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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

#411

Post by Brian_K_White »

We pay money for a device and receive a device which does other people's bidding instead of our own.

Yet the money we paid does not have this property.

The money works 100% for the recipient and we retain no influence over it at all. We can't say what it get's spent on or poison it's performance so that it works for us instead of them somehow. We hand it over and it becomes 100% theirs and it works 100% normally, and does so forever, and with no strings.

There is no amount of rationalizing or explaining or excusing that resolves that simple fact.

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

#412

Post by izacus »

rbanffy wrote: post #402
izacus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption that a target (or source) device has a buffer and encoding hardware capable of delta pixel encoding is would drive costs up to the point where HDMI would not be an accepted industry standard. If you see any of popular video standards (both connectivity and formats like H.264) they avoid framebuffer and memory requirements like the plague. Having said that, DSC exists and has been adopted by both HDMI a…

> The assumption that a target (or source) device has a buffer A full-frame 8K image with 32 bits per pixel takes up 128MB of RAM. An FHD one is 16 times less, 8MB. This is not a lot of memory for an appliance in 2002, when HDMI was introduced.

This was an absolutely huge amount of memory for an appliance component that costs a few cents. It still is.

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

#413

Post by nicbou »

woldenron wrote: post #235
andix wrote: post #37

TVs without a tuner are quite popular in Austria. You save around 30€ per month on payments to public TV stations, if your TV is just a monitor and has no tuner. You can get for example one of those (german, but you probably can read the specs anyway): https://nogis.at or https://www.gisbefreit.at/ Most devices are not high end though.

Do you perhaps know how does it work in Germany? I heard you have to pay the TV tax regardless if you have a TV or not.

Yes, the Rundfunkbeitrag is per household. There are ways to get a reduction, but only because of financial difficulties or a handicap. The devices you own have no effect on the TV tax. It has been so for many years.

https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/gez-rundfunkbeitrag

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

#414

Post by smolder »

Gigachad wrote: post #61
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…

It sounds like you are out of touch with the average consumer. They absolutely love smart TVs and would consider a TV without apps and streaming to be broken. In fact, even the ideal HN approved setup is just a smart TV where the online bit is a removable stick on the back. The average consumer just doesn’t care about being able to swap it out.

I hear this "oh but we're so smart, remember how many regular people there are!" thing often on HN. I'm reasonably sure the person you are imagining is not average, they are sometimes called the lowest common denominator. Even my old highschool friend who delivers pizzas hates smart TVs and can tell good UX from bad. My other one, and his wife, both non-technical computer haters in non-tech fields, have covered this topic and said they miss when things weren't so "smart", and would rather be in charge of buying a playstation/Roku/whatever to control their TV.

Big businesses chronically underestimate consumers, don't try to teach them anything, and don't give them options for fear of confusing them. They forget everyone who works for them and their partners or makes the things they consume are also the consumers they abuse.

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

#415

Post by rbanffy »

izacus wrote: post #412
rbanffy wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The assumption that a target (or source) device has a buffer A full-frame 8K image with 32 bits per pixel takes up 128MB of RAM. An FHD one is 16 times less, 8MB. This is not a lot of memory for an appliance in 2002, when HDMI was introduced.

This was an absolutely huge amount of memory for an appliance component that costs a few cents. It still is.

What appliance that can generate or display FHD video costs a few cents?

You only need a frame buffer if you are holding a frame.

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

#416

Post by rbanffy »

im3w1l wrote: post #81
Filligree wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're thinking of bandwidth savings? Rethink that. If HDMI were delta-compressed, then what happens if you exceed the bandwidth limit for several frames in a row? To be reliable, it needs to have as much bandwidth allocated as is needed for bitmap streaming. And in that case, why not just stream the bitmaps...

And when gaming latency is a big issue, so buffering a few frames to have margin for a complex one would be unacceptable.

In this case the console would just stream full frames.

It could also send deltas and achieve much higher variable frame rates.

The need to stream pixels at a constant rate feels like scanning a CRT and makes generating video signals a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

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

#417

Post by sgjohnson »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #166
sgjohnson wrote: post #154

I for one enjoy that my Smart TV is subsidized by all the morons who think that my data is worth anything. It's not connected to internet. It's connected to Apple TV box. Thanks for the discount.

> It's not connected to internet From the article: “As a dumb TV fan who has bought several sets in the last decade, I’m usually told something akin to: “well, just don’t connect the TV to the Internet!” But that route locks you out of firmware updates, and some TV makers remove functionality if you refuse to participate in their online ecosystem. Many smart TV GUIs also need to load before you’re even allowed to swi…

As long as I'm able to switch inputs and use HDMI-CEC, I don't care about firmware upgrades. I also don't care that the updates might cause the GUI to load a second or two faster when powering on.

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

#418

Post by rbanffy »

tinus_hn wrote: post #21
rbanffy wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day I was reading the HDMI spec. I realised, in almost full horror, it’s stupidly streaming pixels instead of image deltas. When every TV has memory enough for several full frame images, this is just crazy.

Sounds clever but it’s pointless because you have to guarantee that you have enough bandwidth for the worst case, in your scheme when every pixel is changing every frame, anyway.

Sure, but if you are not on the worst case (as in a desktop or anything where you don’t need every pixel changing on every frame) you can get higher spatial and temporal resolutions than you’d get from the dumb pipe as designed.

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

#419

Post by pnt12 »

next_xibalba wrote: post #256
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they love also facebook, which monetize all their private life or sugary food, which alter your diet balance or cigarettes who can literally kill you. Not to mention all of them are addictive. The fact consumers love something doesn't make it a good thing.

> The fact consumers love something doesn't make it a good thing. It does make it a good thing for them. Which begs the question: why is it that you get to decide what is or isn't a good thing? Or: why shouldn't people be able to decide for themselves? The answers against the latter are, at their root, paternalistic and elitist. > they love also facebook Ah, yes. The old "facebook is as bad as cigarettes" trope. It f…

> It does make it a good thing for them.

This ignores that companies pour billions into advertising, fake research and lobbying to influence consumer behavior.

It also ignores network effects and lack of choice: if all your friends are in Facebook and there isn't a viable alternative to socialize, you don't have much of a choice, besides being left out (which may not be such a bad option but may also make you miss valuable socialization).

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

#420

Post by ahaferburg »

mrandish wrote: post #340

I haven't bought a new TV in a while since I use a video projector in my home theater. Last year I got a vacation place and bought a new higher-end Samsung TV. The place is semi-off-grid and only has connectivity through a 4G mobile hotspot (c'mon Elon hurry up with my Starlink!). However, the day I unboxed the TV there was no internet yet. I only got it out with the goal of testing the new receiver and 5.1 speakers…

And by unacceptable you mean that you returned the Samsung and purchased another TV. Right? That's what unacceptable means.
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