Here's what I want for custom firmware: nothing. I don't mean "I don't want custom firmware". I want custom firmware THAT DOES NOTHING. Turn the TV into a dumb monitor. Do nothing else. Don't make me wait X seconds long for the TV Software to boot. Because I don't want it. I don't need it. I have external devices that do everything I want.
What really gets me is how inconvenient most interfaces are.
I don't own a TV, but every time I interact with one, be it apple TV, firestick, or some custom on-TV firmware thing, I find the UI reasonably beautiful but an absolute nightmare to use.
This might be because I don't use the TVs the way they are intended to be used. I typically know exactly what I want to watch before even switching it on. Their UIs however are built around aimlessly browsing and picking something off the top of the recommendations.
I always end up wishing I just had a keyboard and a mouse attached.
I think the reason bubbles down to the fact that people are used to TVs being dumb TVs with a remote that everyone knows how to operate. But the abilities of these TVs are growing exponentially compared to what people expect so they have to find a middleground by having a remote-looking pointing device and a TV-looking interface for this computer with a giant screen.
Eventually I believe it will evolve into something more functional.
These machines are almost impossible to operate without a remote. But remotes are not standardised; nor are the UIs the machines present. As a consequence, I become the only person that can efficiently operate my TV. And when I switch TVs, it takes me a month to learn how to drive it. The girlfriend doesn't have a chance.
Maybe I'm just slow on the uptake.
If TVs were cars, each brand of car would have different arrangements of controls; some would have a joystick for steering, some would have manual accelerator lever like a boat, some would have a horn operated by a foot-pedal, and they'd all have completely different gearstick locations for the different gears.
I need three different remotes to operate my TV: one for the TV, which I use only for switching inputs; one for the Sky STB; and one for my audio amplifier. I need all three to set up a viewing session. This is nuts, not least because none of these remotes is specific to the device they're paired with; each of these remotes has non-functional controls that are obviously meant for some other model, because they have no function or meaning with my model.
Disused remotes pile up in drifts in a cardboard box in my spare room.
Maybe in some distant future, the industry will come up with a standard for remote controls and user-interfaces, such that once you know one, you know them all, and so that any remote can be used to control any A/V device. This would drastically reduce the number of prefectly-good remote controls that end up in landfill.
This is kinda what HDMI CEC is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control). When I push the button on my AppleTV remote, the TV turns on, the receiver turns on and switches its input to the AppleTV. When push the power button again, the TV and receiver both turn off. Same thing when I grab the Playstation controller and turn it on.
I have a remote for my receiver and my TV, but I never ever touch them. The nice thing was that the only configuration required was to enable CEC on the TV and receiver. Everything else just worked.
> I always end up wishing I just had a keyboard and a mouse attached.
I'm with you on that. Screen keyboards suck, especially on a TV.
I still have my old Netcast 4K TV here, but the software is really clunky. It quite literally comes with advertisements built-in to the main GUI (placeholdered by "Smart LG TV") whenever you're connected to the internet. It's not seeing so much internet these days (some sort of LAN-only solution for Miracast would be nice), though.
Have you ever tried plugging a keyboard into your TV? Most of them have USB ports these days, and I'm sure with Linux they're got the basic keyboard drivers bundled.
Have you tried a Chromecast? Your phone or laptop is the UI, and the software you're using (which does need to explicitly support) sends it to the TV. Netflix, YouTube, VLC, and Chrome all support this.
It's a different workflow than with a mouse and keyboard, and the software's still generally going to prioritize browsing/top recommendations, but at least you're not dealing with an on-TV UX nightmare (even if it is pretty).
Are you willing to pay for it? A lot of manufacturers make displays intended for digital signage, which under the hood are basically just a TV with different software:
I actually have one of these made by Samsung. It's quite old though. It's a 40" 720p panel but it can take 1080p HDMI and looks quite ok actually. Can function as a standalone display or it has a builtin PC (a sub 1ghz AMD CPU I think, 256mb ram and a couple GB HDD inside it).
It is insanely heavy and well built (slightly dropped it once, RIP floor).
The panel: it is much much brighter than a regular TV but the kicker is there is no color or contrasts shift no matter how you look at it. I gamed on it for a while and the pixel response time is insanely fast. It is truly an amazing display. Too bad about the resolution though. I'm not using it anymore but I did not throw it away either.
> Are you willing to pay for it? A lot of manufacturers make displays intended for digital signage, which under the hood are basically just a TV with different software
According to your link (and to what I've seen at work) that's not entirlely correct. One of the differences they give:
> Built to run from 16/7 to 24/7 hours per day, have better cooling for longer runtimes
I bet this alone increases the price but quite a hefty amount.
I'm not the GP, but if they're anything like me, they just want the "dumb" part, not the "runs 24/7/365 at blindingly high levels of brightness".
These type of displays are usually low to mid range displays. You aren’t likely to find an OLED panel that supports Dolby Vision etc without “smart” features.
This “dumb tv” trope comes up in every one of these discussions. We are the minority and most people want a tv with a Netflix all and not to have to buy a set top box. There isn’t a market here.
I bring it up here because they’re reversing the LG firmware and modifying it. I would love a fork of this work that does nothing.
While a developer, this kind of work is outside my current wheelhouse and I just don’t have the time to learn and fork it myself. So throwing out my desire. Half hoping someone out there wants it more than I do.. and half just expressing my frustration with modern TVs.
I think there could be a bit of a market in installations / events.
Often smaller installs / live events people want simple non-smart screens for all kinds of things (on stage, in waiting areas, musician cues, info to crew, signage, etc), and although it's possible to buy expensive "monitors" that do it - being able to use cheap and large domestic kit with much faster startup and no extra crap, and no logos being displayed while booting or if it loses signal or whatever would be very desirable.
