Have a regular PC hooked up to the TV. That's my smart machine. I control every aspect of it. Fuck Smart TVs.
Raspberry pi with Kodi hooked up to a projector and a NAS serving files works well for me.
This is the way, although the pi is to slow for me at this point and I replaced it with shields.
Also why the are people connecting tvs to their networks...fuck that noise.
When I completely replaced my PC, I intended to use my old PC as a media box. But in reality, I've basically used my Chromecast for everything. One of these days I'll probably want to watch something that isn't on one of my streaming sites, but I've been surprisingly resistant to that so far.
Chromecast is the ideal smart device so far, for me. No ads or anything. I use my phone as a remote and basically every video app supports it easily. Open app, press cast, select what I want to play. Exactly what a smart TV should have been like.
I believe you can still get "dumb" flatscreens, but they're getting rare, and they cost at least hundreds more than their "smart" brethren. So of course those sell very slowly.
The older I get the more I miss the sheer freedom that was built into our daily lives back when technology was just a notch or two less advanced. Phones that stayed trapped on their wall, not in your pocket, tracking you. TVs that were made of dumb stuff that could still pull free content from the air. You had to be part of a special "Nielson family", fully set up with a little tracking box and all that, for the TV to tell anybody what you were watching.
People expected you to basically fall off the earth for 8 hours at work, and didn't expect to contact you for less than a housefire-level emergency, which meant you spent most of the day free, and not just while you were at work. Nobody blinked if you stepped out for the evening to go shopping and could not be contacted for hours. Now people end up in screaming arguments because they didn't answer that text fast enough. It's misery.
I had a shock the other day, watching some YouTube short featuring a young woman (an adult, not a minor) complaining humorously about her mother, who always knows where she is, and thus has all sorts of unwanted opinions on her location. Mother always knows because of an app called Life360, which is basically the kind of spying app that an abusive spouse would hide on your phone. But it's not hidden. You force your children to install it on their phones. It's a leash. So now this adult woman, who of course cannot quite afford to leave home, because economy, cannot simply delete this spying app from her phone without consequences and arguments, so she has no privacy in her movements, from anyone, never mind the government and such. Never mind what actual minors are now putting up with.
We have officially left the era where the adults pissed and grumbled about them damn kids wanting them damn phones they don't need, and we are now in the era where some kid has absolutely been beaten with a belt because he tried to leave his phone in the bedroom and slip out of the house in privacy.
Things like Life360 are normalized among children and parents, so other people will now expect to track you and treat a refusal of tracking as a violation of trust, and probably a sign that you are elderly, thus your rights are becoming debatable.
Again, 5 minutes ago this was evil shit that abusive spouses snuck onto people's phones, suddenly, it's normal, and people will just expect it.
I guess the ongoing shock is that we expected Big Brother to somehow slap a shackle on our necks that we can't take off, but this is all worse. This is putting the shackle on your neck, every morning. It doesn't even lock. You could, theoretically, throw it into the lake at will. Nobody would stop you. But you don't. All the chains are made of other people. The whips at your back are the opinions of children, and what they think is normal. The surveillance cameras do not loom from posts in the sky, no. They're in every pocket. They're much harder to hide from than a security camera ever would be.
I hope I'm just melodramatic, or something.
Nearly hucked my Vizio out last night as I discovered that between last football season and today they have hidden the broadcast channels I receive with my antenna, in their "Free+" offerings and no longer show the channel number when you rotate between them.
This also means that when you choose "Antenna" from the input menu, you get around 15 seconds of black screen while it loads an informative slide about the change and then demands you press the OK button to finish loading their program
Then, to change the channel you must open their fiddly "broadcast guide" and use it to choose the channel you want to watch (after 15 second loading delay for the guide and another 5 second delay once you've picked a channel.
To change the TV from the Nintendo game to Fox took me 10 minutes. Then I realized Fox was showing the Packers game and I needed CBS and it took me 5 more minutes to find the menu again and find CBS.
Just last February this exact same action took maybe 20 seconds? Turn TV on, change input to Antenna, flip channels manually.
time to hook an old pc running linux up to that bad boy. while you're at it, maybe set up a NAS. they can't get to you on open source software!
Don't forget to disconnect that "smart" TV from the internet! It usually works for me to tell it to use a LAN connection and disconnect the LAN cable
The most egregious action I've seen was from a Vizio smart TV I bought several years ago. It shipped with a simple remote control, and a tablet with a control app preinstalled. One day I turned the TV on and was notified that in order to use the updated UI I would need to reach out to support to order (and pay for!) a new remote that had additional buttons.
