Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options

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.

[0] https://github.com/throwaway96/dejavuln-autoroot

[1] https://github.com/throwaway96/faultmanager-autoroot

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.

That's like Alibaba, except for small(ish) quantities of LCDs of any possible description.

This “proprietary telemetry” is basically malware, just, it was put on the thing at the factory. Once a system is fully rooted by malware, the least-bad option is to nuke it entirely and install from scratch.

In this context where the locked-down device probably also doesn’t have a fully open source kernel and drivers, this becomes a bit tricky. Better just to use a device that doesn’t have malware on it in the first place.

Alternatively, you can plug in a Raspberry Pi that runs steam link :)

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.

https://youtu.be/NzBBfGnAWM0

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.

https://www.aorus.com/en-us/monitors/s55u

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?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#Cost

[1]: https://vesa.org/about-vesa/member-companies/

I can't be the only one that hooks up my computer, with a graphics card, to my TV

[0]: This came up recently with Valve: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220488

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220488

That just has to be an LLM at work.

Not sure if you're referring to Vodafone, but Vodafone Germany definitely does this. You can opt out of allowing public access via your personal router, but this opts you out of being able to use other people's routers in the same manner.

It was fairly well implemented I think: separated from your network, bandwidth was limited (to avoid impacting the host), you could opt-out (which meant opting out of using the guest network), joining the wifi was automatic if you had a cellphone with the same ISP and it was the same "guest" network for all routers so in big cities, you could rely only on this to access Internet.

It was stopped a few years ago when they deemed cellular network was reliable enough to not need the guest network.

This Kindle did not have things like idle-screen advertising. That wasn't yet a thing yet.

These first edition devices were available with unlimited data access (IIRC in the US via AT&T) on cellular networks without a separate subscription. It was slow (everything was slow back then), but it would let a person download a book or have a look at a web page (with the very limited browsing that was possible with e-ink and a CPU that was meant more to barely sip power than to render megabytes of CSS and JS).

The expense of the data access was built into the one-time purchase price, and the hope was that people having the ability to buy books from "anywhere" would snowball into a thing that was both very popular and profitable.

It was simple and, functionally at least, it worked very neatly: Take new Kindle out of the box, switch it on, and download a book with it. No wifi or PC connection or other tomfoolery needed.

That was back in 2007 -- a time when many people still had landlines at home if they wanted to make a phone call, or a dumb phone in their pocket if they wanted to do that on-the-go. Some folks had Blackberries or connected Palm devices, but those things were rare.

And the Internet, and indeed Amazon itself, was a very different place back then. Having an Internet connection that was very quietly always available on a Whispernet-equipped Kindle was pretty cool at that time.

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Sidewalk is a different kind of network. It uses consumer devices (like Echo Dot speakers) to act as Sidewalk bridges. This generally works at a low frequency (900MHz-ish), to provide a bit of relatively slow, relatively long-range wireless network access for things that are otherwise lacking it.

The present-day operation works like this: Suppose I've got some Amazon Echo speakers scattered around my house. If a neighbor's Internet connection is on the fritz, then their Ring doorbell can use a tiny slice of my Internet bandwidth using Sidewalk via one of my Echo speakers to keep itself connected to the network and thereby still function as a doorbell.

Or, maybe their Ring doorbell is out on a post by the gate, where their wifi coverage sucks. If it can gather up a little slice of 900MHz Internet access from anyone's near-enough Sidewalk bridge, then they've still got a button for their gate that notifies them on their pocket supercomputer when some visitor is waiting out there. They don't even necessarily need to plan it this way in order for it to Just Work.

Or, what GP was referring to: Your hypothetical new smart TV might use the neighbors' Sidewalk-enabled device(s) to update or patch itself, produce new ads to show you, and/or send telemetry back home to Mother. It might do this even without you ever having deliberately connected it to any network at all.

---

Either thing (some modern equivalent to Whispernet, or the already-loose-in-the-wild Sidewalk system) could potentially be utilized by smart TVs and other devices to get access to the network and simply sidestep the oft-repeated, well-intended, and somewhat naive mantra of "It can't have Internet access if you never connect it!"

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.

Just feels the best that it's not a commercial product, rather a project built by cool people.

https://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/satellite-phone-service

But also, it's unlikely I'll live long enough where keeping an older vehicle won't be an option.

This is commonly repeated and but as far as I can tell nobody has actually demonstrated it.

seems on the cheaper side and it might work like he said

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.

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.

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

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDMI-CEC

FWIW I have two 2018 models with zero “smart” features.

My barber and grocery store is a $9 Uber Ride each way. So I could get away with a car easily where I live now. My wife and I have been down to one car since Covid.

But when I was in the burbs if metro Atlanta where everything wasn’t so close, it would have been over $100 easy going from one side to the other or basically anywhere besides the grocery store.

My car insurance is only $176 a month for my wife and I. It doesn’t make sense not to have a car, even if you include the minor maintenance on a car that would be hardly ever driven. Even at a theoretical $400 car payment + $176 in insurance, it still easy to come out ahead.

The reason why projectors don't use a single rgb lcd (like monitors) to produce the color is the same why all sub 5000$ projectors use pixel shift to fake 4k resolution: Too much light is blocked by the lcd itself if the individual pixels become too small.

Turning a HDMI device on wakes the TV and then it automatically selects that input. I've never been to the homescreen except by choice, and even then it is completely stock. Barebones, no ads - it has no internet to get any.

Someone is going to run in here talking about how smart TV's randomly connect themselves to wifi, which is absolutely nonsense.

HN things I guess.

No one offers actual fidelity on the streaming platforms. They consider cost to them to serve content and assume you don’t care enough to seek alternatives.

Getting rid of ads on the streaming stick and various streaming services is an interesting challenge though...

The AppleTV supports CEC and controls the power and the volume.

No nagging

You can intercept those as long as they're not using DoH/DoT.

There's historical speculation that a smart TV could connect to an open wireless access point, or more realistically, that it refuses to operate without internet access, perhaps after a certain number of power on hours.

Obligatory David Foster wallce just to add some gen x post structuralist nihilism

https://youtu.be/A_ujr9gi3wk

Turns out they track the aggregate of everyone’s brushing and if every employee brushes their teeth, the plan gets a discount.

”Lower rate based on group's participation in Beam Perks™ wellness program and a group aggregate Beam score of "A". Based on Beam® internal brushing and utilization data.”

Until people start abusing these "features", they will not go away.