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
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
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 may never recover from this rabbit hole. ESPhome works with so much of the crap I already have.
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.
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.
There is a brand that makes dumb TVs.
https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.html
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.
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Good luck finding them though, we’ve never found a place either offline or online that sells them.
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That assumes we are in the US, whomp.
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Not really, apologies we came off that way.
We just haven’t seen them where we live, online or offline, though we would really like to.
Thank you, hope you have a great week!
Hey no worries fellow human, context and tone are hard on internet text chat. I probably came off as a snarky bastard. Enjoy your month! ;)
None of us are a guy, thank you though. We appreciate it!
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
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.
Meanwhile, the marketing department reading this: “Boss! It’s working! The people are actually enjoying it!!”
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’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.
I honestly think the issue is that these people want a SmartTV but are annoyed about its downsides. When I bought my current TV I disabled the smartOS but ended up enabling it back because I did find value on its features.
I think the complaints are not well articulated. They do want the smart TV they just want good ones that dont spy on them or show ads.
Exactly! I just don’t want constantly have to fight my devices. It tires me out and sucks the fun out of them.
Found any promising leads? My Samsung is still holding on but I know I’m counting the days until it’s time to replace it
I’m still agonizing over it. However, I stopped caring as much and decided to focus on picture and capabilities. I’ll use it as dumb tv and try to beat whatever streamer will follow my shield into submission. Saves me getting a new dac for my hifi as well as none of my possible choices seem to support usb audio passthrough.
My biggest problem right now is that I always end up in the premium oled section ;)
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.
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.
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.
Same, but I go the other route. Laptop to wall sized tv and sound system.
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And it won’t stay on the selected input. No signal? Gotta go back to the screen with ads.
99.9% of all these “problems” can be solved by using an ablocker DNS and a couple of adb commands (on Android).
I’d be setting up a pihole if I had a smart tv
I went from pihole, to Adguard Home to (finally) ControlD. I chose to eventually outsource the DNS because I was letting all family without connection when playing with my miniserver :-P
Too bad adv commands are blocked on firetvs 😢
Well, yeah, though luck… Amazon (the store) is entirely banned from my house.
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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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.
I also have an Apple TV and like it a lot. It’s the only Apple device I use regularly, I’m definitely not an Apple fanboy, just heard that run well and there was a specific app they support that I wanted so I went with that. Only thing I dislike is the remote. God that touch pad thing is awful. My wife says she thinks it’s because my hands are big, but idk. But other than that, great experiences with it overall.
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.
