181–190 of 661 posts
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My TCL starts to bootloop if it goes more than a month without connecting to the internet so it can download screensaver ads. The warranty people force me into the support gauntlet. The support gauntlet's first demand: connect it to the internet.
Edit: Didn't know TCL is a brand, not available in my part of the world... - What brand is your TV?
I’ve had good luck with sceptre brand TVs. They are no frills and cheap. Plug in a $30 roku and hook it up to some decent speakers and you are good to go. I’ve had two of them going on 8 years strong now. Loads of connectivity to. From vga to dvi to component/composite, 1/8” audio in/out, spdif, hdmi, etc, etc. On the other hand the power supply in my (former) LG plasma tv died after 1.5 years. I DIY replaced that wi…
It's worth noting that Roku devices apparently send a lot of information about your usage habits back to their servers, so if "privacy" is one of your reasons for choosing a dumb TV, perhaps Roku's not the best choice. Not sure if there are authoritative deep dives out there, but here's what the Pi-hole folks saw: https://pi-hole.net/2018/09/19/what-really-happens-on-your-n... I was disappointed but not surprised to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All smart TV's are dumb if you don't connect them to the Internet.
They won't spy on you, but you'll still have to deal with the laggy shitware they run. In some I've had the misfortune of using, simply changing the inputs was a torturous affair because of the shitty software the TV was running.
Many comments suggest never connecting smart TVs to the Internet, and others rightly point out that the TV could seek out open APs. What about deploying some hardware to basically launch a deauth attack on the TV whenever it tries to connect to anything? Wi-PWN[0] looks like a fairly good starting place for this since it can be flashed on an ESP8266. It’d probably need some tweaks for this use-case though. [0] https:…
If you want extremely good picture quality and also insist on "dumb" the best you can get is a second-hand Pioneer or Panasonic plasma display. I don't think any of these ever had "smart" anything, and their image quality is top notch.
It has been done with smaller monitors, through dirt cheap boards that made possible adding HDMI to old VGA-only panels, for example: https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...
How difficult/expensive would be to scale the same solution to 4K panels?
The displays in the article are TVs for people who hate their eyeballs. If you are looking for a quality picture there's really no substitute for LG OLED. They are smart TVs but the features are unobtrusive and work well. If you want extremely good picture quality and also insist on "dumb" the best you can get is a second-hand Pioneer or Panasonic plasma display. I don't think any of these ever had "smart" anything,…
I’ve had good luck with sceptre brand TVs. They are no frills and cheap. Plug in a $30 roku and hook it up to some decent speakers and you are good to go. I’ve had two of them going on 8 years strong now. Loads of connectivity to. From vga to dvi to component/composite, 1/8” audio in/out, spdif, hdmi, etc, etc. On the other hand the power supply in my (former) LG plasma tv died after 1.5 years. I DIY replaced that wi…
But if I still had one, I’d definitely be looking into rooting it specifically so I could uninstall all the bloat they now come with and ensure it doesn’t try and connect to the internet, or break itself while trying.