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Plasma Bigscreen

plasma-bigscreen.org

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Re: Plasma Bigscreen

#111

If a display manufacturer produced a quality display and supported something like this, I wouldn't mind paying a good deal extra for it. I wouldn't even mind if it shipped with a proprietary OS and I had to do the installation myself. I'd love to see Framework or Purism make a Linux powered smart TV.

What does this get you over connecting up an old laptop to a TV screen and controlling it with a bluetooth keyboard?

A much cleaner implementation that doesn't clutter the room with cables and an old laptop. Added bonus that I wouldn't have to explain how it works to each guest that tries to use it (assuming that the UX resembles other TVs people have used).

Re: Plasma Bigscreen

#112

The killer feature of Kodi (on most hardware, for example the Raspberry Pi) is that it can switch the output resolution to match the video you are playing. It also bypasses things like ALSA in order to be able to bit-bang audio in supported formats directly to an external receiver. These are basic functions of normal video playback devices like blu-ray players or cable boxes. A Plasma skin can't do any of this. So wh…

You don't typically don't want to switch output resolution to match the resolution of whatever your outputting on modern displays, but instead want to match the panel resolution and software scale the content. You're way too likely to confuse the monitor trying to match resolution. There's something to be said for matching frame rate, but there's even more dragons in that practically.

Actually matching framerates is a lot more common, for example to provide smooth playback of 23.976/24 or 25 fps when the native refresh is 60hz (not cleanly divisible). Usually this is done by going up to 72hz or 75hz rather than down but it's a lot better than keeping at 60hz and stuttering. Previously this was accomplished with something called telecining which.. isn't great.,

Re: Plasma Bigscreen

#113
post #58

I realize "Plasma" is the name of the KDE presentation layer across all platforms, but it's mildly awkward to see in this context considering plasma TVs have only been a dead technology for six years or so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_display

I'm still rocking my 12 year old plasma TV, the thing won't die!

I still have a 50" 720p Toshiba plasma, from 2006.

Won't die... Been wanting to upgrade to a newer larger tv for years, but this thing keeps running along without issue...

Re: Plasma Bigscreen

#114
post #77

I wonder how long it will be before cheap TVs have no input ports (just a WIFI connection). That way the TV gets to decide what you watch to some extent. For example by interrupting your Netflix stream with a few ads from time to time.

Video games are way too big a business. Until game consoles die and it all moves to the cloud (Stadium, etc.) I can’t see ports going away on most TVs.

If I'm not wrong, latest Samsung TVs let you play Xbox games without an Xbox

Re: Plasma Bigscreen

#115
Nitpick for anyone involved in this project:

> Plasma Bigscreen turns your TV or setup-box into a fully hackable device

I know what you meant, but given the concerns people have with privacy of their TVs, smart devices, and in general the security of their internet connected home, describing something that turns your TV into being "fully hackable" feels like it's ripe for misunderstanding.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen

#116
post #12

If a display manufacturer produced a quality display and supported something like this, I wouldn't mind paying a good deal extra for it. I wouldn't even mind if it shipped with a proprietary OS and I had to do the installation myself. I'd love to see Framework or Purism make a Linux powered smart TV.

NEC has commercial displays with builtin Pi CM4s. https://www.sharpnecdisplays.us/products/displays/ma551-mpi4...

This looks really great. I know it's expensive for the image quality, but this TV will probably outlive most consumer TVs since it's made for 24/7 operation.

The cost to image quality ratio would probably scare most consumers away, but I might have found my next TV. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen

#117

Does it have widevine for netflix etc al, and hardware media acceleration? I tried using an rpi4 as a media player a few months ago, and it was simply not fast enough, although one reason is I could not get HVEC hardware acceleration to work. I reverted back to using an old T430 laptop with a broken screen and k/b, which is ideal for 1080p.

I used a rpi2 for video at 1080p. x264 was no problem, x265 was laggy.

With a rpi3 or a rpi4 both should be fine.

Librelec (and other ROMs) ship the ffmpeg fork which uses the acceleration

Re: Plasma Bigscreen

#118
post #92
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would really like to know more about this, and I can't seem to find anything about it. Are these projects implementing their own drivers for all the various audio hardware they can use instead of using ALSA? That certainly wasn't the case some years back when I used OpenElec.

"ALSA" has two meanings - there is only one set of Linux kernel audio drivers, and they're all ALSA no matter what distro you use. I think you're talking about this meaning. The other meaning of "ALSA" is libasound / asound.conf / dmix, the old userspace audio stack, which is deprecated since Pulseaudio except for a few holdout distros. ALSA had difficulty mixing multiple playback streams, let alone bitstreaming DTS.…

I sort of disagree. ALSA didn't really have difficulty mixing multiple playback streams unless you go back really far. dmix works quite well. It has a lot of problems, particularly dealing with routing, hot plugging, etc. but the dmix stuff always worked more or less fine for me, as long as I had it configured. otoh, pulse took quite a while to mature in my opinion, and had plenty of issues with this basic functionality over time, though I will at least be fair and say that it got blamed for a lot of ALSA driver issues and other nonsense too. (I think up until recently it was defaulting to doing resampling with a Speex resampler that suffered from fairly noticable aliasing in many cases, as a result of the projects paranoia to be seen as a resource hog...)

That and bitbanging audio through GPIO or otherwise bypassing the ALSA stack doesn't seem all that unreasonable. I can't find any specific information about it with LibreElec/etc. but it would not surprise me.

Oh well. I think Pipewire has a lot of potential today. It brings much improvement to routing and session management for audio and the hybrid scheduler design and considerations for pro audio use cases makes it very promising. I hope the need to bypass the Linux audio stack can disappear.

Re: Plasma Bigscreen

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still rocking my 12 year old plasma TV, the thing won't die!

I still have a 50" 720p Toshiba plasma, from 2006. Won't die... Been wanting to upgrade to a newer larger tv for years, but this thing keeps running along without issue...

I don't understand why people think electronics are supposed to die. Even if they do, it's often just some capacitors that died in the power supply. An easy fix!
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