There are "universal scaler" boards which are free of this "smartness" and yet have a tuner and other multimedia features you'd want in a TV, and are also quite cheap:
I wonder how popular a service for "upgrading" TVs with those would be. Market it as "spyware delete" and I suspect you might get a lot of business... possibly to the point of causing the manufacturers to take offensive action.
I would love to replace the full hardware of my TV(s).
Starting times are horrible, it's like a bad joke where I wait up to 2 minutes to boot into netflix (boot horrible half smart OS, that boots into the MiTV stick (which sucks, and crashes) just to have a normal Netflix experience. You cannot control external speakers with the remote. They literally didn't put that in for their speaker output.
My full android TV is not better either, boots forever. Recently started to do HDMI only in BW until I factory reset it. I mostly use it with a Linux computer as that's less painful.
And the newest fun is that the remotes have constant connection issues on both TVs if they are more than 2 meters away. Which, why wouldn't it, blocks the whole screen until reconnected.
TVs at this point are literally the worst customer tech products I could imagine.
My Android TV (from Sony) has the habit of randomly restarting every so often, most of the time while I'm watching something I don't want to miss of course - no idea if it's doing system updates or just crashing, but even the updates could wait until I turn the TV off? It also has some quirks that appear from time to time (buttons on the remote not working, sound or image not working etc.), then I know it's time to, as the saying goes, try turning it off and on again. And, most annoying of all, sometimes it just randomly "forgets" channels, so I have to do a full channel scan (or restore the channels from a USB stick) to get them back. Since a few weeks, channel 4 is one channel when I press "up" from channel 3 and a different channel when I press "down" from channel 5. I can't even start to imagine a way to implement the channel list that would allow this bug to happen, but it does...
> Since a few weeks, channel 4 is one channel when I press "up" from channel 3 and a different channel when I press "down" from channel 5. I can't even start to imagine a way to implement the channel list that would allow this bug to happen, but it does...
And here was me thinking I spend the extra for a Sony on the next TV as they appear to 'more stable'. But well...
My in-laws have a fairly high end Sony smart TV (Android TV based) from only 3 or 4 years ago and it's the worst POS I've ever encountered. It was always a bit sluggish (flipping through menus, changing channels, etc) but recently it has slowed to an absolute crawl. Any type of App or even bringing up the menu takes like 2 minutes, and turning on the TV takes like 5 minutes. Once it's booted up, at least flipping through the OTA channels "only" takes about 2 or 3 seconds, so it's somewhat usable.
My initial instinct is that some sort of hardware is failing (storage, maybe?) but it was quite slow to begin with, so it's plausible a software update is the cause.
When I was a kid my grandparents had an old style TV with vacuum tubes. It also required several minutes to “heat up” before the picture appeared. I guess we’ve come a full circle.
Adding an anecdata to the pile - my parents have a Sony Smart TV and yeah, it's a POS. Trying to watch some YouTube videos at Christmas and it would frequently crash with "This page requires too much memory" errors.
At least on my LG TV, basic non-"smart" controls are available directly via both RS-232[1] and IR remote without recourse to menus.
The IR remote, in particular, might be a solution for your in-laws' TV, as LG-compatible IR remotes are "plug-and-play" and available for less than $10 (avoid "service" remotes for this application, as they include a button that makes it easy to accidentally factory reset the TV, which is both annoying and, in the case of OLED TVs, maybe even potentially harmful[2].
RS-232 is particularly nice for tinkering with one's own TV, as it allows you to disable the OSD entirely, completely neutering all smart TV functions and pop-ups until the TV is turned off (or OSD is re-enabled via RS-232), and also includes video and audio controls not available on any of the IR remotes I've seen (brightness, contrast, bass, treble, etc.).
Along with a 4-port IR-controllable USB switch[3] and an audio interface with a TOSLINK input[4], I use the RS-232 functionality as a basis for my desktop "KVM", with inputs, brightness, power, and volume controlled with an Apple Siri remote paired to a Mac.
The only times I touch the menus are rare cases where I actually want to use the built-in smart TV apps (viz., for 4K video from services that don't support it on Mac or PC).
[2] Source: unconfirmed Internet claims that the button resets a panel refresh timer that may lead to burn-in and warranty invalidation, which seems crazy for something that could be triggered without confirmation by a simple IR command one might accidentally mis-program into a universal remote by mistyping a single number.
Which is awesome and highly recommended, but for the present application any USB audio interface with low-latency monitoring and TOSLINK should work as well (and if you don't care about mixing the currently active HDMI audio source with other audio like I do, the volume on the TV's built-in speakers and non-digital audio outputs is controllable via RS-232).
As a counterpoint we bought one recently (though it's literally their flagship, an A95L) and it's been wonderful. The only thing I could say is that the remote seems a bit battery hungry (~6 months on a. set of batteries).
To be fair, we don't use broadcast or cable, and use an AppleTV. So it's run as a dumb set for the most part. All the people complaining here seem to be using the built-in OS and tuner.
I don’t think his anecdotal experience is representative of the masses. I have a Bravia Google TV and I’ve experienced none of his issues, except that controlling external speakers is limited to something like 10 surround sound SKUs, presumably all Sony options. Other than that, we’ve loved the speed and usability of this TV for about 2.5 years now.
You can plug the TV into a smart plug and disconnect it from mains power when not in use. The boot times will probably be longer, but it won't crash as much during use.
It is. And yes it works better if it was disconnected before, but not reliable. However I likely have a unlucky stick, from the 3 I bought that's the one acting up most.
My Sony also has some minor glitches like forgetting to output sound sometimes (a restart fixes it - it's most probably caused by one of the apps I have installed).
