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Comment by fein | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm just old fashioned or out of touch, but why is it such a barrier for people to treat their smart TV as a dumb display? Hook up a computer via HDMI and never connect the TV to wifi.

I understand that the tech in these things is a horrorshow, But so is the tech in every other smart device that normal ("I don't care how it works, just that it works" types) people allow into their homes every day - and these are the people who tech is built for, not "us". Of all the tech to raise red flags about, this seems the easiest to mitigate.

And to be completely fair, I haven't purchased a new TV (Projector yes, TV no) since I bought my plasma in 2014. That 2014 TV has smart features as well but has just never been hooked up to the internet. Maybe the new rigs can't be used until connected to a network but I wouldn't know. Enlighten me if this is the case.

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One way that you probably are behind on the goings on in the TV market are that there are whole TV brands that require you to login just to use the television at all, like Roku.

These are usually the cheap models, the kind that are heavily subsidized by spyware, but the fact that this exists at all is seriously not cool.

I imagine that you can login to those televisions once and then take them offline, though I haven’t tried personally.

The other thing I would say is that here we are asking customers to basically buy duplicate products and that second product might still engage in spyware.

E.g., I’ve bought a $500 TV that comes with Roku or whatever. It already runs all my streaming apps. So the strategy now is to turn off internet on that TV and now I have to buy a streaming box and hope that it’s less intrusive. If we decide maybe Apple is the one with the least intrusive ads and tracking, that’s now $300, almost doubling the cost of the TV.

And if we buy some other streaming box like Roku or Amazon well guess what they have all the same sorts of telemetry and ads going on.

To fully remove the national spy network from your life you would have to get rid of all other devices that will collect the same data or do already. Smartphones, smartwatches, home security systems, Wifi, any computer or device you did not build yourself, TVs, any other "smart" device, anything that has electricty going to it, any car since OnStar in the 1990s, all delivery trucks and self driving cars, your neighbors security system, devices that broadcast IDs, even bluetooth devices... So many examples..

The amount of devices in the national spy network which is passed off as just advertisement data is really providing full spectrum live video and audio to third parties that can and do share it for any reason that benefits them.

No, we would simply have to make spying illegal and require offenders criminally to pay restitution plus fines for each violation. You'd see vast improvements in folks' behavior pretty damned quick if people started getting thrown into jail AND bankrupted for spying.

You also have to create an account to use an Osmo action cam. I almost sent the damn thing back upon finding out, but as it turns out, you can make a fake mail, fake account, and after having connected once you can treat it as if it never happened.

Still infuriating.

>Hook up a computer via HDMI and never connect the TV to wifi.

Having just gone through this...it's a lot harder than you think.

Current gen TVs have specs that garden variety connect a computer can't supply over HDMI. You need HDMI 2.1 with FRL to hit it. So you climb onto google, discover yes there are minipc that can do that...except only the new ones...the "AI" ones that cost you an arm and a leg. Also they need fast DDR5 memory which is great fun right now. And the more affordable ones are AMD so no quicksync.

So you think lets maybe do a USBC dongle to an existing device, only to discover that they require different firmware (!) on the dongle depending on whether you're using a mac or a windows PC [0]. And then you realize you actually need a cable capable of 48gbps and none of the ones lying around are labelled so you have to buy a new one just in case. And after you've done all that you still don't know why its connecting at 120hz not 144hz per TV specs. And then the whole media encoding circus starts...

I can 100% understand why people just type in wifi password and call it a day. The average consumer is not up for flashing firmware onto dongles to watch their big brother series.

[0] https://kb.cablematters.com/index.php?View=entry&EntryID=147

No streaming app is giving you a video feed with 48Gbps of data (more like 5-15 Mbps), and no one produces 120 or 144Hz video (most movies/TV are still 24Hz aren't they?), so there's no point in sending that kind of signal to a TV (you'll just have a crisp, high refresh signal of the low refresh blurry compression artifacts), but even ignoring that, cheap n100 minipcs can do 4k60 or 1k240 just fine (I use a minipc as my desktop with a 4k240 OLED).

>most movies/TV are still 24Hz aren't they?

They are and that's part of the reason why it matters.

144/24 = 6

120/24 = 5

60/24 = 2.5

TVs compensate by showing you every 2nd image longer causing a slight but noticeable judder effect. Panning shots don't look smooth etc. Much like font kerning once you see it you can't unsee it.

