Posted by fleahunter 3 days ago
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 house I would normally get Rpi for is pretty convenient!
Plus, I'm pretty confident they are already doing illegal things. On my Samsung TV it wants to force update. There is no decline option, there is no option to turn off updates, only to take it completely offline. There's no way in hell these kinds of contracts would be legal in any other setting. There's no meaningful choice and contracts that strongarm one party are almost always illegal. You can't sign a contract where the bank can arbitrary change the loan on you (they can change interest but they can't arbitrarily charge how that interest is determined. Such as going from 1% to 1000% without some crazy impossible economic situation).
Someone needs to start a class action. Someone needs to push that as far as the courts will go
The bigger problem here is tivoization. You can build a fresh kernel from source but you have no way to install it because the bootloader is locked down.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
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.
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 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.
I have to have a kettle for other purpose (including heating water for other mugs than mine), and no self-heating mug is going to be as efficient as a kettle to heat water.
Furthermore, I also put cold or room temperature liquids in my mug. With a self-heating one, I would be carrying the heating parts for absolutely no reason.
Same goes for a TV. By keeping things separated, I can decide what I do which each device and manage their lifecycle separately. If the device reading video files is included in the TV, I can't plug it to another TV or a projector or even take it with me to use it elsewhere. While I've upgraded three times my video playing device to follow tech evolution, I've kept the same TV to plug them in.
You can make coffee with a kettle, but if you are making enough coffee often enough, it does make sense to bundle a second kettle into a dedicated coffeemaker, even if you are reducing the functionality of it by doing so.
But as a "power user" of a TV, I want to compose my own setup.
In the same way, "power users" of coffee don't use a coffeemaker. They use things like French press.
(I use instant coffee myself in my non-heating mug so in this comparison I would be the person not owning a TV and watching everything on their phone?)
Example: watching a movie but want the live score of a sports match scraped from a public website to be displayed in a corner.
OR while watching a sports match -- i want a overlay feed of text from a chat stream for a select web source
Looking forward for some public experiments / open projects in this space i could leverage. Dont have the skills to attempt it myself from scratch.
I mean, I didn't wanted to buy a brand new one anyway, it's very expensive and I don't need latest AI features. I found a year old model with firmware that was listed as supported by the jailbreak at the time
Global Panel Exchange Center
It's the same system software, just with root capacity.
That being said, there's still a bunch of nice homebrew:
- Video screensavers ala Apple TV
- DVD logo screensaver
- Adfree (and sponsorblock-integrated and optional shorts-disabling) Youtube
- Remote button remapping (Netflix button now opens Plex for me)
- Hyperion (ambilight service that controls an LED strip behind the TV)
- A nice nvidia shield emulator for game streaming from my PC with low latency
- VNC server (rarely useful, but invaluable when it is)
Sponsorblock and remote remapping are killer features for me, and the rest is just really pleasant to have.
I tried a 48" TFT-type television (attempting use as a computer display) and the refresh rate just wasn't there, along with typical backlight splotching (but it cost a fifth as much, so...).
My only caution is OLED can experience burn-in (unlike the smaller Aorus 45" using a VA-type panel), but it is otherwise a much better experience
I would rather have a quality large display with speakers and DP than a TV. The only argument in favour of buying a large TV for coding is cost.
The other limitation is lower brightness than miniLED monitors, around 30-60% of the nits in SDR. Whether that matters obviously depends on the ambient light or reflective surfaces near you.
For me, because I'm next to a big window and already squinting at my 400 nits IPS monitor, a < 300 nits OLED is a non-starter, but a 600 nits in SDR, IPS miniLED, is ideal.
This limitation should be temporary however because there are some high nit OLED TVs coming on the market in 2025 so bright OLED 27-43" monitors will likely follow.
Its also easier to implement, if I recall correctly
This is the essential core of it, as I have come to understand it anyway.
Wikipedia [0] states:
> VESA, the creators of the DisplayPort standard, state that the standard is royalty-free to implement.
And VESA's website [1] lists Samsung, Sony and LG as being members already, so they've already paid. What am I missing here?
