Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In Defense of Dumb TVs

frame.work

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 391 posts

Re: In Defense of Dumb TVs

#171

Post by yellowapple »

ramraj07 wrote: post #137
WalterBright wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A remote designed by someone who thought about it for ten seconds (why do modern TVs have dozens of buttons no one ever uses?). I'd prefer the remote as an app on my phone. My desk is covered with remotes. Remotes are so 1980s :-/

You'd prefer it until you try using it. When you want to reduce the volume the last thing you need to do is go looking for the app. Now a watch app, that's something.

My HTC One M8 back in the day shipped with a universal remote app that used the built-in IR blaster and it was fantastic. HTC's subsequent discontinuation of that app (and its replacement with a third-party app that was basically useless) is what immediately drove me to never want to buy an HTC product again.

Re: In Defense of Dumb TVs

#172

Post by withinboredom »

yellowapple wrote: post #168

I definitely second the Sceptre recommendation. Yeah, there are probably higher-quality displays out there, but my TV's been more than good enough for me, and the price point is pretty hard to beat. In terms of bang for the buck, a Sceptre TV and a box/stick of one's choosing is about as close to ideal as I've seen these days. Hopefully they realize that the lack of smarts in their TVs is indeed a differentiator in a…

If you're in the market for speakers, trying to find ones without "bluetooth" or "Alexa" support is just as difficult. I ended up buying speakers built for computers because they were simple and dumb and just played sound.

Re: In Defense of Dumb TVs

#173

Post by yellowapple »

Lvl999Noob wrote: post #156
WalterBright wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A remote designed by someone who thought about it for ten seconds (why do modern TVs have dozens of buttons no one ever uses?). I'd prefer the remote as an app on my phone. My desk is covered with remotes. Remotes are so 1980s :-/

Physical remotes are better, particularly if your hands are dirty (like during eating). A physical remote can be used easily without looking at it and it can be cleaned later easily too. Though it's also true that a lot of remotes are difficult to handle. What we need might actually be a single remote for everything.

I'd argue the opposite: in my experience, a uniform glass surface is a lot easier to clean (and avoid getting dirty in the first place) than some bumpy surface with crevices into which crumbs inevitably sneak in.

Re: a single remote for everything, the term for that is "universal remote", and not once have I been satisfied with one due to the difficulty and fragility of programming it. Maybe in this day and age we can finally make that programming dead simple and robust; Logitech came close with its universal remote from years ago, but even that still wasn't quite easy enough to setup and use to fully replace all my remotes. That HDMI-CEC or whatever it's called also comes close, but it's restricted to HDMI, obviously leaving non-HDMI devices in the dust.

Re: In Defense of Dumb TVs

#174

Post by banana_giraffe »

olliej wrote: post #151
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go too far in the other direction too, however. Apple TV remote infamously has no mute functionality. And if you do an internet search on how to mute the Apple TV using the remote (because of course there’s a way, right? No one would design a TV remote that has volume control without mute) you get either one of two answers: - it’s impossible/difficult to do with current tech (not true) - the classic Apple for…

Personally I find the problem with the apple remote to be the symmetric design (I would have though the puck mouse would have taught that lesson)

I put some gaffer tape on the bottom of my Apple TV remote to make it obvious which end is up. I'm personally not a fan of the touchpad. In principle, it's a decent solution to the problem, but Apple's implementation is somehow not sensitive enough and too sensitive at the same time.

Re: In Defense of Dumb TVs

#175

Post by banana_giraffe »

jjice wrote: post #160

My roommate recently bought a TV that described itself as quad core. I love computers and I love software, but as a developer, I don't want computers in places they aren't necessary. Your TV is one of those to me.

Shopping for a new dryer and I had a similar thought. Nothing good is going to come of my dryer being connected to Wifi.

Re: In Defense of Dumb TVs

#176

Post by Egrodo »

pridkett wrote: post #15

I’m really pleased the author called out the Apple TV as a device that lets you avoid ads. We tried to go cheap on another of our TVs and get an Amazon Fire Stick and in addition to it being not as smooth (combo of UX and speed) at the Apple TV, it had a good amount of ads all over the place. There’s lots of griping about the cost of an Apple TV 4k, but I’ll pay that extra $100 to avoid ads and not be tracked so exte…

The non-Apple equivalent is the Nvidia Shield TV. Excellent piece of hardware that gives you access to basically every streaming app, plus integrates with Android's casting setup.

Also fun fact, the Shield TV is the longest supported Android device in existence

(https://www.androidauthority.com/nvidia-shield-tv-25th-updat...)

Re: In Defense of Dumb TVs

#177

Post by lostlogin »

jeswin wrote: post #126
pridkett wrote: post #15

I’m really pleased the author called out the Apple TV as a device that lets you avoid ads. We tried to go cheap on another of our TVs and get an Amazon Fire Stick and in addition to it being not as smooth (combo of UX and speed) at the Apple TV, it had a good amount of ads all over the place. There’s lots of griping about the cost of an Apple TV 4k, but I’ll pay that extra $100 to avoid ads and not be tracked so exte…

I have been using an Apple TV and a Chromecast for a long time. I've never seen an ad on the Chromecast - it simply plays a stream as instructed by an app on the phone. Is it different with the Fire Stick?

The Chromecast does some gross shit. You see it in Pihole if you force it to route its dns through the Pihole.

It has some black magic whereby it ignores local dns setting as far as I can tell. I blocked port 53 at firewall and sent it back to a Pihole.

Good times.

Re: In Defense of Dumb TVs

#178

Post by lostlogin »

throw0101a wrote: post #66
jimmaswell wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never had a single issue with my roommates' Samsung smart TV (casting or otherwise) besides some buggy apps. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on "just works."

Great except for the fact that smart TVs connected to the Internet have all sorts of privacy concerns: * https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/01/fbi-smart-tv-security/ Samsung actually released a TV app to tell you what it's doing: * https://fortune.com/2020/01/18/samsung-smart-tv-data-privacy... Which is nice, in a way, but it'd be better if they just didn't. I'd be much more trusting of Apple TV being connected to the In…

As a bad alternative. By the smart TVs, add a Pihole to the network. Block port 53 if it isn’t from the Pihole and add an as list like the one below.

It seems to work well.

https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/blob/master/Smar...

Re: In Defense of Dumb TVs

#179

Post by lostlogin »

panta82 wrote: post #12

I bought a Sony smart TV about a year ago. I don't get ads per say, but there is a prominent area in the main menu where Sony wants to shill their services and that can't be turned off. Also, TV has to be restarted every week or two (it's android). On the other hand, I love that I can easily cast screen from my laptop or photos from phone using built in chromecast. Smart TVs are a mixed bag.

I have a Sony too, and it’s a little too chatty for my liking. I blocked port 53 unless it came from my own dns and added the below to my blocklist on a pihole. It’s deeply imperfect but has blocked a lot of their crap. I had to whitelist one Netflix domain.

https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/blob/master/Smar...

Edit: I just checked. The Sony TV made 8249 requests in the last 24 hours. I have more locking down to do.

Re: In Defense of Dumb TVs

#180

Post by gigatexal »

We’ve a LG C9 OLED TV purchased in late 2019. It was never plugged into the internet. Wi-Fi is disabled on it as well. We’ve an Apple TV for everything else. We trust that far more than any smart TV. I would have paid extra for a TV that had no smarts: no Wi-Fi hadware, no fancy OS; if it was just really good at taking signal and presenting it to the screen well and was very very dumb otherwise I’d have chosen that.
Post reply on HN