Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

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It always kind of blows my mind that I keep seeing "smart TVs" which have a bunch of integration options for high-end AV installations (rich people's houses, etc.) but no API that you can integrate with to just handle toggling channels/inputs/power states/volumes.

(I did get my last Sony Bravia integrated with Homekit so that I could control inputs, volume, etc. via the Home app, but that's not really what I'm looking for).

Give me an HTTPS API, require me to authenticate devices on the TV itself before it accepts their commands, and just let me do whatever. Default it to off and make it a hidden setting, but yeah just let me do the thing without having to pay tens of thousands of dollars for some professional installation to integrate with hardware I don't have and can't afford.

I think the standard control for TV is the RS-232C port on the TV.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/serial-projector-contr... from a quick search.

HDMI CEC could do something similar as well.

I'm surprised we haven't seen a cheap, USB powered Bluetooth RE-232C dongle for home assistant yet.

Say if we have a pi laying around, could we emulate this?

I guess we could.

Using a whole Raspberry Pi seems like overkill, though: Support for a wide variety of common USB serial chips is already built into esphome. https://esphome.io/components/usb_uart/

Just wire it up with a cheap dev board, build a firmware image for it, and that end of things is... done, right?

Esphome+hdmi breakout board+llm (or use an existing project like [0])

[0] https://github.com/Palakis/esphome-native-hdmi-cec

One of the meeting rooms here at work has a couple of big panels for displaying presentations, and they're regularly misinterpreting noise on some line or other and changing their brightness/contrast/etc settings. It's highly annoying. I imagine there's some kind of data line plugged into the TVs which is picking up interference and causing them to freak out.

I inherited an old Sharp LCD TV that has a serial port. I did some digging and discovered I can power it on and off thru the serial port (amongst other commands). It serves a role in my home where it needs to be on part of the day. Turning it on and off via serial is very, very nice.

In the professional A/V integration world, it's normal for displays and projectors to have serial port interfaces that can be driven by commands from e.g. a Crestron controller or video switcher. Just not as much of a home/consumer thing.

Most LGs had a serial option, you can plug in a very specific USB to serial module in its USB port and then control it over serial with fairly generic commands.

Not sure if they still have this though. Mine does.

Smart TVs don't exist for your convenience. They exist to track your behavior and serve you ads. If they happen to have some hackability, it's an accident or happy coincidence.

> Give me an HTTPS API, require me to authenticate devices on the TV itself before it accepts their commands

https://gist.github.com/kalleth/e10e8f3b8b7cb1bac21463b0073a...

TVs running Roku or WebOS do have nice control APIs

https://developer.roku.com/dev/docs/external-control-api

https://github.com/chros73/bscpylgtv

There's eARC for signalling through HDMI, there's good ol' IR blaster.

For the Bravia, which is probably Android, you can likely write an android service that connects to the web and handles things like volume and maybe channels.

IR blasters are rough because there's no feedback. You're literally just shouting out commands into the void, and heaven forbid if it's something that's a toggle where you don't know which state you're starting from.

It always blows my mind why those rich people even bother with TVs. I'm not rich by any measure, but still I can afford a projector, a screen and a couple KRK monitors.

Multi use rooms require TVs.

Projectors cannot handle ambient light without being a fire hazard.

>Multi use rooms require TVs

That seems an overstatement. I now have one in my entire house (don't have kids).

There's a fairly large TV panel on one wall in basically a sitting room. Otherwise I just use a computer. A relative basically has TVs in every room. I guess it maybe made sense when he was rebuilding anyway but it still seems excessive to me who might sit down to watch a movie or show but doesn't have live TV.

But, then, I don't have AC either in Massachusetts.

I was responding to projectors...

But you also seem to also be saying that a lot of rooms require TVs.

Only transitively. The claim was that if you have a “multi use room”, as opposed to a dedicated tv/movie room, you need a TV instead of a projector.

I apparently didn't get the intent that TV=panel. Fair enough. But I do know people who put a TV in pretty much every room and I don't know if a projector is a great solution at this point even for a dedicated room given that you can get 75" (or larger) panels.

I will say that when all sorts of stuff got pulled out of my house for smoke damage mitigation, I also made the conscious decision to just not put back a lot of the things/wiring that I really wasn't using to any degree. A lot has changed (both with respect to technology and myself) to the point where it really didn't make sense to put things back like they were.

If you are rich you have single-use rooms. Hell, even I have a sleeping room, a cat room and a hacking room. It's not that expensive. The cat room doubles as a mini-cinema.

Ambient light is dealt with having nice thick blackout drapes.

This is not some rocket science, it was done for like a hundred years.

edit: actually in my former apartment I just bought a roll-down projector screen that completely covered the window. pull down - zero ambient light even in full sunshine.

Lots of people (even exceptionally wealthy ones) don't want to always have to go to the theater room to go watch something. Lots of people like having the TV on in the same way one might think about having a radio on, its not necessarily a thing they're exclusively focused on.

Take a look at this house:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/5619-Walnut-Hill-Ln-Dalla...?

Sure, it has a theater room with probably an incredible projector I'd imagine. It also has a bar with a big TV behind it. It also has a game room with several TVs mounted on the walls. In both of those situations, you wouldn't really want a projection setup. A brighter TV wins out in the end.

I've seen lots of TVs mounted in outdoor living room/kitchen arrangements. They're common to find in living rooms even for people who have separate theater rooms. I've seen them mounted in garages. TVs have uses other than just pure cinematic experiences. And I say that as someone who has personally pushed TV watching to an exclusive space in my home and made a point to not have TVs everywhere. Other people like different things.

A relative likes to have TV on as ambient background. Drives me a bit crazy but, hey, I'm a guest. Also used to drive me nuts when I was on group trips with a roommate and their first reaction on entering a room was to turn the TV on.

My point was it isn't as simple as projectors are better.

To be clear I only know this because I was totally going to swap to a projector once I bought a place only to realize they don't work well during the day.

> If you are rich you have single-use rooms.

Yes, you might, but you can also have normal multi-use rooms. It's not like being rich somehow makes a 'standard' living room configuration with TV and couch gauche. The likely main difference is the couch is going to be way bigger and the TV is probably 100" inches.

Theater/cinema rooms are a very different experience (lights off, dedicated to watching the thing) compared to a standard lights on TV experience. Two different purposes.

Truly rich people do not have TVs.

Or if they do own a ultra high end TV like a C Seed N1 they hide them away inconspicuously.

https://www.cseed.com/en/indoor-tv/c-seed-n1-tv.html

It is like eating cheap and nasty junk. If you are rich you avoid it or eat it discreetly...Or your acquaintances laugh at you.

If you want slightly more affordable (they have prices listed - starting at £6k for a 48" TV) there's also Bang & Olufsen:

https://www.bang-olufsen.com/en/gb/televisions

That's certainly a feature screen. Not sure it's inconspicuous!

I think I'd likely prefer one of those slightly more discrete OLEDs that rolls up into its box when not in use, like the LG Signature R...

It always blows my mind what ideas people have what "rich people" have or want.

I know a few 'filthy rich' people and some of them don't even own any TV or projector, because they're totally content with a laptop screen and don't want their kids to be exposed to TVs. You will not see their wealth unless you know where to look.

Once people have money, most of them begin to think about what actually serves them and what doesn't; if you can afford anything you want, you usually become more humble and selective. There's simply no point in owning things for the sake of owning them any more. Displaying your wealth usually has far more downsides than upsides. What we see is the outliers.

> What we see is the outliers.

For every ostentatiously visibly rich person, there are 100 quiet ones shaking their heads.

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