Switch off bad TV settings
practicalbetterments.com
practicalbetterments.com
This is not new tech at all - I was selling Samsung LED TVs with this feature in 2007 or so. Samsung, Sharp, and Sony has little choice but to improve contrast, because their LED sets were right next to Pioneer KURO plasmas that were just absolutely amazing - OLEDs are only catching up their PQ now, 15 years later. First on the scene was the Samsung LN-T5781 - https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-ln-t5781f-review/
Even normal LED backed LCDs can have FALD (Full Array Local Dimming for those who don't pay attention to this field) and that's not especially new, though, hit or miss in effectiveness on earlier TVs.
It's all just an ugly hack compared to real emissive display technology where each pixel can be set to any value on the full brightness range individually.
I absolutely do not want my TV to get louder when one of my kids is shrieking. Just adds stress on top of stress
Using an external receiver can help too.
https://www.milwaukeetool.com/Products/Hand-Tools/Hammers/48...
Yes, passthrough digital audio to an AVR if at all possible.
They don't switch to garbage quality mode every time an app, website, or game queries the microphone. They don't re-enable shitty defaults every software update. They don't require text config files in linux and the critical settings in those files don't get ignored due to open source politics. They don't mess up pairing every time you reboot into a different OS. They just work. $50 will banish all your bluetooth troubles to the deepest pits of the underworld, where they belong.
Beyond Bluetooth optical audio is quietly pretty decent.
I use an external DAC and I've learned which buses break USB when looked at the wrong way. But ... of course the on-board audio is just a USB device. Can't waste a PCIe lane on that!
Are there models that are recommended? I have an old Samsung TV (ca 2010) and would love to add BT to pair my wireless headphones.
https://www.samsung.com/latin_en/support/tv-audio-video/how-...
What isn't right is that instead of using standard terms common across manufacturers and clearly related to what the settings actually do, manufacturers expect anyone who wants to change them to reverse engineer what Dynamic TruScungle means, how it interacts with Active ProHorngus and whether 100 means the ProHorngus is turgid or flaccid.
Even worse is I’m always the one who notices it when no one else does. It’s immediately obvious to me and everyone else is going “I don’t see what you’re talking about”, drives me bonkers. And then trying to find the setting to make me happy takes too long.
Let me toggle the settings easily while the picture is displayed, so I can understand what it actually affects.
I suppose there are two differences:
1. The artist retains control of the interpolation between drawn frames.
2. The computational resources available to the artist far exceed those available in the TV.
Apologies if this is an uninformed question, I watch animation but don't know how it is produced.
I suspect with modern digital animation you could do a lot of the tweening automatically on the computer, but even then you would be carefully selecting them and fine tuning it to match your vision.
Then at the end you would actually have 24 frames per second to turn into your final video. You shouldn't have any frames where something is mid-movement and blurred between the two positions.
A good example is FUNKe[0], He's got a style with very pronounced changes in framerate. One movement will be 3fps and the next 30, never mind that the lipsync tends to be at a high framerate no matter what the rest of the animation is doing. Imagine trying to convert that to 60fps and still have it look good.
For some reason, this dongle hack, de-necessitates the overscan settings [which never seem to work/hold]. But of course then there is no 4K output [which is fine].
On a computer display, you want each pixel to be square and to be visible on the screen, a border around all the pixles doesn't matter.
On a TV, historically, pixels didn't exist, and the nearest concept to a pixel (I forget the term) wasn't square, it was rectangular. Showing a border around the content is not acceptable, and it should go right up to the very edge. Also in the TV world, the most important thing in the image, not the pixels.
So it's this philosophical difference, and separate histories, which means you should never try to get a TV to be a monitor, or a monitor to be a TV. Of course I only learnt this after buying a device which said it could be both.
Overscan makes abosolutely zero sense since the move to digital formats for transmission and local playback.
Also nice that they mention how to turn off ACR and other privacy related features as well.
https://www.consumerreports.org/mycr/benefits/tv-screen-opti...
Display, Mute, Vol +, Home
I used this to basically save a frustrating laggy panel.
If only filmmakers started with decent frame rates. The few films that came out in 48 fps are so much nicer to look at.
At that point I figured out that it was just because I've been so used to crappy frame rates that the more natural movements feel out of place.
I wonder what the first pass, with less motion blur, would have felt like. Maybe better, maybe worse. I kind of feel it would make it worse, in the same way that the transitional from analog to high definition digital made it look worse to me since I could notice the transitions between frames. That is, at least at first. I'm used to it now.
It’s not worse. In fact it’s so vastly better. Watching a 3 hour movie in 3D without getting a headache from 24 FPS judder (“magic”) was a revelation.
But different bad.
There was just something very wrong with it. It kept feeling like suddenly parts of the movie were sped up and going at 2x speed. To the point where I wonder if the cinematographer was just not experienced with the technology to make it work right (like, maybe there are collaries to the 180 rule that need to be experimented with)
I watched it in 2D, I'm sure for 3D it makes a whole different experience.
What it reminded me of was silent era film that’s been slightly sped up on purpose for comic effect. All the walking looked kinda jerky, like it does when you speed up footage of someone walking, for instance. Or very early manual-timing film that was cranked a bit inconsistently. It was so distracting I could hardly focus in anything else the entire movie. If it’d been a better film, I’d say that gimmick ruined it, but… well.
Like I can watch an animated show, and I have no expectations of it looking real. I can still get lost in the story and enjoy it. I don't need it to look like I'm actually there.
I then rewatched the movie (also in theaters) in 2D 24 fps and it was infinitely better.
