- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Smart TVs are all well and good, but when ad-focused update lobotomized my new-ish Android TV, we hit a problem.
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Change the launcher
Don’t connect it to the internet and just use peripheral devices
“Smart TVs are all well and good”
no they aren’t, so far they are a disaster.
Sceptre makes a good dumb TV. I use one personally and other than taking a few extra seconds to boot up, it’s fantastic. No WiFi info to load, no pop ups, just a big dumb pane of LEDs and ports to use them.
💯 I bought a Sceptre as a smaller living room TV, which became our main TV, and it’s great. A smart TV is just a good TV with a crap computer built into it. I’d rather just have the good TV.
Great info, we need a list of such TV which are single purposed.
It’s a VA panel tho 🙁
VA has gotten really good over the years and I‘d prefer it over a similarly priced IPS, if neither has local dimming or quantum dots or something like that. VA has so much better contrast. Of course, it’s nothing against OLED, QLED, microLED, etc but it’s also in a very different price class.
We need more dumb tv’s in the higher price class.
I never regretted the 200€ I paid for an appleTV 4K. No ads, no nonsense, just a smooth and pleasant smart tv experience. Even got almost all the features I was missing compared to android tv through updates over the 4½ years I’ve had it (like vpn support). Whichever brand I‘ll be getting, when I eventually upgrade my tv, I‘ll never connect it to the internet and just continue using my AppleTV.
Whats the benefit of an Apple TV if you don’t connect it to the internet?
I think he’s saying he doesn’t connect the smart TV to the internet. He plugs in his apple TV (and that is connected to the Internet) and has all of the ‘smart’ technology.
Ah, same then, but I just use an old Chromecast instead.
I feel like I’ve managed to really get out ahead with my latest TV purchase - I managed to buy a really nice large dumb TV for like $200, used. I then connected a Chromecast running Android TV, which I have modded extensively to get around “the bad parts”. Quite nice!
I was only using Roku for a long time. It has ads but they’re not particularly intrusive and I honestly don’t notice them half the time. I recently got a new Amazon Fire TV for free through my jobs reward program and that thing is just a big ad delivery machine lol. The OS is so slow it’s like it was almost an afterthought when someone realized they actually needed a way to show all these freaking ads… Its so slow and buggy it drives me nuts! I’m seriously considering just plugging a Roku box in the back and just using the TV like a monitor
Roku is honestly as bad or worse. Someone is getting promoted in their marketing team for finding new rectangular places on the various home screens to place ads. It started small with Roku and they built up a lot of good will. But they’re cashing it in, and it’s already deep down the enshittification curve.
If you want actually zero ads, the Apple TV does exactly what it says on the box and nothing more. I know hating on apple is big. I’m not saying to go all in on the ecosystem. They just genuinely have the best product in this space right now.
Absolutely. 4 or 5 years ago I got myself the current firetv stick 4K because my tv had an absolutely terrible smart tv platform (slow, almost no recognizable apps). After a month or so, I sold it to a friend, bought an AppleTV and never looked back.
I am not an Apple guy but AppleTV is the best “out of the box” streaming device on the market and it’s not even close. Really the only thing I have against it is that Apple changed IP control to require HomeKit.
For us nerds, an HTPC is hard to beat…but for everyone else, I recommend an AppleTV.
The only downside is that they aren’t giving away Apple TVs for free at my job lol I guess I got what I paid for 🤷♂️
You are the product. I wouldn’t be surprised if your company got paid to give them out. They almost certainly got them for free at least. If they didn’t, they’re fools.
They’re free to you because Amazon is getting paid for the ads you see. You’re also working for Amazon, now.
Install a better launcher, done.
As has always been the Android way.
Can you recommend a launcher for a smart tv?
I used Flauncher and button mapper to program my home button to open Flauncher. Worked well for me.
Same for me, now if I could only find a way to have it boot directly to f launcher, but so far I still have to see the home screen occasionally with all of its ad infested malware BS
Yeah, booting directly into the Google TV launcher instead of Flauncher is annoying, but I’m so used to it now, I instinctively press the home button on boot up these days so I barely ever see it.
I use Projectivy, on my Google ChromeCast:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spocky.projengmenu&hl=en
Assuming your smart TV is android, project ivy is my favorite.
Lets go back to microconsoles for streaming and dumb TVs
I recently bought a TCL google tv and first thing I did was install smarttube and a different launcher.
That being said the first question in the setup proces was if I wanted the “smart” functions on or just have a basic experience and only use HDMI and cable tv.
But the ads on the home screen with Google tv are really annoying. They are front and centered. I want my apps and inputs where the ad’s are.
Other than that, my requirements were pretty simple: no fancy hardware for gaming or video upscaling, and I don’t watch enough TV to justify expensive OLED, so a 4K LCD with some HDR capabilities would suit.
Dude bought a 4k TV while trying to get as little upscaling as possible and is upset it’s laggy?
Most media is still 1080, and a 4k TV is going to upscale it…
Buying one without paying attention to upscaling ability, means you’re going to get a TV with low processing power, and all the menus will be laggy for the same reason.
He could have saved a lot of money buying a 1080 tv, got the same picture, and have more responsive TV because it’s not always struggle to upscale to 4k
But he didn’t know what he was doing and now he wants to blame everyone but himself.
But if anyone wants to make a smart TV dumb again, just plug a source into it and use that and it’s the exact same as a dumb tv.
Most new movies are in 4k and I’d say half of all new shows are in 4k. What are you talking about?
To your last point, I think it still snapshots ever 10 seconds or so and hash what it has and send a it. I was trying to find the other post on this which described it and failed.
I did find this article, which makes a SmartTV look like a surveillance machine, even with the HDMI input used.
Fielding: Smart TVs gather an enormous amount of data about their usage and their immediate environment (including other devices connected to them, such as speakers, consoles and media storage), which is sent back to the manufacturer. Some of this data is used to troubleshoot and improve the device’s software or media services, but much of it is also used to profile the TV’s users—their viewing habits can be used to make inferences about their politics, professional and economic status, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, ethnic identity, social activity, purchasing potential, values and beliefs, all of which helps advertising networks know who to target with what.
…
Lewis:* *While the concern is apparent, there currently isn’t a concrete example of a TV manufacturer snooping on its users. In 2015, Samsung landed in hot water regarding an unfortunately worded statement on monitoring living room conversations, stumbling into a communications crisis. Samsung acted quickly, cleaning up and re-wording the statement. However, the immediate outcry was a solid indication of fears around public monitoring. Any proven example of Orwellian-esque monitoring would prove catastrophic for the manufacturer involved.
Kelso: A few years ago, according to the FBI, app developers Vizio, LG, and Samsung were caught snooping on viewers. The FTC had to step in and stop them. Also, the CIA and MI5 were able to access information on smart TVs and listen in on private conversations using the camera and microphones on these devices.
Fielding: Surveillance functions and equipment are built in to almost all smart devices and marketed as “features” to make the user’s life easier. Audio recordings generated from the TV listening for its “wake word” are sent back to manufacturers so they can train their speech recognition algorithms. That’s a deliberate design choice, but it can mean that people’s private conversations are revealed to the manufacturer’s employees as a result.
And you can get around all of that by not giving the TV a direct internet connection…
Without that, it can gather everything it wants, it just can’t send it anywhere.
Because you’d be using the source, there’s no benefit to connecting the TV to internet.
True. And that’s worth doing.
The IT guy in me wonders if they are devious enough to start using Ethernet over HDMI for other internet connected devices. ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)