Edit: It is cool I can plug my phone or laptop into the TV with one cable, no adapters, and get some power as well. For some reason it didn't work with my Steam Deck which was strange.
I can't be the only one that hooks up my computer, with a graphics card, to my TV
Issues with HDCP support maybe?
[0]: This came up recently with Valve: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220488
Granted, I suspect quite strongly the next wave of consolidation is going to continue the trend of being around USB-C, since the spec should have the bandwidth to handle any video / audio protocols for quite some time. Matter of time until that happens IMO.
It also lets you have a single cord that could theoretically be your power cord and your A/V cord.
Display port already allows multiple video streams, ausiostreams ... Why do we need a closed standard to also do this?!?!
AMD doesn't (can't? won't?) do the same but there is a workaround: a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter using a particular chip running hacked firmware. That'll get you 4K 120 Hz with working FreeSync VRR.
https://forum.level1techs.com/t/it-is-possible-to-4k-120-hdr...
Westinghouse TVs are made by a company licensing the brand, not a "Pittsburgh-headquartered company".
These seem like easy mistakes to avoid.
That just has to be an LLM at work.
The whole article is pretty terrible.
You might be interested to read about the findings by Ruter, the publicly owned transport company for Oslo. They discovered their Chinese Yutong electric buses contained SIM cards, likely to allow the buses to receive OTA updates, but consequentially means they could be modified at any moment remotely. Thankfully they use physical SIMs, so some security hardening is possible.
Of course, with eSIMs becoming more widespread, it’s not inconceivable you could have a SoC containing a 5G modem with no real way to disable or remove it without destroying the device itself.
[1] https://ruter.no/en/ruter-with-extensive-security-testing-of...
Also, personal experience: My own ISP (in Germany) experimented with some similar stuff a few years ago: They mandated use of their own home routers where only they had root access. At some point, they pushed an OTA update that made the router announce a second Wifi network in addition to the customer's. This was meant as a public hotspot that people walking down the street could connect to after installing an app from the ISP and buying a ticket.
The customer that "owned" the router wasn't charged for that traffic and the hotspot was isolated from the LAN (or at least the ISP promised that), but it still felt intrusive to just repurpose a device sitting in my living room as "public" infrastructure.
(The ISP initially wanted to do this on an "opt-out" basis, which caused a public uproar thankfully. I think eventually they switched to opt-in and then scrapped the idea entirely.)
(That was years before the other incident - since then they had dropped that idea and "generously" given customers access to the config UI)
Every Android-based media player I've had tried just plain sucks, the NVIDIA Shield wasn't too bad but at some point the controller quit charging. You can still get a game console with a built-in Blu-Ray player too and it's nice to have one box that does that as well as being an overpowered for streaming.
I have a HDHomeRun hooked up to a small antenna pointed at Syracuse which does pretty well except for ABC, sometimes I think about going up on the roof and pointing the small one at Binghamton and pointing a large one at Syracuse but I am not watching as much OTA as I used to. It's nice though being able to watch OTA TV on either TV, any computer, tablets, phones, as well as the Plex Pass paying for the metadata for a really good DVR side-by-side with all my other media.
As for TVs I go to the local reuse center and get what catches my eye, my "monitor" I am using right now is a curved Samsung 55 inch, I just brought home a plasma that was $45 because I always wanted a plasma. I went through a long phase where people just kept dropping off cheap TVs at my home, some of which I really appreciated (a Vizio that was beautifully value engineered) and some of which sucked. [1]
[1] ... like back in the 1980s everybody was afraid someone would break into your home and take your TV but for me it is the other way around
> According to its privacy policy, the company gathers usage data, such as “data about your activity on and use of” Apple offerings, including “app launches within our services…; browsing history; search history; [and] product interaction.” [...] transaction information, account information (“including email address, devices registered, account status, and age”), device information (including serial number and browser type), contact information (including physical address and phone number), and payment information (including bank details).
Yeah, sure, that's privacy, Ars.
[1]https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/all-the-ways-apple-t...
1. Email address - you have to use an email address to have an Apple account. How are they not going to have your email?
2. Devices registered - you mean when you log into your device, they keep track of your logged in devices!
3. Transaction history - they keep track of what you bought from them!
Must I continue? Every single piece of data that you named is required to do business with them.