I have the same with YouTube videos. I can't stand 60 fps videos (except for gaming content); it causes headaches for me. If it's something I really want to watch, I'll download the 24 fps version and watch it offline (YouTube has it on their servers, but only serves it to certain clients or something).
I know other people who just can't see a difference, or rather, they don't notice it much. I feel like I can spot a 60 fps YouTube video in about 2-3 seconds (usually I pause then to check and reconsider whether I really want to watch it). I also tend to notice 30 fps videos (compared to 24), although they don't really bother me.
Considering that I've always been the only one at movie nights to notice when the TV's frame interpolation setting is on, I guess I'm an outlier.
This is going to be interpolated from 60 FPS. At least get a 30 FPS version that can just drop frames from 60.
It was the writing that was the problem.
I've heard this called the sample-and-hold effect. It looks a bit like a fast slide show, and really stands out in high-contrast, steady motion scenes.
> All HD channels in the UK broadcast at 1080i, apart from Sky Sports Main Event UHD channel and the BT Sport Ultimate 4K
Interestingly, David Lynch shot Inland Empire at 60fps interlaced, but the film was released at 24fps.
https://cinemashock.org/2012/07/30/45-degree-shutter-in-savi...
The problem that causes stuttering is (simplified) that your eye is moving smoothly to follow something on the screen, whilst the image is moving in discrete steps. So when your eyes expect something fixed in side your view, its actually stuttering.
Black frames make use of a natural image retention in the eye. Where you effectively continue to see the last bright thing. Hence what you expect to be stationary in your field of view does remain stationary.
This was actually key to film based projectors working, because they need a period of black to advance to the next frame. Without image retention it would seem to flicker. Though 24 hz is a bit to slow for that, so they actually added a black period (by just blocking the light) in the middle of each frame to even out the effect. They were already doing BFI, not for motion smoothing, but for flicker smoothing. It seems likely this is accidentally why 24hz film doesn't have stuttering whilst 24hz screens do need it.
Personally I care too much about the brightness loss of BFI, but it might be interesting for you.
It solves a problem, yes, but a different problem than what is solved by interpolation.
Black frames resolve ghosting. That's great! I want to see one frame at a time, no more.
Motion interpolation resolves jagged motion. Instead of making my brain do the extra work of filling in gaps of motion, it lets my brain see an image move smoothly through time.
The higher resolution gets, the larger the group of pixels are that need to be moved each frame. This causes two unique and interdependent problems:
1. Low shutter speed creates blurry images, which makes high resolution worthless.
2. Low framerate creates gaps in motion, which makes high detail painful.
The faster the shutter, the more detail is visible. Filmakers are happy to solve this as extremely as they can. New cameras and lenses capture incredibly sharp and bright images with very short frame times.
The more detail in motion, the more confusing gaps between frames become. Filmakers (and the industry in general) refuse to increase framerate, so they give us ever increasing gaps instead.
But they just do it better than the other manufacturers do?
Are you saying the original artistic intent of the creators to insert unskippable ads at the beginning of the disc is more important than the consumer's right to control the playback of the content they bought? Plus I heard it might kill babies.
See? It's just silly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bravia/comments/7ztuwv/what_is_moti...
Sadly disabling "recommended content" on the Google TV launcher also disabled voice search from the remote, but I am pretty sure that is a Google problem and not something Sony chose.
(Also my Sony TV cannot stay connected to my WiFi network for more than half an hour before I have to toggle WiFi on and off again...)
1. Controlling Spotify 2. YouTube videos 3. Photo Albums from Google Photos
No network connectivity would render my TV completely useless.
Though I think I could show photo from a thumb drive, so I'd have that going for me I guess.
To clarify, my TV shows a list of apps, and that is it, aside from a single "suggested channel" at top I cannot get rid of.
No content previews, no "watch now!" no special promos, just a list of apps.
To explain a bit more what I said up above, Sony TVs cost more than other TVs with identical specs, ~$200-$300 USD more, but compared to a mid-range LG or Samsung, Sony opts you out of advertising by default (the initial setup is hilarious, for the most part you'd have to manually select a bunch of checkboxes to opt into tracking!).
So, my choices are really between Sony and Samsung, and I think I might just bite the bullet on the Sony and pay the extra amount.
Thank you.
WTF.
But definitely use the "override current launcher" setting. The description implies this is a "only if you're having problems" option, but I find it makes a variety of subtle things work the way they should.
I've heard chatter on and off about ad blocking through packet inspection but I suspect this would not be computationally feasible for a pi. But way out of my wheelhouse to even know tbh.
It's pretty common for TVs to have even higher refresh rates these days - my 4 year old mid-range LG OLED is 120hz, for example. Conveniently, 24 evenly divides 120, so when you turn off the interpolation you get perfectly consistent frame times.
As a more general note, don't be afraid to experiment with the settings. If you're watching low-bitrate netflix streams, some of the artifact-reduction filters can be worthwhile, especially on the lower intensity settings.
For watching bluray remuxes however, "filmmaker mode" or equivalent settings is generally the way to go.
If I walk into a bar or restaurant and see a TV with it, it's instantly offensive from 20ft away. It boggles my mind how people really can't see it, or think it looks good.
I really liked old TV. those wagon wheels running backwards were a direct artifact of PoV and frame rate.
The whole NTSC vs PAL vs SECAM debate, was about what aesthetically is best against what eyeballs do. Personally I didn't get the argument NTSC was better for live action. I just think PAL was superior to all the others.
