131–140 of 422 posts
Why not just burn DVDs with whatever content one wants to fetch and re-encode to SD MPEG2? It's not like kids are super critical about picture quality anyway.
DVDs are significantly more fragile
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My biggest gripe is how terribly slow it is to navigate UI on a TV. The latency between user input and the UI responding can be upwards of 10-20 seconds. Just incredibly user hostile.
That sounds like you have an overly shitty ‘smart’ TV. Plenty of external devices (I’m partial to AppleTV) have no significant lag. Or it could be you’re using some niche service that has its own issues.
Even switching between 2 series in my currently watching list can take an exceedingly long time. Sometimes I try to switch back and forth to force and update and it feels like I’m back on 56K.
The Apple TV HD is old, technically legacy, but still supports tvOS 26. I have an Apple TV 4K in the house as well, which I’ve been meaning to migrate to, to see if it’s any better. But the HD works fine for pretty much everything else. Peacock as a service seems to have an extreme amount of lag.
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I tried to look for a 'dumb' tv for a long time to get to a setup like this. The ultimate setup would be 1) a totally dumb and stupid tv + 2) a streaming box like Apple TV or whatever. I just want the audio/visual aspect of the screen, nothing else.
You can purchase commercial signage displays that are just dumb screens, but the markup is quite high. Easier to just get one of the 'smart' ones and never let it connect to the internet.
Maybe a decade or two ago, but I looked into this last year, and the prices were just about the same.
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External devices like AppleTV, Roku or Xboxes are responsive. It’s the actual TV UI that tends to be very slow and laggy.
My Sony TV has android and is fairly responsive. Maybe a second lag, but definitely not 10-20 secs. I do need to give it time to “warm up” when I start it, though. I use it so rarely it’s generally turned off from wall outlet. I still prefer Apple TV for various reasons, though, responsiveness being one of them.
Even a second lag is insane. I don't understand how people tolerate that.
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This, 100%. I've seen the same scenario - someone with limited vision, next to no feeling in his fingertips and an inability to build a mental model of the menu system on the TV (or actually the digi-box, since this was immediately after the digital TV switchover). Losing the simplicity of channel-up / down buttons was quite simply the end of his unsupervised access to television.
Channel up/down doesn't scale to the amount of content available now. It was OK when there were maybe half a dozen broadcast stations you could choose from.
The thing that didn't scale was the new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV transition, and invasive OS smart features after that. Before these, you could check what was on 50 channels within 10 seconds; basically as fast as you could tap the + or - button and recognize whether something was worth watching; changing channels was mainly bound by the speed of human cognition. I think young people must be astounded when they watch movies or old TV shows where people flip through the channels at that speed habitually.
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This can be solved by using any number of 3rd-party streaming devices: Apple TV, Google TV Streamer, NVIDIA Shield, ... I've never experienced an TV OS that was reliably better than one of the above, though a Roku-OS TV came close.
I tried to look for a 'dumb' tv for a long time to get to a setup like this. The ultimate setup would be 1) a totally dumb and stupid tv + 2) a streaming box like Apple TV or whatever. I just want the audio/visual aspect of the screen, nothing else.
Over Christmas my mom was complaining about her TV and I found a setting to have it start up with the last used input, which meant no more dealing with the smart interface and motion remote. I have an LG as well, but I wasn’t able to find the same setting available, unfortunately. Thought the automatic selection seems to work decently well when I turn on a device.
I have an old Samsung from 2017 that’s dumb. I mainly bought it because it was the size I needed (~40”), smaller than most people these days want.
There are some off-the-shelf products that work similarly in the audio space: https://us.yotoplay.com/ https://us.tonies.com/ I had plans to build something that for the TV, but having kids means I never had the time. And honestly, that might not have been such a bad thing since it made setting limits easier. I was able to teach my kid to turn the TV off when she was fairly young (and pause more recently), which seem…
We have a yoto for our son, and its a great experience, but be prepared for pricing of content to match what we used to page for cds/tapes. e.g., the pout-pout fish card is $8 USD for 10 minutes of content [1]. I think that's ok, as he actually would get a lot more than 10 minutes of use out of it, and its great to pay the creators while not having to worry about ads manipulating my kid. But it highlights how expecta…
You do have to watch out for Short content, but if you were buying audiobooks on Audible, you’d have the same issue .
Floppy disks are getting hard to come by, and will soon be too expensive. A good option would be to have the same data printed as QR codes in labels glued to small domino sized wood blocks that could be inserted in a slot in a box and read by a cheap camera module.
It is likely they are still being manufactured, too.
Even if the price were to double, I suspect that someone with the skills to make this has a sufficiently well paying job that the price of a hundred disks per year would not be a problem.