I hope everyone reading this knows that you can just not connect a "Smart" TV to the internet. Leave it as a "dumb" TV.
Get a separate device like a Roku or AppleTV or Amazon Fire or whatever. The garbage hardware that TV manufacturers slap inside a TV so they can advertise its "smart" features will always be inferior to a purpose built external device.
To say nothing of the security implications of having an unpatched probably unsupported IoT device running on your network for years.
For those with similar problems, use pihole dns to effectively block all that bullshit
Also, do NOT buy a Samsung TV, it's the worst offender of them all. Nothing but bad experiences with itl
Don't buy Samsung anything. Their hardware is junk. They used to be okay, but they decided years ago that they want to be an advertising company, not a hardware company, so they push cheap crap that is used solely as data harvesting and ad delivery devices. Even their home appliances spy on you and break down a few years later.
I've found Samsung to be uniquely terrible across every type of anything I've ever owned that they've made.
I bought my current condo thinking the almost new (I think they were 2 years old at the time) Samsung appliances must not be that bad, but every single one of them has a unique design flaw that has caused it to fail or be damaged in small ways or large:
Samsung range - coated with black stainless coating that peels off upon heat stress...cuz you'll definitely never encounter heat stress when working with a gas range 🙄, the clock's LED is also intermittently failing.
Samsung refrigerator - has a separate ice maker compartment that was not sealed properly at the factory, and therefore freezes over itself...which makes the ice maker useless
Samsung dishwasher - Had a wet sensor on the bottom of the dishwasher that tripped, and then it just ran forever with a large grinding noise...I had to cut the power to the circuit to get it to stop doing whatever it was doing
Samsung microwave - Large, heavy, stainless steel handle attached to cheap, easy to fracture plastic through a single screw hole at the top. The handle eventually snapped off of the top of the microwave....I've also heard (but not experienced because I never use it) that the sensor cook is garbage.
Add all of the above to what I consider to be samsung's already piss-poor reputation for products in my experience (I had a samsung flip phone that the screen just completely stopped working after a year of use in the early 2000s, and a Samsung MP3 player with a battery hinge that was so poorly designed it eventually stopped working because the battery kept popping out).
I fucking hate that company and wouldn't be surprised in the least if their terrible, flawed products are also privacy nightmares.
This is the future that Stallman warned us about. They mocked him and said it didn't matter. It's not going to get better until everyone stops buying TVs with spyware built in.
Vote with your wallets or quit bitching. Self hosted is an option these days. But that means not being lazy. And people are really lazy.
Vote with your wallet
When are we going to finally accept that this is nothing but a delusion? How many failed boycotts over and over will it take?
Vote with your wallets or quit bitching.
I never bought one but I can't do anything about people who have AirBnB's who buy them or hotels that install them in every room.
We have the burdon of knowledge. We know too much. We were there when a TV turned on and you were presented with channels. Some fuzzy some clear. Sometimes your had to wiggle the antenna. The point is, there is a generation that has never known that. They have only seen a smart tv. They don't know the greener grass. TV makers are waiting for us to die and the next generation to just accept their shitty product as normal. I hate it. I hate it so much.
I'm not an advocate for smart TVs, but my experience has been different. I found a deal for an 86 inch LG, and it's been nothing but smooth for me. No advertising built into the os, always has the apps I use right on the bar. The air mouse onnthe remote is reminiscent of owning a wii.
My LG TV on the other hand is crammed full of ads. I've blocked as much of them as I can but it looks like some of them are impossible to get rid of.
The remote is really cool though, much better for typing.
I tried to find the article, but of course it is lost to the anals of the internet. (Yes, I know what I said). I saw an article a couple of years ago about how there was a push in China that would use the built-in cameras in smart TVs to watch how many eyes were looking at the screen during rented features and charge extra if there were more than some small threshold of people watching it. I think 3 people were allowed for a single rental price and it would be charged again if more than that watched.
This is likely coming for us. Also... Yo ho ho.
Why the hell would I connect my TV to the internet? It's a display device.
You will take my Display Port/HDMI/RCA input and like it.
Alls I can say is that when the “smart” tv has “run out of memory” so it intermittently cuts out when I’m trying to beat Ridley in Super Metroid, it’s time for a lobotomy.