Yes it was wasteful of bandwidth. Yes, it was analogue signalling of something which was at the fringes of what analogue and digital is (encoding colour as a layer over b&w signalling of grey levels, under a time code synchronisation for framing). But, it was also amazing, and I think we've lost something in MP2 -> MP4. We've also gained fidelity of what is sent to what is received and we've gained far more content.
I do really miss old analogue(ish) TV
And for a 120 Hz display (or even higher framerates) the jump between frames is small anyway that any reasonable scroll speeds will appear as smooth without the need for motion blur.
If you are seening motion blur on a high-framerate display then either it was already there in the source content, intentionally added by the application, or you display has a crappy pixel response time. It's not an inherent problem with high-refresh displays.
Of course perhaps it is the filmmakers that are to blame: https://www.avclub.com/how-to-watch-dark-movies-and-tv-shows...
I can't find any explanation of how it actually works. Does a each movie get different settings set up by the director?! Doubt it.
However, Samsung TVs are not exactly known for realistic colors. So turn up the eye candy and enjoy!
However, if your room has even a little light in it, the settings would make the TV too dark.
It will also disable any effects the TV has that aren't "map video to screen 1:1" such as motion interpolation, upscaling algorithms, etc
[1] https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/televisions/article/getting-...
If you care about film and getting the closest result to what the actual thing is supposed to look like you're going to need to couple correct settings with a light controlled room for best results. Or don't use OLED, because, it simply can't achieve the brightness of cinema projection, not even close.
Personally I like the results of a 120hz OLED so much better than other options that I strongly favor a light controlled space for movie watching. For lower grade junk it's usually easy enough to swap to another viewing preset that is brighter.
I have come to prefer it. I think this comes as a combination of recent algorithms getting better (there are relatively few artifacts and they are far subtler than they once were) and because newer consoles have conditioned me to abhor any content running at less than 60 fps. The jaggedness of 24 fps grates my eyes. I’ve had my iPhone recording 60 fps video for years.
I like motion interpolation. I always have it turned on, and I chose my TV based on the quality of its motion interpolation.
Screens are so big these days, that if you're watching a 24fps movie, any panning movement becomes a horrible juddering shaking movement. Judder judder judder... ugh. I can't stand it.
With motion interpolation turned on, everything is silky smooth, and I can actually see what's on the screen, even when the picture is moving.
So no, I won't be turning it off, and I suggest that the next time you watch a shakey-cam action movie, you try turning it on too!
Perhaps it is a preference that will change with generations.
[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
#:~:text=In 2021%2C 81%25 of households,17 years old — owned tablets.
That query fragment is what triggered it, which means theres some Javascript taking that in and highlighting whats on the page
(I guess at some point this must have reversed everywhere except the bubble myself and my friends and acquaintances live in...)
/r/hometheater/ has nearly a million members.
https://www.avsforum.com/ is pretty active.
TVs are still getting larger and they've recently crossed the 100" in size.
So yeah, there's a least a few dozen of us!
The number of TVs that have it enabled by default seems to indicate otherwise. I'm not saying that the manufacturers are correct, necessarily, but I don't think they would go through the effort if they didn't think enough people wanted it.
Major, shockingly obtuse sensibility gaps are sadly the norm today in product management.
Maybe the group who doesn’t want it too life like is inoculated, or the other way around.
For example, some people can see a high frame rate and thus can't watch color wheel based DLP because they see rainbowing in the screen. I can't watch my old plasma in 48hz mode because it flickers. My spouse can't see the flicker at all.
Some of the problem for me may be related to the fact that I worked as a camera operator and video editor during the years from transitioning from the old NTSC standard to HD, and I paid hyperattention to detail as HD came online.
For some reason, the interpolation just screams "this is fake" to me.
Great description. It's the same for me.
This is nothing more than conditioning. "Quality" TV shows "film" at 24 fps despite the fact that they were going to be viewed at 30/60. They did this because even though 3:2 pulldown incontestably is a dirty, ugly hack that reduced quality, people were conditioned to think that if something went through that hack, it's quality. If it didn't, it can't be quality.
So when people talk about the "soap opera" effect, what they usually mean is concise and clear.
The best example of this was The Hobbit when presented at the original, director's intention 48FPS. People were so conditioned to movies being a blurring mess at 24FPS that a frequent complaint about the Hobbit was that it had the purported "soap opera effect".
This is most easily apparent in animation, which frequently makes use of variable frame rates to achieve different effects and feelings, often even within elements of the same scene. A character might be animated at 12 fps while the background is at 8 fps. Bumping those all up to 60 would be an entirely different shot with very different vibes.
It's about the slowest frame rate that's not very distracting.
Needless to say, film is no longer the major expense it used to be. In the early days the film itself was a fairly big part of the production cost (and don't forget distribution - cost to replicate the film - and operating cost for the projectors - handling film rolls twice as big, etc.).
And standards are sticky, so the industry stayed on 24fps for decades.
Except, it is very distracting. Around 60 it starts to become bearable for me and allow camera pans to be interpreted as fluid motion.
Action scenes are just brutal at 24FPS. Running, pans, and so on. Either it's a blurry mess at a 180 degree shutter, or it turns into a rapid slide show (like early in Saving Private Ryan).
24hz on an OLED with very quick pixels is a very different experience than 24hz on a CRT or 24hz on a film projector.
A movie properly authored at 120Hz (not interpolated with potential artifacts) would be objectively better than a 24Hz one in every possible way.
Firstly: No one on the mass market actually knows what 3:2 pulldown is, so it's hard for people to see it as an indicator of 'quality' -- most of HN, a technical audience, probably doesn't know what it is either: For reference, it's when a 24 frame per second film is converted to 29.97 frames by by interlacing 4 frames together to create 5 frames. That and a tiny bit of a slowdown gets you to 29.97, which is the NTSC frame rate.