Plus ofc other uses like gaming. And frankly I also didn't want to set up a home theater with half the tech modern, the other half not. A bit like you want your PC screen and GPU to be paired well and not a 1080p screen with a 5090...

My minipc has no issue outputting at 24 or 23.976 or 30 or 29.97 or 59.94 Hz either. And again that big brother series on the smart TV app is going to be garbage quality anyway. It's like setting up a 4k240 OLED and 5090 to run an N64 emulator to play games with a 20 FPS limit and prerendered backgrounds with no texture replacers or anything.

And for "other uses like gaming" you are using an external computer over HDMI, not smart TV apps.

>My minipc has no issue outputting at 24 or 23.976 or 30 or 29.97 or 59.94 Hz either

I don't think you've understood the problem I'm describing. A TV with a 60hz panel literally can't smoothly display a 24fps incoming signal. Even though 60 is more than 24 modern TVs can't [0] drop the panel rate to match the incoming 24 fps signal. Instead they keep the panel at 60hz and fuck with the timing of every 2nd frame to compensate for 60 not being divisible by 24 - judder.

To get a smooth picture everything has to be either same or a clean multiple of the source material. (roughly - fractions like 23.976 aren't noticable but 60/24=2.5 is right in the middle....worst case scenario).

Best way around this mess is 120hz end to end - which means no N100. Or just accept the judder.

>not smart TV apps.

I'm not advocating for them, just saying I understand why less tech inclined use them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold

Okay, but if you have a 120Hz panel, as you said, you can just hold your 24Hz signal for 5 frames. And a minipc and TV can happily negotiate a 24Hz HDMI signal. Flicker fusion also has nothing to do with this unless you have like BFI or something.

If your source is 24Hz, it will never be 120Hz end-to-end. It's already 24Hz. You can just send that to the display. If your panel can't cleanly display that, it's not going to be able to with a built in app either. The app is also getting a 24Hz source video.

better yet,in the age of AI why not do more?

Ive been motivated recently to start making my appliances mine by using Ai to reverse engineer and replace their firmware. So long as the appliance has been slow to update its security channels, the recent eMudrha certificate leak was the perfect opportunity to place yourself in the middle of the relationship between device and vendor. Its allowed me to make some trivial updates to my television's firmware and start to have AI build me firmware that better serves my purposes. Hoping to lobotomize it and replace everything with a simple linux system that executes a startup script to launch a Jellyfin client.

I bought it and its mine, this is the freedom we were originally robbed of.

Funny I am also using a Plasma from around that time (Samsung one but hopefully too dumb to spy). I guess the problem is that they'll keep turning the screws, in the same way it gets harder and harder to use Windows and Office without an account and internet connection.

As a result I'm not upgrading my TV anytime soon, and when I do, I hope to find a dumb one.

It's not hard; but often the TV will nag and nag until it gets a wifi connection.

And with how hard these manufacturers are trying, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they start including some alternate data connection for metadata/DRM/whatever. (ie, not the primary streaming data connection)

This is what I do. I find navigating with a remote control to be infuriating, especially when you need to search for something. With an old computer and wireless mouse and keyboard, it's so much better. Some minor configuration of Firefox's homepage and it's a fine start page for watching TV, with all your stuff right there. Plus you can have extensions that save hours of your life over time. The only downside is the remote becomes the literal keyboard and mouse which might be cumbersome for some, but I don't even think about it anymore. I've been using the same 50" for ten years.

You are unlike most people. Most people just want to come home and watch TV. Historically it used to be cable, now it's YouTube or similar. What do you think is the quickest way to watch YouTube?

> What do you think is the quickest way to watch YouTube?

Shout "six seven" and look over the shoulder of the twelve-year-old who magically appears?

Definitely not with a TV remote vs a keyboard/mouse.

Its all about UX, I recently got sick of my LG and switch to Apple TV and made LG a dumb TV with HDMI, and surprisingly UX ia significantly worse. Apple being Apple and force their shit weird UX. My kids can’t figure it out, they used to use LG TV by themselves to open what they want to open.

Even I fucking hate it because Apple UX. is just bunch of weird behaviors popping out from every action. Apple UX rant aside, similarly many solutions has tons of UX problems, connecting a PC to TV unfortunately leads to even more problems.

All of these shit supposed to work but in practice way too many edge cases, and random issues.

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