Chroma 4:4:4 support is supposed to be important for viewing text.
Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?
151–160 of 197 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second this simply because LG is the least evil of all smart TV manufacturers _and_ has the best panels and (usually) connectivity.
Less evil than Sony? I have an LG TV. I can't recommend it purely because they have the audacity to omit a play/pause button from the remote control. Pausing requires pressing the "centre" button one, two or three times depending on which app you are in. Pure insanity. WebOS is trash too. Probably going to buy a Sony next time.
Same, bought an LG TV and remote is straight up disaster. I have huge hands, huge thumb etc, pressing on the center button means I get to press the other up, down, left, right buttons.
And don't even get me started with creating an LG account just to get anything working on the TV like downloading a system update.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?
#153Side question: what TV is best for integration into home assistant from experienced HA users...
LG TVs have well known WebSocket and serial-port APIs. I haven't tried it with HA, but I'm using alga CLI (https://github.com/Tenzer/alga) to automate my TV (which I'm using as a dumb monitor).
Re: Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?
#154What does hackable mean in this context, and what's the downside of any old smart TV not connected to the internet and the input left on your laptop, where you'd never see anything having to with the manufacturer's app OS?
Most TV's today are actually giant Android computers. I opened a friends TV a few years back to try and examine a back light issue and to my surprise there were just 3 small PCB's in the TV: Power supply, LCD driver/interface, and the video input board that contains an Arm SoC. The PSU had a small harness that ran to the other two boards and the SoC board had a ribbon cable to the LCD panel. The Arm SoC is the real i…
I'm being pedantic but I liked your comment. Most TVs today are giant ARM computers, ~95% of TVs ship with ARM Cortex but only about 35% have some variant of Android.
Most LED backlights are wired in such a way that when one LED fails it bricks a significant portion of the panel backlight. You'll knock out entire rows or huge portions of neighbor backlight LEDs when one fails. Basically it's a cheap way to ensure a whole row of LEDs are the same brightness but the tradeoff is one LED fails and it looks like 5% of your screen went dark.
It seems like a good beginner-intermediate thing that'd be approachable to learn with a basic multimeter and beginner level soldering skills.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're missing out on resolution (4K) and picture quality (HDR, contrast ratios, color gamut) improvements by doing this.
My experience with HDR has been pretty abysmal on a $500 4K TV. Badly tuned HDR is way worse than no HDR at all. I have 20/20 vision, and I really can't tell the difference between 1080p and 4K for video games and movies. I will never do below 4k again on a desktop, but 1080p is more than fine for a TV. Higher framerate makes a far bigger difference than higher resolution for video games too.
For gaming, the internal render resolution of a gaming console might not go over 1080p anyway. If it's a Switch 1 it might even be only 720p. So if that is the main usage, you are right, a 4k screen is a waste of money.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're correct on all points. However, if you do have an pihole/adguard home, this list does get rid of all the ads: https://gist.github.com/d4kine/b2458cc9d693d7d36193be0247094...
Hmm but I'm skeptical. All it takes is an update and the list is no longer relevant. And there's no guarantee that data isn't passed anyways through the domains that are not blocked. Still, would love an "opensnitch" in whitelist mode for my TV!
As you should be, I can only claim it blocks ads because that's my experience. I don't know if I'm being tracked.
But it has worked blocked the ads since 2023, so that's something.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?
#157As ex-Smart TV app developer, I would stay with Sony's Android TV. Reason being
- Samsung Tizen is sluggish. - LG webOS is fiddly and don't feel it gets enough attention and care from LG. - Other brand is just slow. - On hackability, Android is far easier to handle than any other brand.
Mind you Sony has a few line and some run Android, some run something else.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?
#158If you just want it for the HDMI input to use as an aux screen for what ever computer your running than anything with an HDMI input in the size range you want should work. I run all the TV's in my house like this; connected to mac mini's instead of futzing with the onboard software mostly because I despise typing one letter at a time with a tv remote. Honestly all the onboard TV OS stuff I have interacted with in the…
This, this, this. Just never, ever connect the TV to the internet. Connect up an Nvidia shield, or a mini-PC/raspberry pi configured with whatever apps you desire, hidden behind a pi-hole. Connect a steam deck if gaming/linux desktop usage is your thing. I only touch the TV remote to switch on the TV, and even that could be automatable with home assistant+CEC if that's of interest.
In theory, this seems great, but you won't be able to use the majority of streaming applications nor get the same quality out of those applications. Like Netflix, they purposely downgrade the streaming quality on desktop.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought the Samsung Frame TV and I love it, but you're correct about Samsung's OS (it's sluggish, filled with ADs and by far the worst TV OS that I've used so far)
Contrary experience from me: i hate my samsung frame, especially because of the ads. And more especially because of that samsung tv channel which autostarts. And I hate it even more because these ads change the menu in such a way that you cannot navigate it blindly because it inserts itself as a button mid way in the menu bar. You cannot disable or disable those things easily. Built in airplay is unstable. Bought and…
Agree. I have two recent Samsung smart tvs. The screen quality I like (OLED) but everything else about them I hate. I use a PS5 as an entry point for the tv, after the atrocious “tv boot up to functional time” which is a phrase I never considered having to say 20 years ago.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree, but also, much worse image quality. Put a, for example 32" TV and a monitor one next to each other, set native resolution, put up a screen with a lot of text, and you'll see - the difference is night and day.
>Agree, but also, much worse image quality. I managed to grab a 55" 8K LG before 8K went out of fashion. I run it at 4k120 for games and 8k60 with doubling for productivity. I've never had a better monitor and if one should exist it's not available in any store I know about. Monitors costing 2-3x as much as this TV did back then are worse. When it dies I will have to downgrade. :-/
Hmmm, I'm confused now: aren't 8K displays just becoming a thing? Your perspective sounds like they are a dying breed. In the meantime, for me, they are still prohibitively expensive.