Secondly: Why do people in traditionally PAL regions also hate the soap opera effect? Again, for reference, PAL regions ran at 25 frames per second and so got away with a 4% speedup and a 2:2 pulldown that has no real frame-blurring effect.
Thirdly: Generally, I prefer higher frame rate content: I have a 144Hz monitor, and prefer content as close to that as I can, but I still hate watching The Hobbit -- a lot of this has to do with motion blur: 48 frame per second content is not fast enough to get away with appearing seamless, and not slow enough that the per-frame motion blur you get with 24 frame per second 180 degree shutter hides the stuttering.
People don't have to know what it technically is to know it when they see it, and the simple incantation of "soap opera effect" demonstrates that.
Again, almost all dramas shoot at 24 fps. There is zero technical reason for this (there once was a cost saving / processing reason for it, and then people retconned justifications, which you can see earlier in this very thread). They do this because, again, people are conditioned to correlate that with quality. It's going to take years to break us from that.
>I have a 144Hz monitor, and prefer content as close to that as I can
This is not meaningful. Preferring games at a higher framerate has zero correlation with how you prefer movies. And however odd you think the take is, you like 24 FPS because you've been trained to like it, Pavlov's bell style.
Are you sure it’s really just conditioning? Impressionist paintings are obviously a lower fidelity reproduction of reality than photorealistic paintings, yet people tend to like Impressionism more, and I don’t think that’s necessarily just cultural conditioning. Sometimes less is more.
The reason no one has changed process isn't because there's tonnes of better options that everyone is just studiously ignoring because of pavlovian conditioning. It's absolutely nothing to do with people liking the look of interlaced 3:2 pulldowns. It's because the current options for HFR content just plain don't look very good. Some of this is unrelated to the technical specification of the recording & due to things like action content in HFR looking cheesy -- there's going to need to be a wild change in how content is choreographed & shot before we're anywhere near it being as well understood as current practises.
There are exceptions: 4K 120FPS HDR content for things like documentary content looks pretty good on a high refresh rate monitor (note: no one said games), but we haven't reached an era where that's even nearly commoditised and the in-the-middle stuff you'd want to do for cinema or TV just can't cut it.
Humorously this submission, and so many just like it, are about people who are outraged that their parents / friends / etc actually like motion smoothing. So...I guess? I remember a similarly boorish, ultimately-failed "no one should ever take vertical video!" movement from a few years ago, again pushed by people really, really certain of the supremacy of their own preference.
>and every cinematographer, animator, producer, and director
Now this attempt to appeal to authority is particularly silly. Peter Jackson -- you might have heard of him -- tried to do a movie at 48 FPS for a wide variety of quality reasons, to be lambasted by people just like you. People who are sure that the completely arbitrary, save-our-rolls-of-film 24 FPS is actually some magical, perfect number. It is insane. Everyone else is simply handcuffed to that completely obsolete choice from years ago, and will be for years more.
I'm not going to convince you, and have zero interest in trying. And I am certain you're not going to convince me. But your argument at its roots is "that's the way it's done, therefore that's the perfect way and the way it will forever be done". It's utter nonsense.
Instead of trying to jump to 48fps or 60fps, maybe they should just adopt 30fps as the new standard for a while. The 24fps fans won't have too much to complain about, because it's not that much faster (and it's the same as the old NTSC standard), and the HFR fans will at least have something a little better. Then, in a decade, they could jump to 36fps, then 42, then 48, etc.
As a bonus, the file sizes for movie files won't be that much bigger at only 30fps, instead of 60+.
But that's more about what you're shooting and where you're watching it.
I typically don't like portrait video because I watch most video on a 16:9 (or wider) screen. 9:16 video leaves a lot of wasted space. I get why people shoot vertical - because they're only using cell phone screens to view and the content is "portrait-oriented" like a person talking to the camera.
But the other side of this is when you see someone shooting portrait orientation and they have to pan around, back and forth, constantly moving just so they can capture the whole scene. It doesn't make sense if the subject(s) are arrayed horizontally. Add to this the simple fact that you can just spin a phone sideways and even mobile viewers can see the whole thing without all the panning.
If anything, the easy switch from portrait to landscape should offer mobile-shooters more flexibility to match orientation to content rather than likely viewing device.
The reason I didn't like the Hobbit was because they went overboard on CGI. They had to make Orlando Bloom (Legolas) appear younger than he was in the Lord of the Rings which was released a decade before.
Tolkien's elves are literally immortal and the time between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is less than a hundred years. Legolas' father is several thousand years old. There is no reason to expect Legolas to look younger in The Hobbit; you'd want him to look exactly the same.
Production-wise, it was the silly looking CG characters. Even worse was the way they stretched one simpler story into three movies (while the LOTR trilogy just managed a good job of adapting three long books into three long movies without too much oversimplification.)
It looked like absolute soap opera crap. And the worst thing was that I could _easily_ tell when the actors were carrying light prop weapons compared to the real thing.
At 24 fps your eye can't tell, but at 60fps you see the tiny wobble that the foam(?) prop weapons have and it's really jarring. Same with other practical effects, they're easier to hide in the ye olde 24 fps version.
Watching movies in 60fps is the same as when porn moved to 4k. You see every little flaw in great detail that used to be hidden by worse technology. Everyone needs to step up their game in areas where it wasn't needed before.
