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It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

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Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#281

Post by ezfe »

mschuster91 wrote: post #212
contravariant wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking the MAC address from making connections outright seems like a more sensible way to prevent surveillance. Assuming of course you are using it as a truly 'dumb' TV and not as a client for Netflix etc.

> Blocking the MAC address from making connections outright seems like a more sensible way to prevent surveillance. That won't protect against DNS data exfiltration. Extremely low-bandwidth, but works in a lot of cases - people have even written proxy servers to get slow but working Internet on public hotspots that normally require login.

How does that work if you block the internet at the router level?

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#282

Post by IgorPartola »

mchristen wrote: post #195
IgorPartola wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don’t know what you are talking about. My TCL Roku TV is great and I will be buying another soon. It does everything I want and none of the things I don’t. It’s easy to use for me and for my kids. Roku also has all the major streaming services that I want. And I haven’t seen a commercial in 10 years. What am I missing?

I also own a TCL Roku TV and the interface is easily twice as slow as my Roku Ultra. Right on the home screen is a giant ad(unless you have network adblocking). Over the years Roku and Google have been fighting about Youtube/Youtube TV on Roku, just like Disney/ESPN fought the cable companies. I also own a Toshiba built FireTV that suffers from those same problems but far worse. Way more ads, much slower interface, a…

Granted I have never owned a Roku Ultra but the UI is plenty fast for me. And yes I pay for NextDNS so I don’t see giant ads. I think about it so little that I forget to mention it.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#283

Post by IgorPartola »

mrjin wrote: post #199
IgorPartola wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don’t know what you are talking about. My TCL Roku TV is great and I will be buying another soon. It does everything I want and none of the things I don’t. It’s easy to use for me and for my kids. Roku also has all the major streaming services that I want. And I haven’t seen a commercial in 10 years. What am I missing?

Obviously you were lucky. My experiences were based on Sony and Samsung, so TCL might be a different story and also different people have different needs. For me, all I need is really just a instant on big screen with decent speakers, nothing more.

What do you plan on putting on that screen once it’s on?

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#284

Post by doldols »

seanw444 wrote: post #253
rosndo wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet you aren’t going to be able to provide a source for this.

Even if not, it's only a matter of time before it does happen. Not an if.

I suppose the same can be said about your TV turning into a sentient killer robot.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#285

Post by davidmurdoch »

And now even if you do get a dumb tv and connect a new Chromecast (4k) to it you STILL get ads. You even get ads for services you already subscribe to, asking you to subscribe to a higher tier. And you also get the dark pattern of the down button on the remote navigating upwards the first time you press it... So it highlights the giant advertisement first.

I'm close to building my own TV DIYPerks style.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#286

Post by JohnBooty »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #225
JohnBooty wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, TVs went from dumb to smart, so empirically, sufficient buyers voted for smart even when they had an option for dumb This is one of those areas where consumerism/capitalism trips over itself and leads to sub-optimal outcomes. The implicit assumption here is that this must be what consumers want, because it's what they "voted" for. But voting (whether democratic elections, or just free-market consumer spending c…

> There's no reasonable way for consumers to know how shitty the inbuilt OS/apps of a "smart TV" will become over time, or what onerous software updates the manufacturer will pump out, etc. A lot of this stuff is difficult or impossible to know even for savvy, educated people looking for a TV. Maybe, but it has been a decade since smart TVs became prevalent, and I would bet everything I have that if you put a dumb TV…

Right. Capitalism often leads to suboptimal outcomes (everybody owns a TV somewhere between "mildly annoying" and "downright terrible") because there's no reasonable way to know better, so consumers choose based on the one thing everybody understands: price.

    There is also more data out there than ever 
    before in history about TVs, but I doubt most 
    people would ever care enough to read in depth 
    reviews on rtings or whatever.
You can read all of the reviews you like, but the conclusion is the same: you effectively cannot buy a non-smart TV now.

There's also the larger issue of whether it's reasonable for consumers to do so. Educated, informed consumers are always the goal, but at some point this is not reasonable.

1. Consumers can't be experts on everything. Cars, prescription eyeglasses, medicine, home repairs, computers, shoes - there are simply not enough hours in one's life to become a domain expert at everything.

2. A lot of people are, frankly, not the brightest. As the saying goes, half of the people in the world are below average. I don't mean this insultingly, in fact: quite the opposite. Human beings are human beings. We are all worthy of dignity and respect. But being an uber-savvy consumer is less practical for some.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#287

Post by superkuh »

doldols wrote: post #260
superkuh wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days it's the other way around. If you pirate everything it's all very easy, it's the guessing game and multiplying streaming services where you have to deal with inconvenience. It's all just a little bit of history repeating...

I know all about this, my Plex server is rapidly approaching 200TB of content. Is it really convenient? Sure! As long as you ignore all the work that goes into setup and maintenance. I’d be deluding myself if I tried to pretend that this is anything but yet another part of a really expensive and time consuming home theater hobby. Even at it’s best DIY piracy is still miles away from just being able to open up Netflix…

I see this a lot. I've never understood my peers need for complex "plex server" (or related) setups. Why not just store the files on the hard drives of your normal computers? 200TB is why, I guess, but this is hardly typical nor does it require "plex". I do just fine with a handful of computers with ~30 TB between them and some network shares. No "maintainance" required.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#288

Post by JohnFen »

yardstick wrote: post #85
qwertox wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be enough for that TV, but many devices have a custom-set DNS address and ignore the one given through DHCP, unless you set up a firewall where you block that address, then they fall back to using the one provided via DHCP. That's how Chromecast and Amazon devices are doing it.

DoH / DoT DNS privacy and security works both for and against individual users. It definitely works against network owners and operators.

This is why I had to set up a MITM to detect and drop DoH/DoT requests. Allowing devices and applications to evade my network management is crazy to me.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#289

Post by fuckcensorship »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #285

And now even if you do get a dumb tv and connect a new Chromecast (4k) to it you STILL get ads. You even get ads for services you already subscribe to, asking you to subscribe to a higher tier. And you also get the dark pattern of the down button on the remote navigating upwards the first time you press it... So it highlights the giant advertisement first. I'm close to building my own TV DIYPerks style.

Last year, the NVIDIA Shield TV, a $200 device if you get the Pro version, received an update to Android TV that forced a new UI for the homescreen that injects ads from a variety of premium streaming services [1]. There is no easy way to disable it as far as I know other than installing a custom launcher such as FLauncher [2]. The cancers of modern day advertising cannot be understated.

[1]: https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/nvidia-shield-tv-update-an... [2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.efesser.fla...

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#290

Post by gonehome »

mrjin wrote: post #41

Smart TVs were created for all kinds of agendas but none were actually for us the consumers. All those agendas require an OS which takes time to boot. Making it worse, some of those TVs' CPU are crap and thus every operation takes much longer than those dumb ones. Lots of vendors also start to ship new remotes that removed all the essential buttons, especially the video source button, and I have to press 5 or more ti…

> “So we are actually paying more”

I suspect this is false and the ads and tracking enabled by smart TVs are instrumental in getting the price down.

Price sensitivity on TVs I suspect is one of the main drivers of this.

Still, I think there’s a real niche for someone to make a tv focused on the HN market. Call the company “dumb electronics”. db even has a pleasing symmetry to it for a logo imo. Focus on speed to boot and switch inputs, optionally sell it as a package with an Apple TV, make it premium and OLED. Basically the tv apple would build if they decided too.

The current best option in the tv market is the LG OLED, but it’s smart and still leaves a lot to be desired.

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