Is there an open-source version of Google TV and similar smart TV software? I feel like i read about one quite recently.
Connecting a Raspberry pi or a Linux computer into the HDMI port. And not connecting the TV to WiFi.
Smart TV’s can be used as dumb TV’s by not connecting them to the internet. Likewise the HDMI port can connect your own device for the smart functionality.
Yes, im aware of those ways. I remember reading that there was a replacement that was specifically emulating the look and feel of Google TV, but simpler and better. You could install it on Chromecast etc.
Yeah but is there an OS or a Linux distro specifically geared for use with a “surrogate SmartTV”?
It could also be used by connecting the device to a large monitor, as those are cheaper than SmartTVs. No point paying a premium for features you don’t intend to use.
On a related point, what would you do for a remote control in such a setup?
Yea I always hear people say just hook up a PC or Pi but I don’t want a keyboard and mouse in my livingroom. The value of these Apple TV / Roku / Google TV setups is you have a little remote and a UI that is designed around it with big visual elements you can see across the room. I’m surprised there seems to be so little movement on something like this.
I guess one issue is apps. The likes of Netflix wouldn’t support it.
“I don’t want to use a keyboard,” was what my wife said at first too. Then she realized that saving hundred of dollars and never seeing another advertisement was worth it.
I used to have the PC setup. Ended up going for an Apple TV 4k. Yea it was $200 but it was a one time purchase 7 years ago and there’s no ads. Just serve up everything though Plex and Infuse
Apple TV still has a ton of privacy concerns and most people who are against having to use a keyboard probably aren’t going to be setting up a Plex server.
I’ve been trying to solve this problem for a while. I’ve not yet found a really good solution, but I can summarize what I’ve learned, partly for your information but mostly in the hope that Cunningham’s law will finally put me out of my misery. Here are suggestions I’ve seen, organized roughly along some axis of easiest/most popular to hardest/least popular:
- Get an NVIDIA Shield TV. This isn’t really what you asked for. It’s just a commercial smart TV box, but it’s generally considered the least annoying and highest quality of the lot. The unfortunate fact is that when dealing with DRM controlled media, having a big company like NVIDIA behind the product goes a long towards simplifying things.
- Install Kodi. Kodi (formerly XBMC) is the elder statesman of the FOSS smart TV world. You can run it on just about any hardware, including a SBC like a Raspberry Pi. You can even get it pre-bundled with a Linux OS like LibreELEC. It’s got a clean interface and good community support, BUT it’s primarily oriented towards viewing media from your own collection. If you’re a person who consumes content via streaming services then you’re gonna have a rough time. Apps (mostly unofficial / community made) do exist for many popular services, but installing them can be a pain, and you may have trouble streaming in high quality (DRM issues).
- KDE Plasma Bigscreen. Great concept, not maintained any more. See my comment here for all the gory details.
- Clean build of Android TV. I’m not aware of any major independent android distributions (Lineage, Graphene) providing official builds of the android TV operating system, but this site seems to provide relatively consistent lineage OS based releases. You can run them on a Raspberry Pi. I haven’t done this yet, but it will probably be the next thing I try.
- EarlGrey TV. This one is a deep cut. EarlGrey TV mad a very small splash in the FOSS news cycle a couple of months ago. The concept is simple: install your favorite Linux distro and configure it to boot directly into a browser displaying a static webpage with links to your favorite streaming services and/or local media folders. The implementation is extremely basic, but the upside is that it’s easy to tinker with if you’re so-inclined.
As for remotes, there are some decent options on Amazon that connect via bluetooth or a USB dongle and basically act like a mouse and/or keyboard packaged in a remote control form factor. I bought this one a while ago and it’s been fine. Nothing special, but fine. The play/pause/volume buttons on the front read on the receiving end like the media buttons on a keyboard. The air-mouse functionality isn’t for everyone, but this model is one of the few with a little track pad on the back if you prefer using that. Honestly just get anything with a full keyboard. So much easier than using the arrow keys to click-click-click your way through an onscreen keyboard.
LineageOS Android TV looks like an interesting solution but having SELinux in permissive mode is a bit scary. Maybe someone with more in-depth Linux knowledge can chime in here but my understanding is that would mean that the Android kernel’s security system would basically be turned off. Permissive Mode logs security access violations within the OS but does nothing to prevent them so I would be wary of connecting it to the internet.