One of the rules of cinema and shooting at low frame rate is to use "180 degree shutter" (a term that comes from the spinning shutters used in old film cameras), or in other words a shutter that is open for half as long as the frame rate. i.e.: If you're filming at 24 frames per second, use a 1/48th second shutter speed.
The reason for this is that 24 FPS @ 1/48" exposure film adds enough motion blur to each exposure that any movement that occurs over a small number of frames is naturally smeared by a consequence of the exposure time, but anything that is relatively steady across frames tends to look crisp. If you shoot at 24 FPS @ 1/1000", you end up with something that looks like a fast flipbook of static pictures. 24 FPS just isn't fast enough, and people can see that each individual frame doesn't contain movement.
Anecdotally, 120FPS @ 1/1000" on a 120Hz display doesn't exhibit this same problem, at least to me or people I've shown it to, although some people will notice it "feels fast".
48 FPS @ 1/96" seems to be the worst of both worlds: Too fast a shutter for motion blur to compensate nicely, too slow a frame rate to to make it look seamless, so it ends up in the uncanny valley where people know there's something missing, but not what.
The frame interpolation feature that people seem to hate is almost directly designed to fall into this horrible territory.
Motion blur doesn't work on modern TVs (i.e. OLED). They will display a static, blurry frame for 1/24 of a second, then snap to the next one practically instantly with a clearly visible jump. What I get in the end is a juddering mess that is also blurry, so I can literally see nothing.
Naive interpolation of inter-frame content is awful, is what a lot of TVs do to implement their smoothing feature, and is why everyone complains about it.
The reason a lot of people hated The Hobbit may be partly because of this problem: It was shot at a 270 degree shutter to try to get a bit more motion blur back into each frame, which to a lot of people felt strange.
Maybe, or maybe we just haven't adapted to 48fps yet. Something I heard a lot about The Hobbit was that the outdoor scenes looked great whereas the indoor seens looked like film sets - which, well, they were film sets, and making a set that looks "natural" will require new techniques. Everyone hates early stereo mixes (e.g. The Beatles), not because stereo sound inherently sounds bad but because production takes time to adapt to new technology.
But no one's brain is saying "wow the lack of motion blur really affects the realism here".
I walk into a house and see a TV show playing on a TV with interpolation turned on and it just looks weird because of how TV looked growing up. I mean that's just the simple reality of it. I understand when film nerds come along and explain motion blur etc but that's all very "system 2" thinking. I'm talking about pure system 1 subconscious processing.
What's even weirder is how some folks can never seem to grasp why their explanations of how motion blur is bad can't convince others to suddenly like interpolation.
With time, higher quality sets should balance this back out.
To my eye, interpolation does the exact same thing. It's like they used too many lights and it makes the layers of depth in the shot "separate" from each other and look flat. It makes the whole shot look completely fake to my eye.
You can also prefer to not like black & white films, and watch the colorized versions done decades later.
You can also prefer not to see nudity, violence, or profanity, and watch the edited-for-TV versions of those films.
Finally you can prefer a totally different story or shot composition or artistic choices altogether, and ask Generative AI to recreate, reedit, or augment scenes to your preference.
All of these are valid preferences and we have the technology to facilitate them for you.
But 1) They should never be the default on any technology you acquire. That's the PRIMARY sin of all of the technologies mentioned by OP - it's not that they exist, it's that they're on by default, and since most humans never change the default settings on ANYTHING they change, they experience content in a way that as not intended by the original artist behind the vision.
And 2) Well, this is subjective, and everything is a spectrum. But you are ultimately robbing yourself of the specific experience intended for you by the creator of the film. It's certainly within your right not to care and think that you know better than them, but on a spectrum of that philosophy, carried out across all of society, it's probably not a good thing.
Now if you're talking about watching YouTube or similar content then it's a different story.
So I don't buy this "vision" argument. It's just holier-than-thou. Directors choose 24fps because it's literally the only option. It's no choice at all.
Forcing me to watch your movie as a jerky motion-sickness-inducing mess? I will indeed, to use your words, shit on it.
Most people don't give a damn about those things. They just want to be entertained, maybe they have other hobbies where they can exercise their particular snobbism, and movies are not particularly important for them as an art form or they don't care much about art at all.
How do you feel about watching movies in a theater? The frame rate there is low but the screen is so much larger.
There was one movie that they showed at 48fps - I think it was The Hobbit? I've forgotten. That was amazing. Blissful. My eyes have never been so happy.
Even if I forgot the plot already.
Different display technologies need different things. No difference from CRT filters on old video games played on modern screens.
Probably it's just what you're used to and how much you've been trained to notice artifacts.
Audio still wins by a mile in a theater though. Though home theater audio has gotten pretty darn good. I just wouldn't know as long as I'm in an apartment.
You can also always choose when to have motion interpolation on or off. For sports and nature documentaries I think it's just better. For animation it's worse. For other films it depends, I usually prefer it in something fast and actiony, like John Wick.
I don't play games much, but visually I've always distinguished between games and movies. I expect them to look quite different, not at all similar.
And I thought my feelings about this were universal, and had confirmation bias from seeing postings before Thanksgiving like "if your parents' TVs look weird, here's a guide for turning off motion interpolation depending on make and model", etc. I've assumed that the whole point of motion interpolation was for new TVs to impress people with how they look for sports, that this is what sells TVs in Best Buy, and the over-application of motion interpolation to other content was an unfortunate byproduct.
Theater is fine -- I have a home theater w/ a 24p projector. I wish it had 120Hz smoothing, but at least it's not dim like my local theater.