My solution: Buy a very large monitor.
Then connect some streaming box to it you can easily replace if/when it gets shitty, instead of having to replace the whole TV.
Who knew my anti-consumption / general frugalness would lead to me having a better TV experience than people who buy the high end gadgets
I never add "smart" TVs to the network and I block unknown mac addresses at the router. All apps are loaded either on a gaming console or a Roku (the lawyer units with more power). If you keep your TV off the network (and uninstall the apps), you'll never have performance issues.
Some years ago around the advent of smart home devices I bought a huge fullhd Hisense tv for cheap. It has zero smart capabilities, and essentially acts as a big second screen for my computer, and I couldn’t be happier with it.
I am scared once it is time to replace it for something more modern I won’t be able to find one without all the smart crap I don’t use and don’t want.
Bloatware, adware and over reliance on software/complex electronics has ruined a lot of the experience with consumer electronics. Almost everything is festooned with half assed processing units for relatively pointless non-sense. Some of its useful, much of it over or under built. I think we have a big market correction on the horizon, it's currently over saturated with marginally useful junk and a definite market exists for upgraded simple electronics.
I've had a Vizio "smart" TV for about 3 years. It is my first experience with a smart TV and it has been a massive pile of shit since day one. Most recently it has decided to show a black screen every time I turn on the Nintendo Switch. In this state it does not allow me to do anything but turn it off. So I have to turn it off, turn it back on, go into settings and restart the TV. It will then work for a single play session, but as soon as I shut the Switch off I will undoubtedly have to go through this same process the next time I want to play.
This is only the most recent issue I've had with Vizio's garbage ass software. To those saying to just unplug it from the internet, trust me when I say the solution is not that simple. It was even worse before any updates, but with each update they break something else. There is no "good" software version to leave it at.
This is why my TV is not connected to any kind of network. It is a TV, and it should behave as one and just take any video input I give it
Between that and the shit apps that you use to watch the various streaming services, it's getting to the point where I'm about to buy a super-cheap laptop to put into the HDMI port, so I can watch through a web browser & block or sidestep some of that shit.
Yesterday I was trying to watch NFL football. The app I pay for wasn't working. Rebooted the TV a couple of times. Rebooted the Wi-Fi did all the troubleshooting yada yada yada. I lost the entire first quarter before I open up. The laptop took 30 seconds to find ' alternative', casted that to my TV from a different room and enjoyed cheering on my team for the rest of the game.
In the middle of the second half I started asking myself why I'm paying for an app that forces me to do the things that I did 10 years ago to stream games..... Yo ho ho, where's that bottle of rum?.
Once had a "smart" TV, brought it back where i bought it within a month and took a regular monitor, now a PC does the smart and the TV what is supposed to do, display shit.
The whole point of Internet of Things (aka CONNECT EVERYTHING TO THE INTERNET) was to make customers' life miserable in the medium-long run. Anyone who couldn't figure that out was massively deluded by the propaganda
They also spy on you and know what you watch, even if it's not played from their apps and is just a raw display input. https://www.consumerreports.org/video/view/electronics/televisions-streaming-media/4151762767001/your-smart-tv-may-track-what-you-watch-and-say/
I have a 55" IPS TV with absolutely zero smart functions, and we use it as a dummy monitor, Audio is not even connected, all is hooked up to a Linux computer that serves all the content. Zero bullshit, Zero advertising and we have full control of everything, and it was dirt cheap.
In my country you are charged a license fee for the privilege of owning a tv. That's why I always only had a PC attached to a monitor instead.
Nowadays that is replaced with a dirt cheap orange pi running libreelec (Kodi) which also runs pi-hole in the background for all of the other devices on the network.
The setup is a bit of a hassle but it's a vast improvement on the interface and functionality of friends "Smart TV" experiences in my opinion. I even set it up to work with an old TV remote as the pi has IR built in, although there are phone apps to do remote control also.
As an aside, isn’t the whole point of the Fediverse that we should be able to move content around? It’s sad that the only way to upvote a Mastodon post on Lemmy is through a screenshot or a link. Why can’t it just be a post that we can upvote?
Translate: I don't like Smart TV.
But seriously... there must be something wrong with manufacturers if they think these "features" are even adding value to their products
They don't. This is about them getting more profit from you.
I love the way my TV turns itself on in the middle of the night on a random channel at full volume.
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