I don't own a TV, but every time I interact with one, be it apple TV, firestick, or some custom on-TV firmware thing, I find the UI reasonably beautiful but an absolute nightmare to use.
This might be because I don't use the TVs the way they are intended to be used. I typically know exactly what I want to watch before even switching it on. Their UIs however are built around aimlessly browsing and picking something off the top of the recommendations.
I always end up wishing I just had a keyboard and a mouse attached.
Eventually I believe it will evolve into something more functional.
These machines are almost impossible to operate without a remote. But remotes are not standardised; nor are the UIs the machines present. As a consequence, I become the only person that can efficiently operate my TV. And when I switch TVs, it takes me a month to learn how to drive it. The girlfriend doesn't have a chance.
Maybe I'm just slow on the uptake.
If TVs were cars, each brand of car would have different arrangements of controls; some would have a joystick for steering, some would have manual accelerator lever like a boat, some would have a horn operated by a foot-pedal, and they'd all have completely different gearstick locations for the different gears.
I need three different remotes to operate my TV: one for the TV, which I use only for switching inputs; one for the Sky STB; and one for my audio amplifier. I need all three to set up a viewing session. This is nuts, not least because none of these remotes is specific to the device they're paired with; each of these remotes has non-functional controls that are obviously meant for some other model, because they have no function or meaning with my model.
Disused remotes pile up in drifts in a cardboard box in my spare room.
Maybe in some distant future, the industry will come up with a standard for remote controls and user-interfaces, such that once you know one, you know them all, and so that any remote can be used to control any A/V device. This would drastically reduce the number of prefectly-good remote controls that end up in landfill.
I have a remote for my receiver and my TV, but I never ever touch them. The nice thing was that the only configuration required was to enable CEC on the TV and receiver. Everything else just worked.
It's a different workflow than with a mouse and keyboard, and the software's still generally going to prioritize browsing/top recommendations, but at least you're not dealing with an on-TV UX nightmare (even if it is pretty).
I'm with you on that. Screen keyboards suck, especially on a TV.
I still have my old Netcast 4K TV here, but the software is really clunky. It quite literally comes with advertisements built-in to the main GUI (placeholdered by "Smart LG TV") whenever you're connected to the internet. It's not seeing so much internet these days (some sort of LAN-only solution for Miracast would be nice), though.
Have you ever tried plugging a keyboard into your TV? Most of them have USB ports these days, and I'm sure with Linux they're got the basic keyboard drivers bundled.
https://www.samsung.com/us/business/displays/4k-uhd/
There's an infographic on the differences here:
https://image-us.samsung.com/SamsungUS/b2b/resource/2016/07/...
According to your link (and to what I've seen at work) that's not entirlely correct. One of the differences they give:
> Built to run from 16/7 to 24/7 hours per day, have better cooling for longer runtimes
I bet this alone increases the price but quite a hefty amount.
I'm not the GP, but if they're anything like me, they just want the "dumb" part, not the "runs 24/7/365 at blindingly high levels of brightness".
It is insanely heavy and well built (slightly dropped it once, RIP floor).
The panel: it is much much brighter than a regular TV but the kicker is there is no color or contrasts shift no matter how you look at it. I gamed on it for a while and the pixel response time is insanely fast. It is truly an amazing display. Too bad about the resolution though. I'm not using it anymore but I did not throw it away either.
Making a firmware that does "nothing" is probably less work than making one that does a lot of things. So even in the new currency (developer time) it might be cheap and make some people happy.
Which is GPs point. Open source TV firmware means that the manufacturers motives are no longer the totality of the conversation.
Often smaller installs / live events people want simple non-smart screens for all kinds of things (on stage, in waiting areas, musician cues, info to crew, signage, etc), and although it's possible to buy expensive "monitors" that do it - being able to use cheap and large domestic kit with much faster startup and no extra crap, and no logos being displayed while booting or if it loses signal or whatever would be very desirable.
While a developer, this kind of work is outside my current wheelhouse and I just don’t have the time to learn and fork it myself. So throwing out my desire. Half hoping someone out there wants it more than I do.. and half just expressing my frustration with modern TVs.
I’m a “hacker” with multiple LG TVs around the house (in fact I exclusively buy LG TVs) and I have no interest in putting custom firmware on those TV sets. So I can’t imagine there’s many inside the Venn bubble that are both laymen enough to want Netflix, technical enough to know about custom firmware but also motivated enough to want to install it.
So the number of people who want dumb firmware might not be disproportionately less than those who want custom smart firmware.
Not wanting to commit digital piracy makes you a "layman"? What other options are there? I'm assuming you're using "Netflix" as a placeholder for all similar streaming services, but even if not, there are still many shows only available there that you simply can't legally watch without it.