24p content at 60Hz is really, really bad (3:2 pull down what not). At least we can agree on that. That seems to be what "turn off motion smoothing" is about, to me.
24p content at 24Hz is fine, but 120Hz is better.
EDIT: I should say that the input lag (gaming) is much greater for smoothing, so even at ~30 fps I'd run my PlayStation at 60Hz no smoothing (game mode on &c).
Movied are even worse, I can absolutely see the judder especially when panning. It is one reason I prefer to wait for home releases and will go to movies that are specifically phenomena irreplaceable at home, such as Oppenheimer in 70mm IMAX.
New TV I've got has the `Filmmaker mode` - wasn't sure what exactly is that, turned it On and yes - it's how it should be. This article cleared it for me now
The only bad thing about motion interpolation on most TVs in my book is the fact that the /implementation is often pretty bad/. If perfect frame interpolation was a thing, I'd watch everything upsampled to 165Hz of my monitor. Well, I do it anyway using the Smooth Video Project. But that also suffers from artifacts, so is far from perfect. Much better than judder though...
More articles explaining how to customise the settings is better than less because it draws attention to the fact these options are being forced on all consumers.
Shaky-cam action movies are their own unique problem :)
I think they exist because it saves a fair bit of cash on fight choreographers and the time it takes to train the actors to do it realistically. On the flip side, it really increases the respect I have for properly choreographed action scenes that are consistent and visible.
I don't think this is about feelings. (But it just might be in a small minority of cases IMO, and if it's the case for you, then all the power to you.)
In the case of this article, all the points are about discernment. Some people not only notice the issues, but are also able to identify them and articulate precisely what is happening. The rest don't.
I would say your visual experience is fairly rare, but common enough that I regularly encounter people that have various issues with digital motion. I have no problems with low framerates myself, but I do find camera shake (especially as so common in video games now) to be nauseating, though it seems most people have zero issue with it.
It's so ironic that at the end you gave an advice:
> I suggest that the next time you watch a shakey-cam action movie, you try turning it on too!
Are you assuming that everyone likes the same things you like? I guess not. The same for the article—it doesn't assume that.
No advice fits everyone, but good advice fits many people. And I'd argue that the article's advice fits many, if not most, people.
TV is probably the only screen many people have that has motion interpolation on by default. They watch movies on theaters, PC monitors, laptops, tablets, and phones probably more than on TVs.
Many people are already used to what movies "look like." Non-tech-savvy ones might not know what "FPS" means, but they would likely be able to notice that watching movies on their phone feels different from on a TV with the default setting. The article's suggestion to disable motion interpolation on TVs makes the watching experience more consistent across all screens.
It’s been awesome. The TV is fast to boot up, responsive, doesn’t spy on me, and doesn’t need useless software updates.
It looks like there are a lot of people with perfectly valid reasons to keep some or all of these settings on. Which is great. I will rewrite the article to reflect that — and change the title to something more neutral and less absolutist.
Unfortunately, I don't know that there's a generic non-jargon word for this collection of settings, but let's not solve for that by overloading the word "smart"!
2. More pop on the store display.
It turns out that "fixing" these things do result in more people picking the TV. Just like an overstated display will typically be preferred in a side-by-side comparison.
Basically, low FPS can be a stylistic choice, and making up new frames at playback time often completely butchers some of the nuances present in good animation.
If it had looked better with frame interpolation the studio could have baked it in, before release.
Perhaps it depends on the quality of the execution, but there are shows where I wished I had frame interpolation.
For the high frame rate version of The Hobbit that I saw, in my opinion it looked bad for character shots but cool for overhead action views.
I turn off overscan as those artifacts do not bother me.
People want content to the edge of the screen, but not to pay a TV technician to come and calibrate their tube to exacting standards in their home. Content creators need to know that some of their broadcast is invisible to some of their viewers as a result.
Pixel perfect tvs came later, so the transiton to HD wasn't the right time. ATSC3 could have been a reasonable time to change, but then broadcasters couldn't use the same feed for ATSC1 and ATSC3 ... and who knows if ATSC3 will ever win over ATSC1, or if all the OTA TV spectrum will be refarmed to telcos before that happens.
And FTR don't have TV anymore since 3year old tested the strength of the screen with a hammer. Don't miss it. Hypnotic on Linux for news TV and Netflix for (mostly stupid) ways to waste an evening.
30fps videos look very jarring to me, I almost always notice “tearing” or “shuddering” - even when in a cinema. Enabling motion interpolation / frame rate up scaling usually fixes this for me.
It’s so distracting and at times almost painful for me to watch without it that at times I’ll use a tool (Topaz Video AI) to re-render videos to 50-60FPS.
I can't stand motion interpolation. Turned off on every TV I own. Will literally walk away and do something else if it's on a (non-sports) TV in public. There's something "too smooth" about it that irks me.
Biology is weird so I say just give people the options to pick what works for them.
https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-s...
I expect refresh rate is similar, given that... if a substantial portion of your subjective perception is mentally fabricated, then your brain physiology contributes, and that's set during childhood.
For reference, I grew up on NTSC screens (29.97 interlaced frames per second).
Considering it as 30 interlaced frames per second isn't really accurate. It's 60 fields per second. A lot of content intended for interlaced broadcast is not 30 fps broken into fields, it's 60 distinct half pictures per second.
(Excuse my rounding)
[0] In urban/bike areas, always open a car door with your opposite hand (e.g. driver's side with right hand). It forces you to turn your body, which allows you to look behind you, which lets you notice bikers approaching from behind before you open the door and splat them.