Also 'product interaction' is an euphemism to say "if you're sick, we'll sell this information for around 80€" (I think it's close to 200$ for Americans but I don't have any contact in this industry overseas). If you have a cancer and suddenly you see an increase in ads for pseudo-medicine and other scams whose only goal is to extract all the money you have left, and if lucky, your famil's money too, that's from 'product interaction'.
You can give Apple any age you want to. It’s not like it checks.
And I have no idea about the other topics you are going off on and what they have to do with Apple..
Many tens to hundreds of dollars for that single datapoint is incredible. I have naively assumed we were just packaged up in aggregate and never thought more deeply than that.
What are the most valuable data? Pregnant? Wedding? Divorce? Illness? Home purchase?
They want to show you things you have recently watched or looked at when you log in, rather than just random TV shows.
> Age?
You can give your kids an age-restricted account so what they watch is limited.
(/s).
This isn’t the iPod days where you would sync your watch history with iTunes.
At the end of the day, they could be taking screenshots of everything you do with your TV and argue it's because of some AI system that will allow you to more easily launch whatever it is you normally do at that time of the day. If you do not see any issue with that, why would you be on this thread?
Apple tracks what you are watching on AppleTV only.
I’m on this thread because I understand technology.
Are you saying that if you are watching something like “South Park” you wouldn’t want the service that you are watching it on to keep track of where you are in its 25 season run?
So the solution they propose to TVs that track what you're watching is to switch to AppleTV where Apple will track what you're watching? And you still justify this somehow?
How else are there going to mark what you watched and whdfd you are in a TV series?
I can't help wonder if they are just afraid of the offering looking more bare, or is this really such an uncommon desire to want to see "new to me" stuff and not repeat things?
The only Apple “ads” I ever see are inside the Apple TV+ app (yeah, their naming is confusing…) and it’s only for TV shows they’re promoting in their streaming service.
I did the same last year though when I couldn’t find a good non-smart tv. Even if you don’t like the advice it is a practical solution for normies.
> If you want premium image quality or sound, you’re better off using a smart TV offline.
In the future, if they add e-sims, we'll just remove them or de-solder or whatever.
The real risk is cars: if they start not working without cell network connections.
If we continue giving money to people who build malware into the products, the malware will eventually be baked in deeply enough that the rest of the device will refuse to operate if it can't phone home to the ministry of truth or wherever.
I let my latest LG TV on the network, but block internet access at the router. HomeKit integration (Siri turn off tv), Chromecast, Airplay, and other local services all work, without the ability for it to phone home.
Given how limited cell service is in a lot of the US, I think we're a ways off from this.
But also, it's unlikely I'll live long enough where keeping an older vehicle won't be an option.
There’s just no reason for this. You have one job: Take my signal and display it. Anything else is just another place for things to go wrong.
This is commonly repeated and but as far as I can tell nobody has actually demonstrated it.
Buy a cheap smart TV and run it in "store mode".
Brightness and saturation will probably be maxed out but with a cheap TV, it looks more like "normal" on a more expensive model. Hint: The main difference between cheap and expensive in some cases --- the color adjustment range is limited by software on the cheaper models.
Currently using a Hisense 4k model from Costco connected to a small mini PC --- Windows or Linux, your preference. The TV functions as nothing but a dumb display.
Use a small "air mouse" for control. On screen keyboard as needed.
Use a Hauppauge USB tuner for local digital broadcasts.
I use software called DVB Viewer to view local channels and IPTV. A browser with VPN for streaming in some cases.
In every case, I maintain full control of my data and the ability to block ads as I see fit.
They aren't "cheap," but just last week I unboxed and tested 5 different Samsung S95F televisions of 4 different sizes.
One of the functions that each of them promised to perform when set to "retail mode" was to reset the picture settings every 5 minutes.
That makes retail mode a non-starter for anyone who seeks any resemblance of accuracy in their video system, at least on these particular televisions.
seems on the cheaper side and it might work like he said
That probably mimics Samsung TVs, which are popular for that reason but look like crap.