It'd be great if say Google pushed TVs in this direction ("Google Display with smart cube. Never have an outdated TV again" or something), but I bet the decommodified dumpster fire of baked in software benefits them too much. After all, the last thing any of those companies in the business of selling "content" wants people to do is to end up plugging in a Kodi box. It's like banks with overdraft fees - by abusing your customers, you make them worry that switching will result in even more abuse, thus encouraging them stick with the abuse they already know.
I can assure you there is an even smaller a market for a reverse engineered open source LG TV firmware.
As an extreme case, Linus Torvalds decided to write a terminal emulator, do it straight on the bare metal for his PC, accidentally deleted his OS in the process, then got carried away a bit trying to survive without real OS. None of these decisions made any business sense, yet we have the entire Linux ecosystem out of it.
https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...
Vision and HiSense don't incorporate any ads. You can also buy kits to convert your television into, well, just a television.
Also, not having features doesn't necessarily make your TV faster. I have a 39" Seiki from 2013 that takes 6-8 seconds to power on and about 5 to display the image again when changing resolutions. Great panel, wouldn't trade it for another LG at least.
the sceptre panels are stupid cheap, but they fail. and good luck getting an rma through support. otherwise they support hdr and motion compensation etc etc so its not a bad deal
https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-adver...
I find it easier to just never connect my TV to the internet and call that as much of a win as I'm gonna get. Though, with this sidewalk stuff, soon even that may not be possible.
(Amounts in article per month I think) I'd be glad to pay 300$ extra for a good dumb TV, the problem is _no one really wants to sell it_.
Looking “clunky” and “old”, more like a dictionary-bookmark than an iPhone, was a feature, to me. It doesn't need to be slick and rounded with a main menu. You certainly don't have to move everything around so that there's a × button in the top-right corner of things that aren't modal popups; that just breaks the pre-existing “top-left corner to go back” idiom (which still exists for the “library” and reader mode).
And whose idea was it to make it so the “change brightness” menu also drew a cross-hatched pattern over your actual book? That makes it so you have to repeatedly enter and exit that menu (which now takes up nearly half the screen, for smaller buttons than before), unless you've memorised the brightness level numbers. You also can't judge at a glance where to touch for the correct brightness level if you do know it, because they replaced the custom 15-little-boxes interface with a generic slider widget that only uses the middle of the range – making it behave differently to every other identical-in-appearance slider in the OS. So what's the point of making it look the same?
The one improvement is that they removed a banner ad (presumably because they wanted the space for extra UI padding). I don't think that's worth it – but I have no choice, because I don't control my own device.
(They also removed the “experimental” from the “experimental web browser”, which might be an improvement, even though it seems the same; there's less UI space thanks to the pad-pocalypse, and it still can't do Cloudflare DDOS-walls properly. Not that I blame Amazon for the latter problem; my browser can't, either.)
I have a paperwhite, but I haven't connected it for a while. Generally when I do connect it to a PC to upload more books, I'll habitually update the software. Its good practice right? Guess I'll now have to remember in perpetuity not to.
Recently I updated my Raspberry Pi setup to find that the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS does not support the official Raspberry Pi cameras (it does add a ton of functionality, including a speed boost for Raspberry Pi 4, but nothing that adds stuff in my setup). So I rolled back everything. And I'll have to remember not to update unless they (or someone else) has added camera support back in.
The point is that I used to laugh at the old guys who refused to update their software. Now I'm turning into them. If everything is working the way I want, why update? Especially for personal devices where the impact of "security vulnerabilities" is so low.
And what if I want the smart features, just without the ads and tracking? Where's the "unlock ad-free version" button that Android apps figured out a decade ago?
This is one of the main reasons I dont buy IoT devices and don't have an oura ring (though I'd like one). I'm skeptical even of the "good" brands and I cant be bothered to set up offline VLANS and the like to "fight" the natural tendency of corporate whores to worm their way into my life uninvited. I think this is why many corporate execs voluntarily forgo opportunities for profit from people like me - power is just so much more enticing.
What's worse is that 5G probably means that IoT devices won't even need our internet connections in future. Imagine a brave new world of subscription lightswitches and TVs to go with already existing subscription phones that turn off when you dont pay the bill. Clearly consumers are clamoring for all of this, since the market will probably one day exist. /s
Organic labeling serves as a good model to follow here.
Obviously before there was a market for organic food many farmers claimed that there wasn't a market for organic food and that outside of a few activists nobody really cared. There was though.
One thing I’d love for it to do is provide unified close caption styling, always on closed captions, automated sound levelling, and automated color / black levelling.
I’m always surprised when I see a tv that has brightness / contrast sliders. That stuff could be easily automated the same way I calibrate my PC display.
So yeah, it was worth it.