At the same time, I'm pretty confident that this is a subjective phenomenon. My parents have it on all their TVs and my mother both prefers it and notices immediately if video isn't 60fps or equivalent, while my father says he doesn't notice the difference.
We were watching an action/fighting movie with swords and other martial arts, and I distinctly saw these graceful arcs of the actors' limbs and weapons turned into polygons. The motion interpolation clearly inferred linear transitions between the different positions captured in the actual frames. Imagine a large swing tracing out an octagonal path with all the physical unreality that would entail.
It seemed like I was the only one in the room who perceived this travesty.
Also, you get used to it after a while. At first I was similarly jarred by the smoothness, as if it were fast forwarded, but after a few hours of getting used to it, when I saw 24 FPS content, it was literally unwatchable as it looked like a slideshow to me.
There is something about 24fps that I believe may have something to do with how the eye or brain works that makes viewing more immersive. Perhaps it’s due to historical cultural reasons, but I’m not sure that totally explains it.
FWIW I play valorant on a 390fps monitor so I am not a “the eye can only see 60fps” truther.
Peripheral vision has a lot of rods (instead of cones) which are more sensitive to rapid motion. I can certainly pick up flicker and "perceive the frames" more clearly when looking in my peripheral vision.
Same goes for the old CRT monitors: 60 Hz was an absolute no-no, 85 was tolerable but higher was better.
Edit: CRTs were worse, of course, because they were constantly flashing light-dark, unlike LCDs which simply transition from frame to frame.
Maybe one day the real-time implementation will be good enough, but I find that it’s shockingly bad most of the time.
This is all subjective of course, but I think you'll find that in cheap cameras, overdone noise reduction is the culprit, rather than noise reduction itself. If you're able to look at the raw sensor data, I think you'll find something even worse still. Small sensors are inherently very noisy, in typical lighting conditions.
So yes, the images look worse than optimal, but not worse than if there was no filtering at all.
Not to mention that after 6 years the TV becomes useless junk killed by bulky modern app updates. I think there is a market for something like "Framework TV".
Also, you cat reset an old, slow TV, put it in "dumb" mode, then add something like a Vero V or another box.
How much TV are you people watching such that this statement becomes even remotely accurate? My 2017 LG OLED display says it has 6400 power-on hours and it looks as good as new.
https://www.marketingcharts.com/television/tv-audiences-and-...
I've tried to get her to change oh so many times, all in vain...
No rational explanation either. Just... that's how she rolls I guess.
Still, the objective tests from RTINGS seem to suggest that it's the LCD sets that look all fucked up after a few years, while almost all the OLED ones look perfect. And they OLED sets aren't showing a downtrend in overall brightness over time.
https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/longevity-results-after-10-m...
For the lifespan of the screen, it doesn't matter if anyone actually directs their eyes at it.
Why is that?
They also shift the image around by a few pixels to prevent logos and tickers from permanently marking the screen.
And when turned off, they also try to level the brightness of individual pixels by displaying different patterns - again to combat "burn-in".
You can make an OLED visibly burn in within a couple months if you max the brightness, cover it in static content and then leave it running constantly.
Or it can last a decade if used lightly, on lower brightness, with good burn-in compensation software, with few to no static images.
I have a 4K OLED from 2018. Since then, I think the only notable improvement in the models from the same manufacturer is maybe enhanced-ARC? That is a neat feature, but not sufficient imo. Maybe a 120Hz refresh rate, but very little content even uses 60, let along 120 - at least in the cinema and TV space.
2004 is the first year I remember watching a HD widescreen TV show (Lost). There were a handful of test clips and the like earlier, but they were a rare thing. E.g.: there's a HD video taken of the aftermath of 9/11 because the operator was just learning to use this (at the time) brand new technology.
That lasted about a decade, and then 4K become a thing around the 2013-2014 timeframe. I got a Sony 4K TV in late 2013 and a Dell 4K monitor in 2014.
However, both of those were standard dynamic range, albeit with a fairly "wide" colour gamut.
I got my first OLED HDR display in 2021, and an OLED HDR TV in 2022.
In other words, every "generation" of television technologies has lasted about a decade before being superseded by something significantly newer and better.
Display technology still has some ways to go. No current consumer panel reproduces 100% of the Rec.2020 colour gamut. Similarly, there are no consumer panels that can reproduce the full HDR10 or Dolby Vision brightness range of up to 10,000 nits. There are 8K displays that are close to that target spec, but they're either one-off experimental models or more expensive than a luxury car.
A decade from now, around 2033 mark, I full expect something like VR technology to have replaced TVs for many people. Apple's new headset (available next year!) will set a new quality bar that no traditional TV can ever hope to match, such as an extremely wide field of view, stereo, and very bright HDR in combination. Sure, they're expensive now, but after a decade of further development? They'll be amazing and cheap.
You are likely right about your specific use cases. Though you might also want to see how early on some people predicted that TV would never take off, because families just didn't have the time for it.
We don't have a TV at home, and we would just do different activities in the situations you described. (But, yes, those activities in these situations would likely not include hanging out with headsets on.)
Many young people live by themselves and can't afford a "huge" TV. Meanwhile VR will give them a virtual TV as big as they like.
Another potential future technology that might obsolete the current 55-85 inch typical TV sizes is "OLED wallpaper", or something similar that would allow wall-sized televisions.
Even before the 2030s I expect something like quantum nanorods to replace OLED panels, potentially allowing up to 10,000 nits in an affordable panel that doesn't suffer from burn-in.
On another front, I've noticed a lot more people watching something like TikTok, YouTube, or Netflix on their hand-held devices instead of traditional TV. I can picture a future super-thin, super-light Apple iPad with an OLED HDR display becoming very popular, especially for people on a budget that can't afford a huge TV.
