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Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

arstechnica.com

281–290 of 548 posts

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#281

Am I missing something? I have a LG nano something TV that has many “smart” features, but I never let it connect to my WiFi ever. Since day 1 it has been hooked up to an AppleTV. Can I not buy any fancy smart TV in 2025 and use it as a dumb HDMI display for AppleTV?

Second that. There were articles a year or two ago about TVs trying to connect to any open Wi-Fi they can find, without you asking them. But hopefully LG wouldn’t go that far.

At that point you just open up the back of the TV and drive a screwdriver into the WiFi chip.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#282

Am I missing something? I have a LG nano something TV that has many “smart” features, but I never let it connect to my WiFi ever. Since day 1 it has been hooked up to an AppleTV. Can I not buy any fancy smart TV in 2025 and use it as a dumb HDMI display for AppleTV?

the issue is that eventually SIM cards will be baked in to deliver ads and spyware; there will be no alternatives because everyone was fine with buying smart TVs and not connecting them to wifi.

see: Android's recent transformation into a closed platform which no longer allows users to control devices they purchase. it's important to fight against trends like this loudly and vehemently while we still can.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't you want it to be a computer? Then it can be connected to your devices AND also do the job itself in a situation where it's awkward to connect to a device. If already needs a computer in it to drive menus / modern display protocols. Having that computer be powerful enough to also decode content is barely an extra cost.

For the same reason I don't want a self-heating mug.

Why wouldn't you want that? Genuinely curious

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#284

I'm confused. Every TV is a dumb TV if you don't give it your Wifi password.

A guest logged into Wi-Fi on a Vizio of mine and there was conveniently no way to disconnect/forget it without a factory reset back to motion smoothing hell.

Change your network name. When the TV prompts you to connect, join the renamed network. Then, rename it back so everything else can connect again and the TV can't. I can think of a few potential problems with this, but, it might work?

Or blacklist the TV's MAC address in your router settings. Didn't think of that first for some reason.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My work health insurance recently offered a free scale and blood pressure monitor, I thought that's a nice perk, I'll use that, so I ordered with the intent of never using their app, just using it for my own tracking. The first time I used it, I got an email from my insurance company congratulating me and giving me suggestions. Both devices have a cellular modem in them, and arrived paired to my identity. I destroyed…

Why not just remove the cell modem?

We shouldn't have to.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#286

Absurdly although I’m, currently paying for a BBC TV licence, I use an Apple TV but they have not, and will not provide UHD content for it on their streaming app. Either I can do the stupid thing and connect my LG TV to the network, or through various means download the UHD content, and therefore have to manage it, especially the last watched position, or forego it. Having ADHD, I never really watch to the end, and s…

TV devices are a hot mess to support from a streaming perspective, they each come with their own quirks that mean some perfectly-in-spec encoding and packaging techniques will result in a failed playback on some models of TV. Once a TV device _is_ supported, that support has to be maintained typically for more than a decade until usage of that model falls so low that dropping it from support can be justified.

It would be prohibitively costly to produce per-device renditions so instead there is one generic rendition produced for "all smart TVs" and another one for "UHD capable smart TVs".

Traditional TV manufacturers all work with the BBC to get their devices certified, which is a requirement for carrying the iPlayer app and comes with legal agreements that asset that a device _will_ be able to playback BBC content for as long as it's supported.

Because Apple like to Think Differently, they opted not to align with the entire rest of the TV industry in standardising on MPEG-DASH spec. They instead require all developers to stream video using the HLS protocol. As UHD content on iPlayer is geared exclusively for smart TVs, and all the other smart TVs support MPEG-DASH, the UHD workflow simply never evolved the ability to target Apple's TV devices.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second that. There were articles a year or two ago about TVs trying to connect to any open Wi-Fi they can find, without you asking them. But hopefully LG wouldn’t go that far.

At that point you just open up the back of the TV and drive a screwdriver into the WiFi chip.

Goodbye warranty

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason I don't want a self-heating mug.

Why wouldn't you want that? Genuinely curious

Modularity and separation of concerns can extend into other domains than software.

For me, it seems so much simpler to keep the two separate. You won't be forced to wash the heating element every time you wash the cup. Can't heat a different cup while the other is in the dishwasher, unless all your cups are self-heating. Normally, the only way for a cup to break is if it shatters, but with an inbuilt heater there's electronics that can break too. And should the cup shatter, now the heater is unusable too, or vice versa.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#289

For a hacker news article, it misses the crucial option - hacking a smart TV! I have LG OLED jailbroken using rootmy.tv, it was pretty trivial. It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen, you can customize it, SSH into it, map any commands to the remote, etc. Before I only used monitor, simple DP/HDMI input is all I wanted. But being able to take full control of the tv and connect it with other devices in the…

> It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen Why would I want a Linux computer with a huge screen? I just want a huge screen. I’ll provide my own connected devices, independent of the screen.

Well, you can make it a PC and then turn it off, I guess. Then let the rest of us have all the fun.

Re: Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

#290

For a hacker news article, it misses the crucial option - hacking a smart TV! I have LG OLED jailbroken using rootmy.tv, it was pretty trivial. It's basically a linux computer with a huge screen, you can customize it, SSH into it, map any commands to the remote, etc. Before I only used monitor, simple DP/HDMI input is all I wanted. But being able to take full control of the tv and connect it with other devices in the…

I was thinking the same. While it is not for everyone, hacking the TV to make the dumb is possible.
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