Depends on the TV. Some can’t be used unless internet connected. Roku TVs are especially bad about this
My two TCL Roku TVs work without an Internet connection. This isn’t in defense of Roku TVs to be clear- I regret my purchase, but at least for now they do work offline.
when i order a screen in asia to germany i pay a lot less taxes than when ordering a tv or smarttv. so buying a smartTV is kinda dumb anyways.
Yeah; it’s always better to buy a display instead of a TV
SmartTV, dumb owner.
Looked at the CES reveals and aside from some minor improvements, its nothing but overloaded AI crap.
Even on TVs from 10 years ago, the first thing you had to do was turn off the stupid auto frame generation, smoothing, lighting, and other effects so you can actually enjoy your content in original detail and correct FPS.
Feel like I’m the only one that likes the soap opera effect to some extent 🙈
It’s fine for tv, but it causes input delay for video games.
It’s not fine for anything shot at 24fps
It’s nice for sports/live stuff and tolerable for media already shot at 30 or 60fps.
My wealthy coworker buys top-of-the-line, really expensive TVs, and then just leaves all that shit turned on.
Well yeah, minor improvements really stack up.
A friend is buying a TV or a screen for console gaming anyway and man, the TV’s are actually pretty decent for gaming nowadays. I haven’t checked out any for several years.
I bought a UHD LED tv in like 2016 and what a POS it is compared to these modern models. I mean I haven’t had it for years gave it to my sister but still.
I thought they looked pretty damn nifty. And AI isn’t a curse word when it comes to everything. I get being annoyed at the marketing, I am too, but, like isn’t Nvidia DLSS AI? That’s shit’s actually good.
DLLS and similars are nice for running newer games on outdated hardware.
Sadly it also enables studios to cheap out on optimization, you shouldn’t need upscaling for 1080p medium on a new GPU.
Sadly it also enables studios to cheap out on optimization, you shouldn’t need upscaling for 1080p medium on a new GPU.
Well that is a food point in late stages capitalism.
I was idealistically thinking about it light might be beneficial for those 480hz and whatnot screens coming out.
And for these new Blackwells like for 5070 the vram is still only 12, but they claim they have a much better resolution compressing tech or something.
Idk man but to me just thinking everything AI is “ick” is sort of ludditic. Yeah it’s a garbage overhyped marketing term but some of the
featuresapplications people are coming up for sophisticated neural networks are pretty godddamn cool.As a video editor by trade AI is the absolute shit. The audio I can salvage now is wild.
Yeah, people who don’t have to use it professionally don’t understand how useful a tool it is.
It took me way too long to figure out what was going on with those settings. One of my relatives tv’s was like this back in the day and at first I thought it was just their “HD” setup which made me completely write off getting anything HD because of the fake look like a soap opera. It wasn’t till I was gifted a blue-ray player that I realized their tv just had horrible “enchancement” shit.
Still, Dark Souls the best.
Dark Souls sucks.
Must be a skill issue
No. It’s a “the game is too grindy to be fun for me”-issue.
I can’t believe this is real. I’ve just bought a relatively cheap Samsung smart TV and it’s got nothing close to this. I would hardly even say it’s got adverts since it’s mostly just recommendations from my apps in the same way they all do now, I don’t think I’ve actually seen it try to sell me anything or get me to watch something that wasn’t free.
Who the fuck would buy a TV like this? If a company was going to introduce on-screen ads like this they’d start really small.
Who the fuck would buy a TV like this?
mindless consumers
I didn’t exactly do a lot of research into either of the two TVs I have and neither of them have ads like this.
I don’t mean they do this consistently, but that they do this by chance. sometimes people end up spending money on bad brands
Your Samsung will start pushing ads after the warranty period
Is that true
Anybody else have a weird level of fixation on the baseball player and the game character being in the same pose? Like, “maybe it’s watching” kind of fixation?
I’d like to be exactly this high, please
So smart TVs are now smartass TVs?
Always have been.
I just bought this dumb tv. Couldn’t be happier.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CJV6722?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title
It’s not a good tv, but it’s the biggest one I could fit on my desk and it has absolutely no “smart” features.
Just don’t connect smart TVs to the internet. That’s all you have to (not) do
My TCL TV flashes a little ring light constantly if it doesn’t have an internet connection. The best part is the LED is part of the IR receiver, so if you cover it up your remote stops working. I’ve dimmed it as much as possible through the hidden service menus, but the option to remove it was apparently removed in a firmware update at some point.
Jesus fucking christ. This is by design; they knew what they were doing.