Coordinated asshole design.
I can't decide if it's better to check for such things before purchase, or just return it as defective if I end up getting a model that does this.
If it doesn't say on the box "requires constant internet to function" in big bold letters, it should.
That would be a ridiculous requirement, because people expect that TVs need electricity. But the producer can argue that people these days also expect TVs to need the internet, can't they?
You can fix that with a piece of tap or blu-tack.
I recently acquired a very old Sony TV it reminded me how lag-free TV interfaces are supposed to work. But nooooo LG is like "we're going to make great TVs but the UI is a poorly written web page running on a 386, enjoy!"
No separate box seems to do all of 4K, Atmos, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HLG without some weird restriction like 'except the Netflix app'. Even worse if you wanted DV IQ I assume, but I think my TV doesn't support it anyway.
And honestly I think I prefer WebOS to Fire sticks' UI for example. Stock Android TV isn't great either. If I was into playing Xbox/PS games I imagine that would make a better 'hub', since it's presumably (I have no idea) more organised around your own content/games at least rather than random adverts and features you don't want. Also probably more money being spent on designing it.
The home screen on my LG TV seems to devote the top 60% of the page to sponsored content. Is this not an issue for you?
But my friend has a Samsung TV and it shows him ads for things he can buy from eBay, ads for games etc. in a similar area .. and yeah that's nonsense, that would really get on my nerves.
I just want to watch a film.
I don't want to hack my forks either. Or my microwave. I just want to heat stuff and then shovel it in the appropriate foodhole so I can get on with things.
This place isn't for just hackers, not anymore at least. And that brings good and bad.
A NUC is generally the way to go for smart TV functionality in general, IMO: you get way longer support, and it's much easier to diagnose problems as compared to some locked-down, proprietary, do-it-ourselves OS.
For example if your wifi was called “Home”, an additional “Home-IoT” is for every device.
The IoT devices can then be set to not sniff your network, or even connect out if you want.
A good example of this is in this EdgeRouter setup guide, which is a pretty decent guide on how to plan a home network for more than just basic home browsing.
https://github.com/mjp66/Ubiquiti/blob/master/Ubiquiti%20Hom...
It's about bringing some parts of the image closer to whats intended by the filmmaker, at the cost of other parts of the image (usually noticeable by adding gradients to flat color). That isn't going against the filmmaker's intention, so much as respecting the contrast the filmmaker wants at the cost of some gradients. It's a different way to approximate the actual signal the TV should send.
It feels as if Samsung deliberately lowers contrast, for example, until their dynamic contrast is enabled, as the picture matches studio displays much more closely then.
No proof, not making this claim, but it did feel this way when I had my TV side by side to a studio display.
What this setting is usually used for, is to avoid "blinking" and screen going dark when you leave menus and start watching videos — there is unavoidable (...mostly. VRR kinda fixes it?) renegotiation period whenever going from 60hz<->24hz or 60<->30. So to avoid the TV going dark for a second to re-negotiate the connection, the device steps in and "pretends" it's all 60hz all the time.
_Usually_ what a set-top box does is just frame double (if possible), or do 3:2 pull down, which _should_ be unnoticeable for human eyes, unless you're very sensitive.
Side-note: this is why HDMI 2.1 and 120hz HDR is so good for everyone. 120 divides cleanly into 24, 30, and 60fps so you don't have to deal with 3:2 conversions ever.
For example, Dialog Clarity/Enhancement, TruVolume (automatic volume leveling), and DTS Virtual:X?
Why or why not?
Do you use Spatial Audio on your Apple products (which sounds great to me)?
The aesthetic of it is so different, seemingly much about the creative aspects of a production would be done differently.
Motion blur is evidently used by filmmakers in an artistic/aesthetic way similar to the way rock bands use guitar distortion and electronic musicians let some signals clip, photographers use lens flare, use limited camera dynamic range for artistic effects, etc.
Adding a post-production step to remove the "limitations" that were used artistically does alter the aesthetics of the production.
Imagine if metal albums were played back on "better" stereo equipment that removed all of the distortion products produced by the amplifiers.
I never observed what TFA is complaining about, does someone have an screenshot?
How would my TV get a virus? This was a Tizen TV, not an Android TV where I'm installing shady apps.
https://www.techspot.com/news/78967-samsung-loading-mcafee-a...
Build quality and software invasiveness are both going to keep trending in the wrong directions until people stop buying smart TVs. And it's not like you need to break the bank or order commercial displays - $150 on Amazon for a dumb 43" 1080p, $260 for a 55" 4K.
Quickly, it became apparent that I couldn't come close to the overall picture quality potential with manual settings. This is for a late model qled. The chip and its auto-adjust capability are built for the panel.
So now I deal with some soap opera effect as a trade off for an amazing picture in every other respect. And I rarely notice the soap opera effect anymore. One gets used to it.
Perhaps once movies are recorded at a frame rate from the current decade this advice will be useful. We play PC games at 144Hz+ for a reason. There is no need for movies to still run a format derived from technical limitations of a hundred years ago.
Do you guys remember this hero putting papers on car's windshield to explain users how to fix their TV ? You are what you fight for !
Interpolation will never give the same results as actual capture, so the author is wrong here.
E.g. if you're playing 24fps movie from a device that's reporting 60fps uniformly across all content, you will have a bad time.
For Apple TV it can be set like this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102277
The effect makes movies completely unwatchable. I was at a friends house watching Elf and it felt like watching Will Ferrell host a Zoom call.