That's what I do in my living room. Still need to boot the TV to android, hope the remote works so I can switch to HDMI and hope the remote doesn't have connection issues because that captures any screen on my TV.
Is there a way to get decent output for drmed up crap (which is rather a lot of the video content most people want to watch) on Linux these days? Last I heard, you can't get 4k on Netflix and presumably also get the shaft from other streaming providers.
But then you're probably going to want to set up a bunch of *arrs and a nas, and things are looking less and less like a straightforward alternative to an appletv.
So you manually search for and download videos, manually curate your collection (including somewhat frequently clearing out space for new things), and manually keep track of what episode you're on in what show? That really does not work just as well.
> It has one job, display pixels, that's it, that's all I want it to do.
If that's all it does, it's a monitor, not a TV. A TV has a second job: to directly receive over-the-air (and/or cable) channels. That is, the presence of a tuner is what differentiates a TV from a mere monitor.
Customers of various smart television brands have, over the past few years, reported that their newly acquired television will, given power, connect to nearby open wireless networks without user intervention or permission.
Any device that connects to my wireless network is not able to do anything until I go into an app on my phone and manually move it to an account that will give it access. Fortunately, there are no other open networks within range.
Theoretically a company that drives through neighborhoods often such as Amazon could have an open hotspot and an agreement with TV manufacturers to share the data.
My uncle recently got a smart TV (cuz it was on sale) but never uses the "smart" features, so as I was setting it up I declined to connect it to his wifi. The TV only showed the cable channels; trying to switch to HDMI, open the menu to change settings, etc were all locked out unless you logged onto a wifi network.
Yes, with LG, you can apparently still avoid connecting it with recent models, which gives you have effectively a dumb monitor with (for OLED) a glorious picture. Can’t vouch for other makes.
It will only show a popup when turned on to tell you you're not connected to the internet, but it goes away after a few seconds and then it's smooth sailing.
It remembers and selects the previous input when turned on, and it also seems to do input auto-switching when I turn on my set-top box. After I've configured the image parameters and whatnot, I never touched its remote anymore.
I want to play a video game, or connect my laptop to it. The input is already set to the correct HDMI port from previous usage, and it has a video signal on it.
When turned on, the TV still displays an app selection bar a the bottom that never goes away.
Also, I can't tweak the colors, only choose from a few presets. And color calibration is terrible, vivid yellows become some weird color.
This is a worry, but (a) so far it’s still in the future (b) 5G coverage is not complete enough in residential areas, at least in America. Many houses have extremely poor cell service.
If it were as simple as just not connecting to the internet as is often suggested, I'd have done that already! Also yeah, it can be a bit of diminishing returns on the privacy front when it comes to the things we do use to drive our media consumption haha
Go find a TV a few years old with android or whatever 'smart' OS on it and tell me how long it takes to boot and be meaningfully interacted with (like opening an app, like the TV app). What about how many times it randomly reboots in the span of an hour and loses all configuration including selected time and time zone configuration which in the case of a TV renders the electronic program guide literally unable to function (oddly specific, but bear with me...) or how many really weird bugs you run into like the top of the line Samsung 'smart' TV I once borrowed (which did lose time and time zone setting when it rebooted) where when you tried to set the time or time zone, it would set the time an hour or two wrong in a completely unpredictable pattern. Using it felt like I was living in The Good Place when Eleanor was making it all topsy-turvy, I swear
I was so lucky that I found a 4K TV with a big enough screen with absolutely NO 'smart' features. None. It has what appears to be the same firmware as the old cheapo 720p TV I got to replace my old faux wood panelled thing that was so old it needed a chain of adapters to run a PlayStation (1). The EPG just ...works. Not that I watch TV any more; it's always on HDMI. It boots up in seconds. It doesn't randomly restart. I don't have to tell it to not connect to the internet cos it doesn't know that the internet exists! Glorious. I might also have a chance in hell of repairing it if (fine, when) it does die. I'll have saved up enough by that point to afford one of those big screens meant for advertising displays or whatever that doesn't even have a TV tuner either lol.
Please excuse my light hearted rant on the plight of my OECD nation problem (it's a real burden /s), but temporarily borrowing a 'smart' TV drastically reduced how much I watched and played because it was TORTUROUS to just get the stupid thing to turn on and show the HDMI1 input. I really do mean torturous. The extra privacy that comes with not having an internet TV is obviously a bonus, but I run all my media off my laptop anyway (I use my consoles for games only).
I just don't want software like that existing on a device where all it does is cause complications that just don't need to exist (for me). The built-in obsolescence of these TV OSes is just awful. If it were as simple as just not giving it access to the internet (ignoring the general availability of open wifi or the potential of 4/5G shipping with the TV itself so it can always phone home anyway) I'd love that and I'd do that but good lord I will stop having a TV before I use a 'smart' TV ever again.
> or how many really weird bugs you run into like the top of the line Samsung 'smart' TV I once borrowed (which did lose time and time zone setting when it rebooted) where when you tried to set the time or time zone
Apropos of anything else, wouldn't surprise me. My dhcpd.conf has several devices where I've set the time-offset to counteract - with varying degrees of success - IoT devices that think they know where they are and the time zone better than I.
I assure you that the % of people that care about this to the degree that they’d go this far off the beaten track is far from being large enough for any TV manufacturer to care about, let alone for it to be worth it to them to change their product direction in any meaningful way. This is fanfic plain and simple.
https://mysku.club/blog/aliexpress/67872.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20190511065920/http://redlightgre... (translation of above into English)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tst5Xmh3q-A
I wonder how popular a service for "upgrading" TVs with those would be. Market it as "spyware delete" and I suspect you might get a lot of business... possibly to the point of causing the manufacturers to take offensive action.