Rtings needs a category/filter for design and “smart” features that cause issue.
Open it up and replace it with a resistor, can’t blink if it doesn’t exist.
Many smart TVs have firmware that interfere with your ability to switch sources using the remote for your cable service provider, or causes it to default to a specific source menu or app, or auto-switch between sources when it thinks it’s “detecting” them, even if you were actually using the other one.
And older people don’t know how to navigate the new user interfaces that come pre-installed on these smart TVs, especially if they have several connected devices on different ports. Have you had to walk a customer over the phone through using the Video Input button on their cable service remote, only to discover the TV software doesn’t allow 3rd party remotes to access the video input menu; because only the TV remote they lost is able to access that menu?
Or had to look up an article on a customer’s brand of smart TV, and walk them through disabling specific tv settings buried in their menu that prevent the TV from properly detecting and switching between sources, or having to mess with the TV closed captions, because they’re somehow interfering with the closed captions settings on their cable box.
I have. SmartTV software is occasionally a nightmare to negotiate with when trying to get it to work with a customer’s STB or their wifi, or what have you.
Too much of a gamble. What if someone already did once and it uses the cached ads? What if they have some preloaded?
Better financially support products that never have ads and that way demonstrate demand.
They put barely functional processors in these things. A new smart tv that isn’t connected to the internet is not going to come cached with ads.
From what I have heard, this is not true for all brands. Some won’t work without being connected. Shouldn’t be legal, but here we are.
Yes. I’ve heard some brands will search for nearby devices of the same brands that are already connected to the internet so that even if YOU didn’t connect the TV to WiFi, it still calls home/gets ads.
Ok now I know yall are just making shit up.
from what I have heard
Where?
In a different thread here on lemmy.
Is the thread in here with you now?
I don’t know what you’re going through in your life, but I wish you all the best. Just wanted to pass on some information I thought was relevant.
I appreciate the kind words. You’re right, I’m being a dick. It was unnecessary and I’m sorry.
I think I saw a review of the Amazon fire TV and they literally lock controls and tell you some basic af features are locked behind an Amazon account registration or login
I have an Amazon fire TV.
It is not connected to anything, and everything works fine. I just hooked up my shield to it and use that, but basic tv functions (settings and whatnot) work just fine without being logged in.
Everything should work without being logged in. Being logged into your TV shouldn’t even be a thing.
That’s fair, just pointing out in my case that I don’t/didn’t need to login to anything and have full functionality of my TV.
The only logins I would need to do would be for streaming service apps, IF I was actually using the TV OS to watch stuff. Otherwise everything works fine.
If that’s real, then it’s full refund or terrorism upon both the vendor and manufacturer.
orand
I’m getting from context that this is a smart tv displaying an advertisement, but what the fuck is it even advertising here? A baseball game? Why is the countdown to-the-hour? Why does the player look like a drawing instead of a photo? Why is it specifically that player and not just 'dodgers game tomorrow!"…? It almost looks as if it’s an in-game notification for an MLB-Manager game.
If it were a burger-king commercial I’d be upset, but the inscrutability of this as an ad at all actually infuriates me.
Ads and bloat are the main reason I still use my 1080p Bravia from 15 yrs ago, which btw still looks great.
Well, that and that I have better uses for 1k usd
I bought a 47" or 49" tv for a few hundred AUD - it was a dumb TV - 1080p from memory. Thing lasted 10 + years, reasonable picture quality and only needed a Chromecast and eventually got a ShieldTV.
That TV since died after 4 moves, two of which were 350km+ but man it was money well spent.
We’ve now got a 60something" Hisense which is a bloated crapware box, it’s not allowed on the network; same with the reverse cycle dryer, or any “smart” home appliance. The volume of traffic these devices send wherever is absurd.
I don’t know if it’s something you want to tackle, but making a separate VLAN on your home LAN and shifting all the IoT/smart devices to that network can keep them from whatever snooping or spying these devices might do on your LAN that you work and live on. Plus you can more easily monitor the unreasonably chatty ones and block them or at least prune off their ad-seeking IP addresses. PiHole for a home LAN can help a lot too, but that’s another discussion.
Oh I do have a VLAN for my reolink cameras and some other home built iOT devices with adguard running on my primary LAN (two adguard instances for redundancy).
But I’d still not want to waste any bandwidth on “smart” devices.
Nice. Totally understandable. We have unlimited DL/UL, but I don’t support leeches on our LAN.