The actual best TVs, picture wise, are among the LG C series, which are surprisingly dim and unsaturated. That said, mine has held up terribly so I won't buy another. My $200 Onn looks good enough to my eyes and lasted longer.
Why does it have to be cheap? What if I want a killer panel without all the bs?
> Use a small "air mouse" for control
An alternative is something like 'unified remote' on it, then you can even type from your phone without any pain.
> A browser with VPN for streaming in some cases.
There is a missing piece for me here. A magic 'send my PC browser tab to this other PC connected to the TV' button. Not sure if something like this exists. It would be ideal to send all the browser context with cookies etc so that you are logged in too and can just start playing whatever you found on PC.
Any for of cast is not an option, rendering has to happen on the TV PC box.
It doesn't have to be --- but you may be wasting your money if you run in "store mode".
As noted above, "store mode" will usually max out the brightness, saturation and contrast while removing user control. This looks pretty "normal" with cheaper models. More expensive ones can become overbearing.
It appears to me that in some cases, the difference between cheap and more expensive is mainly the color adjustments.
In order to take advantage of economies of scale, they may use the exact same screen panel on multiple different models but limit the cheaper ones in software so it doesn't look as "bright" and "eye catching" in the store as their more expensive "killer" model.
Chromecast does exactly this and has existed since ~2010.
You can send a tab to another device on Firefox. It doesn't come with all the browser context, but it's pretty handy.
I use an NVIDIA shield on a dumb TV with firefox sideloaded (ad blockers, ect) for 95% of my streaming. You can import your cookies or other preferences or simply browse for content directly.
It felt illegal.
But kidding aside, who are we even really kidding anymore, even if you were provided the TOS would you simply not use the device of there were something in the TOS you disagreed with? How about when you’ve been using the device and all the sudden they change the TOS and force agreement as you are about to start a tv evening with the family?
The people simply accepted their enslavement, the taking of your agency, because we all allowed or were overwhelmed with it.
They take our agency through process just like they’ve taken our freedom and rights in so many different ways, just like through YC funded Flock, where treasonous mass surveillance cameras just show up over night and most here seem unaware it’s a YC company that now provides a mass surveillance network to the government and global government tightening its noose around humanity’s neck.
I'd read reports that Q-Symphony (audio from the TV speakers and soundbar simultaneously) wouldn't work, but it does.
I stuck an OSMC (https://osmc.tv/) box to the back of both of them so they can play stuff from my NAS. They're not the cheapest solution and I realise Kodi/XBMC on which they're based isn't everyone's jam (I grew up with XBMC on an Xbox so it is very much mine) - but they play everything, have wifi, HDMI-CEC, integrated RF remote, and work out of the box.
Model numbers if anyone cares: Samsung QE65S95C, Samsung QE77S95F. I believe S95, S90 and S85 (at least up to F) are all very similar so they should all work but ofc ymmv.
I wouldn't recommend Kodi for streaming, it kinda works but the experience isn't great. I use it exclusively for playing stuff from my server full of legally acquired public domain videos (ahem).
I do watch YouTube videos on it, but I use TubeArchivist (basically a fancy wrapper for yt-dlp) to pull them onto the server first, and a script to organise them into nicely-named directories.
I’m using a Minix Z100 running Gnome and Kodi. I use a simple Bluetooth keyboard, the interface is clunky but it does the job. I use Samba to also share files to VNC running on iOS and Android on the same network.
I tried using fancier solutions but anything that browses content without involving directories always break for some specific content in unpredictable ways.
An alternative could be some x86 Android TV build like Lineage, but I have not seen very convincing demonstrations that this is truly viable.
I just think of them as the best solution to run Kodi for media that is on my network.
Now that it's connected, it shows an ad at that time, in the same way. Can't win.
Source, my open test network and a neighbors tv that keeps trying to phone home with it.
Or blacklist the TV's MAC address in your router settings. Didn't think of that first for some reason.
So no remote. I get up, hit the spacebar to pause/play. The audio is into a multi-channel receiver though so audio has mute/volume controls on a remote.
I get that people would rather have a remote but I personally actually don't like remotes at all. My TV is basically a screen only.
As far as I know there are no remotes that work with MacOS.
This is what the article recommends by the way.