Comment by somehnacct3757 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somehnacct3757 | Hacker News Reader

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If you go this route, you will want to stick to older technology for audio and content peripherals. Otherwise you will have to connect it to the internet for bugfixes.

For example, imagine you want to keep a smart TV offline but you also want the latest greatest eARC features over HDMI 2.1; or you want that new Dolby tech to work with your PlayStation 5. That's stuff that came out in the last couple years. Assume it will take the TVs five years to work seemlessly. In the meantime you're gonna need firmware updates. It won't work out of the box. Or maybe it will, but with a noticeable lag.

Whatever smart TV model you're considering, read the patch notes and visit the fan reddits so you know what you're getting into.

An alternative is to get a gaming monitor; however these rarely reach TV screen sizes so if you're looking for 45"+ you're stuck with smart TVs

My LG CX tv can be updated without internet by downloading the firmware file and loading it onto a USB drive.

A quick search shows that at least some Samsung models have this capability as well.

Any TV with a USB port and Roku TV as its firmware should be updatable without going online.

If I faced this dilemma, I’d just turn on my phone’s hotspot, give the credentials to the TV, then turn off the hotspot after it’s updated.

It's not so much the connection that's the problem.

You might have to agree to a ToS when you first connect to internet. Who knows what privacy you give away signing that.

The update might be a trojan horse containing both the bugfix you need and a new mandatory streaming service tile on the home screen.

As a practical matter, I'm not especially concerned about ToS updates since my TVs are never online. The only way to exfiltrate data is to log it all and then upload as a chunk when I next do an update, or to log into a public wifi network and send data that way. But the former is not likely, and if they can do the latter I'm already defeated.

I also don't care about tiles on the home screen, because I literally never see the home screen. I always have a device plugged in (and have never connected a TV to the internet for software or other updates, thankfully).

My 2019 Samsung does a fine job at eARC using its factory firmware, but I’m fine with PCM stereo audio.

My 2016 OLED LG model had a firmware update that supposedly would halve the max backlight to the point where the TV was unusable. Since I never connected the TV, I was safe from this but as you said I might miss out on some features.

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