Instead of buying a TV, look for a digital signage display. It’s a TV, but with none of the “smart” crap on it.
Alternatively, just don’t hook your device up to the internet.
Or just don’t buy Samsung. Never had this kind of trouble with any other brand except Samsung. Because of this, I’ll never ever buy another Samsung product.
The smart stuff isn’t the issue. It is all the connected shit.
There are plenty of smart TVs that you just don’t have to connect to the internet. Then it can’t download ads, be laggy or reboot because of updates, send all your data to the manufacturer, …
Just connect a small PC over HDMI like you would a dumb TV, and other than a slow boot it will work the same.
I can recommend TLC as a TV that doesn’t require an internet connection. But I would steer clear of ever connecting it to a network, the remotes have microphones in them.
My Samsung tv also has microphones for voice control.
Yes, that is most likely what they were designed for.
But I wouldn’t trust these brands to not misuse them for other things.
There are plenty of smart TVs that you just don’t have to connect to the internet
AFAIK many of them will continue to nag you to connect them to the Internet if you don’t do it. Those nags can be just as bad as ads.
Yes, just don’t buy those brands.
TVs are a minefield, but one that can be navigated.
How does one do that? Which brands are dangerous?
Take a crayon, jam it in the pinhole for the mic, then scrape the excess off the surface. Problem solved.
They cost like 5x more because they’re marketed toward businesses. https://www.samsung.com/us/business/displays/pro-tv/bh-series/65-bht-series-qled-4k-uhd-hdr-pro-tv-terrace-edition-lh65bhtelgfxgo/
They are also capable of running 24/7 without ever overheating, no matter the location. And have extra software specialized for signage.
It isn’t just a marketing gimmick.
Yeah sounds perfect for my living room. I’ll definitely pay an extra $3k for those features.
Recommending digital signage for personal TVs is still a bad recommendation.
Alternatively, Sceptre are mostly sub-$1k
Sceptre is the GOAT. I’ve got a 4k dumb panel for cheap during Black Friday a year or two back. It’s fantastic. No WiFi on it (because it is a dumb TV) but a streaming device like nVidia Shield is perfect.
There’s other business oriented tvs that aren’t just for signage. It’s more for conference rooms.
Plus side there though… Like most devices marketed towards enterprise, once they hit the used market, the price drops dramatically. You can get a pretty good deal on a used one.
My understanding is that TV prices are subsidized by bloatware. No bloatware, no subsidy.
If they were, they should be free. Yet there’s still triple and quad digit prices on these things that probably cost like 8% of that to build (because of slave labor probably), and the subsidy on top should mean they’re literally paying us monthly to have their screen.
I’ve seen this advice over and over and I have to ask: does it really compare? Gaming for me is all about frame rate, and no, I’m not a competitive gamer or anything. What’s the response time on those “digital signage” models designed to show static food menus 24/7 for a decade. I’m sure they don’t have a “game mode”, but what’s the refresh rate? If you’re going to literally pay more for a display sold to corporations, these factors need to be considered. Personally, I got a good consumer TV and just never connected it to the Internet…
This is good advice, but I really wish we lived in a world where consumers could bond together and get laws passed that make this type of crap illegal so that buying TV’s (or any type of appliance for that matter) didn’t involve having to do research on weird non-consumer hardware just to have a nice experience.
EDIT: some morons in my replies keep on saying shit about “voting republican” and We Do In OtHeR CoUnTRiEs. I’m not american, I don’t live in america, and I cannot remember the last time I set foot in america. Shut the fuck up, nobody asked you.
Just look at the printer situation. It’s gonna get worse. Much worse.
As long as brother b&w laser printers are still not enshittified, everything’s right in the printer world.
Books it is then
In other words, you wish we lived in a democracy instead of a plutocracy. 'Cause that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. This thread is squarely about the FTC failing to do its goddamn job, because this should not be legal.
We do have that in other countries (so in this world), and you’re going to laugh, but the Dutch one is literally called the Consumentenbond.
We can you idiots just keep voting Republican
Consumer rights is a bipartisan issue, Dems fuck us over too.
This kind of fucking attitude is why Dems always have sand in their potato salad. "This wouldn’t happen if democrats never lost an election :( " Miss me with that shit. Trump is talking about using military force to annex Panama and Greenland and making Canada the 51st state and you’ve got online Democrats sitting in the corner timidly and indirectly suggesting that maybe ads wouldn’t be so bad under them. The Democratic party deserves to get bullied until they grow a spine and start giving people a real reason to vote for them besides “republicans bad”. Call me when we get AOC hopped up on barely sub-lethal amounts of cocaine and she bites Gavin Newsom’s head off like a praying mantis.
