn’t even worse.
  
  Ah shit.
  Thanks for the feedback, it is greatly appreciated as those things are expensive.
  I guess we are fucked until the EU make a new pro-consumer law. But that would take years (if they ever make it).
  Another possibility would be to use a projector (it is only for homelab NAS movies afterall). I have a xgimi in my bedroom and it is somewhat great once connected to the free AppleTV my ISP gave me. Otherwise the default google tv OS on it is pure shit.
- I recently got a TCL TV that has Google TV on it. The reason I chose it, even tho it's not the highest quality 4K capable TV, is that on first boot it gives you the option to choose dumb TV or smart TV modes. Have never connected it to the internet. Maybe you would have some luck looking into that!

Or: buy a computer, once
It's not that hard, the original author is just lazy or ignorant or both.
My smart tv is a mid ranged i5 from 2012.
- Electricity must be cheap where you are. If you have to use an x86 platform, please use a modern one that is both vastly more powerful and adept at decoding video while also needing a tiny fraction as much power and producing next to no heat and noise.

This is why I am dreading when my 2017 dumb TV dies. It's really telling that dumb TVs, which should be cheaper to produce and sell, are either not available or very expensive (as in commercial displays). Really proves the point that the consumer is really the product.
- Projectors come with their own set of issues, but at least you can still get a really good one without all the "smart" features.

How about using computer for all the smart stuff and leaving all the visual stuff to the display? Besides, you can run Firefox and ublock origin to watch YT without ads, so what do you need a smart TV for?
- Because it's "convenient" and people are lazy.
  
  People don’t hate ads enough to go through the trouble of using better options. Once you’ve lived without ads for a while, there’s no going back.
  
  Because finding dumb screens is actually difficult and smart TVs are cheaper.
  
  Last time I was looking for a TV I couldn't find a single dumb TV unless I wanted to roll back to standard definition, which makes the text in a lot of modern video games unreadable.
- I have a cheap N100 mini-PC with Lubuntu on it with Kodi alongside a wireless remote as my TV box, and use my TV as a dumb screen.
  Mind you, you can do it even more easily with LibreELEC instead of Lubuntu and more cheaply with one of its supported cheap SBCs plus a box instead of a mini PC.
  That said, even the simplest solution is beyond the ability of most people to set up, and once you go up to the next level of easiness to setup - a dedicated Android TV Box - you're hit with enshittification (at the very least preconfigured apps like Netflix with matching buttons in your remote) even if you avoid big brands.
  Things are really bad nowadays unless you're a well informed tech expert with the patience to dive into those things when you're home.
  
  There's no HDR on Linux solutions. And I do like the HDR.
  You can at least swap out the launcher and remap the buttons on the nVidia Shield Pro if you're that way inclined. It's not perfect, but there's fewer compromises.
  You get the full fat versions of paid streaming services as well, although I mostly use Jellyfin now.
  The only MiniPC solution that does everything right now is going to involve Windows 11...

I'm in the market for a new tv and all this crap just makes me want to scream in frustration. But prolonging the decision will just make it even worse.
On top of that my 2017 shield is starting to show its age and there is really no comparable 4k (streaming) alternative thats not a security risk. I feel more and more pushed towards piracy, so that I can use my linux box and decide how and where to watch content. I hate it...
- smart TVs mostly can be used as a dumb TV if you reject the terms of services when you set it up. I understand they are annoying, but people making such a big fuzz about them are clearly just fabricating drama.
  
  I think it is a drama, because it's not just the tvs doing that. Almost everything is getting more and more annoying and restricting. Things are starting to constantly nag you one way or another, shove things into your face you don't care about, take away functionality and generally worsen user experience... It's just mentally exhausting.
  And yes I know you can reliably turn that data collection stuff off (at least in the EU) but hopping through those hoops each and every time for each and every device and service can and will hollow out your resolve (and you have to find all the buried options every time...). Thats how you get masses that just don't care anymore.
  
  You don't even have to reject the terms of services, just never connect it to the internet. Not even once.
  Won't even be able to send rejections to a server.
  I can recommend TLC, they can be used as a dumb TV and never need an internet connection if you just use it as a screen. Wouldn't recommend them with internet though since the remote literally has a microphone build-in.

I never understood why people hated smart TVs until one day mine decided to install an update that presents me with advertisements and a hub screen when I turn it on. If I don't select something in time, the screen disappears, which locks all of the controls, and I can only reset it by turning it off and on again. Why??? Just why?!?!
- You know why.

We have an older 2012 1080p Sony 55" TV. Super thin, still works great. It had a few "smart" things it could do, like local tv guide, weather. Very simple stuff, nothing like streaming apps. Those basic smart things haven't functioned in a while. Support ended for them a long time ago. I've had a negative opinion for smart TVs since then. Having those functions sitting there broken drives me nuts.
We always used some type of streaming box. Started out with some Roku's for a long time that worked okay until they updated them enough to run like shit. Ads were never egregious but you could tell where the trend was going. A friend let me have an older Nvidia Shield TV. It was FILLED with ads for shit we didn't care about. Google Play store shit, Nvidia shit, advertisement shit, AHHHHHHH. It too eventually was updated enough to where everything runs like shit. I looked into a lot of self contained media systems from no names on Amazon, but I just didn't trust them. I could set up a PC to do it all and I'd be fine with it but my wife wants something easy to use.
Sooo I ended up going with an Apple TV. So far it's been really nice. Zero ads on the home screen. It lists the previous content we were watching and then our streaming apps below it, that's it. When you move the cursor over the Netflix or other apps it lists what you previously watched and some recommendations for other shows but it's not in your face or moving anything around to do it. There are some apps you can't remove, but I just made a folder and threw them all in there. It's nice but it's costly at around $140. So far for me, I'd say it's worth it. We only use Netflix, Hulu and Plex on it, but all of them work great. It also supports the Steam Link app. I use it some, but I've started to use Moonlight that is installed on my Steam Link device instead, since the picture and stream quality is a lot better.

OT, and I'm usually not the type that comments with gun trivia, but
the cold metal of a glock
Wasn't Glock famously made of ceramic polymer and became popular for evasion of metal detectors?
Sorry for the sidetrack, that single point irks me even if it's way outside my wheelhouse.
- Nope, that's a line in Die Hard 2 that the armourer hated.
  
  I recently got into amateur radio and the radio usage in Die Hard 1 is bonkers. They both talk at the same time a ton, it's just all over the place.

99.9% of all these "problems" can be solved by using an ablocker DNS and a couple of adb commands (on Android).
- Too bad adv commands are blocked on firetvs 😢
  
  Well, yeah, though luck... Amazon (the store) is entirely banned from my house.

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 just never connect my TV to the internet and never have any problems. My old Chromecast is showing its age though.
- 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.

Sounds like an obvious spot in the market for a bullshit-free smart TV. You'd just have to get the UX right.
- Yeah, it's bound to happen eventually, although they'll probably never be exactly as good or cheap as the ones for the sucker mass-market. Think Fairphone.
  In the meanwhile, we just have to keep kludging in old solutions or alternate solutions, like a monitor. Or you could personally launch an enterprise if you're so positioned, I guess.
  
  I'm surprised I've yet to hear of a homebrew industry of completely cutting out the microcontrollers and soldering in a Pi or something to drive the raw display. I don't predict it to be easy, but it doesn't seem completely unobtainable?
  Flashing a custom bootloader would be even better, but I assume that hasn't been done because they got that shit cryptographically locked down at the chip level.

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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  Connect the TV to wifi, then go into your router's settings and block it. It's usually under "Access Control" or "Security".
  
  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.

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..
  
  Vizio.

136 comments