Are you sure. Maybe if we lean in a little further right these “moderates” who are considering authoritarian rule might just change their mind.
Also commas
I needed a second t.v for the basement and i decided to just not buy one.
I had an old mini projector I repurposed and there a nice tv upstairs/phones for anything else.
Cant wait till “minimal” stuff becomes the trend.
Joke’s on you! Projectors get this “smart” bullshit, too!
Not one from 2018
Get a commercial projector, monitor, or display to skip that intolerable bullshit.
Gaming on a TV? Wouldn’t like that low refresh rate personally
144Hz TVs are a thing and common. I’m using a 65" 144Hz 4K OLED right now.
Modern TVs are excellent gaming monitors, and they’re much cheaper than an equivalent PC monitor. Especially LG OLEDs, since they are built with gaming in mind. Input lag is a thing of the past.
What’s the burn in like on the oled? I have an LG oled as my TV but haven’t dared buy one as a monitor as oled used to be so bad for burn in
You’re thinking of plasma TVs from like 12 years ago.
Here’s what my LG C1 panel looks like after three years of heavy use (8+ hrs/day), used exclusively as a monitor. Primary tasks include gaming, watching YouTube in a window, and full-screen music production and video editing. (Edit: What you’re seeing on the right side of the screen is glare, cause the TV is right next to a window.)
I’ve disabled the burn-in protection in the service menu (TPC & GSR) because they dim the screen too much and make text difficult to read. I left the remaining features in the user menu enabled, because they’re not as dramatic, so I don’t even notice that they’re on (logo dimming and pixel shifting). The only other preventive measures I take are autohiding the taskbar and setting the wallpaper to randomly cycle every 30 minutes, but I probably don’t even need to do that. I consider burn-in a non issue.
My gaming PC uses an LG C2 OLED. 120Hz, 4K, HDR, FreeSync. At the time, gaming monitors with competitive specs were all sold out anyway or way more money.
That said, I don’t connect any TV to Wi-Fi directly, hate all that “smart” crap. The smart TV apps usually all suck compared to just casting from other devices to a compatible cast device. For example I just cast from my phone to Chromecast as my primary method of controlling my TV and consuming media on it.
Its not 1987 anymore.
Yeah, tried to play Dead By Daylight that way and it basically made skill checks impossible.
Edit: Where hte line appeared to be and where it actually was weren’t synced up due to the TV’s higher resolution
Sounds like a skill issue
The game kept checking. No skills found.
computer monitor + sound bar?
This really seems to be the right answer. At least while computer monitors stay dumb.
Get one of those tiny PCs that you can just leave behind the TV, get a wireless mouse and keyboard too.
Nothing on TV isn’t available online anyway. Paying the cable company for anything more than an Internet connection seems like setting money on fire to me. Maybe sports would be difficult, but that can literally be found if you know what you’re doing. Even games you wouldn’t be able to with TV.
Cable TV just seems to me like a boomer’s version of the Internet. It has no place in a world with the Internet, change my mind. The ads on TV are worse than what you find on any popular website/app.
But as usual, capitalism is messing everything up with the marketing. In a world where hi speed Internet is widely available, “TV” just has no use. None. And worse, the commercials are now leaking through your literal screen.
I’m not saying that ads aren’t a problem, but there’s a hell of a lot more you can do about them.
In a perfect world, there would be a place you could go whenever you wanted something and find products and solutions for that thing, and there wouldn’t be ads in anything else at all.
But until there’s an actual argument to say TV technology isn’t totally worthless, my stance is simply “no TVs are necessary or useful”.
You can get little combined keyboard/track pads for $20-30. They’re the same size as a remote, usually rechargeable, and kind of a pain to type on… But perfect for typing in the name of what you’re searching for
Can you link what you’re talking about?
There’s a lot of variations, most of them are kinda crappy and they might last a few months or for years, you never really know. This one looks very similar to the one that has lasted the longest for me
Yeah I leave it at my brother’s house for our weekly movie and TV day, and he had them already so I didn’t spend more than like 15 minutes looking at those.
But it’s on the back burner for a QoL update like that.
Or a beamer if you want a big screen.
I don’t like sound bars, you can take my old 5.1 Yamaha system out from my cold hands!
I still use the 5.1 system I got with my first computer in '04.