These are called digital signage displays - they have rs232 control ports, are a bit more ruggedly built, have a bit more cooling and are twice as expensive if not more than a civilian tv - if somebody sells one to you at all.
Most of the time - at least within events, we end up using "Hotel Mode" to disable some of the features or force the LCD to always boot up into a specific source.
The fun part of open source is that a market of 1 interested person is enough.
As an extreme case, Linus Torvalds decided to write a terminal emulator, do it straight on the bare metal for his PC, accidentally deleted his OS in the process, then got carried away a bit trying to survive without real OS. None of these decisions made any business sense, yet we have the entire Linux ecosystem out of it.
Not that much smaller, though. Of course the market for things-that-are-X is larger than the market for things-that-are-both-X-and-Y, since the latter is a subset of the former.
I wonder how many people in that majority category you’ve described are likely to want to install custom firmware though.
I’m a “hacker” with multiple LG TVs around the house (in fact I exclusively buy LG TVs) and I have no interest in putting custom firmware on those TV sets. So I can’t imagine there’s many inside the Venn bubble that are both laymen enough to want Netflix, technical enough to know about custom firmware but also motivated enough to want to install it.
So the number of people who want dumb firmware might not be disproportionately less than those who want custom smart firmware.
Not wanting to commit digital piracy makes you a "layman"? What other options are there? I'm assuming you're using "Netflix" as a placeholder for all similar streaming services, but even if not, there are still many shows only available there that you simply can't legally watch without it.
I think, given the context of the thread, they mean that a layman would be more likely to want a TV with Netflix built-in as opposed to an external device that typically performs better and is more flexible.
The point being exactly that since we're now entering a time where open source TV firmware is a thing, profit motives don't necessarily trump everything else anymore.
Making a firmware that does "nothing" is probably less work than making one that does a lot of things. So even in the new currency (developer time) it might be cheap and make some people happy.
Not true, pre-install a removable box. Preferably this becomes a standard where Google, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia share the same form factor. Now my LG TV from 2020 is missing out functionality, even though the hardware could support it.
Why would it need to carry a network connection (apart from CEC), when the point is that the display itself shouldn't be connecting to the network? Standardize on a certain barrel connector a certain distance away from the HDMI port, with the ethernet/wifi on the other side of the module.
It'd be great if say Google pushed TVs in this direction ("Google Display with smart cube. Never have an outdated TV again" or something), but I bet the decommodified dumpster fire of baked in software benefits them too much. After all, the last thing any of those companies in the business of selling "content" wants people to do is to end up plugging in a Kodi box. It's like banks with overdraft fees - by abusing your customers, you make them worry that switching will result in even more abuse, thus encouraging them stick with the abuse they already know.
Yes, I know, also power, just not a usable amount. Ethernet over HDMI is rarely implemented and caps out at 100Mbps. Even if you have it, that still leaves you with a power cable and big ugly box to put somewhere.
That makes it pretty much perfect for an open source project, then. Suitably motivated individuals with some technical skills can build and use it if they want to and the majority can remain blissfully ignorant of its existence.
Even if true (and I don't think it is), that is irrelevant to an attempt to reverse engineer an existing smart TV and create custom "dumb" firmware for it. All that needs is people with the desire for it and the technical skills to pull it off.
Vision and HiSense don't incorporate any ads. You can also buy kits to convert your television into, well, just a television.
Also, not having features doesn't necessarily make your TV faster. I have a 39" Seiki from 2013 that takes 6-8 seconds to power on and about 5 to display the image again when changing resolutions. Great panel, wouldn't trade it for another LG at least.
Hisense definitely does automatic content recognition.
the sceptre panels are stupid cheap, but they fail. and good luck getting an rma through support. otherwise they support hdr and motion compensation etc etc so its not a bad deal
I find it easier to just never connect my TV to the internet and call that as much of a win as I'm gonna get. Though, with this sidewalk stuff, soon even that may not be possible.
I would be a lot more motivated to buy this stuff (& pay extra) if the FSF/Mozilla or somebody provided certification for IoT hygiene - devices that don't spy on you, don't have ads, dont send telemetry home and dont even have the capability to access the internet.
This is one of the main reasons I dont buy IoT devices and don't have an oura ring (though I'd like one). I'm skeptical even of the "good" brands and I cant be bothered to set up offline VLANS and the like to "fight" the natural tendency of corporate whores to worm their way into my life uninvited. I think this is why many corporate execs voluntarily forgo opportunities for profit from people like me - power is just so much more enticing.
What's worse is that 5G probably means that IoT devices won't even need our internet connections in future. Imagine a brave new world of subscription lightswitches and TVs to go with already existing subscription phones that turn off when you dont pay the bill. Clearly consumers are clamoring for all of this, since the market will probably one day exist. /s
Organic labeling serves as a good model to follow here.
Obviously before there was a market for organic food many farmers claimed that there wasn't a market for organic food and that outside of a few activists nobody really cared. There was though.
> Where the numbers keep growing is in its number of active SmartCast accounts, which are now over 14 million, and how much money it makes from each user on average. That number has nearly doubled from last year, going from $10.44 to $19.89. On the call with investors and analysts, Vizio execs said 77 percent of that money comes directly from advertising.
(Amounts in article per month I think) I'd be glad to pay 300$ extra for a good dumb TV, the problem is _no one really wants to sell it_.
This is like the Kindle with Ads model from Amazon. You can pay Amazon an extra $20 (or request via support) to not have advertisements on the device forever. Or save a few bucks and deal with the occasional ad. And from what I can tell, the Kindle with Ads is still a pretty popular product.
The thing is, you can't pay extra for a TV without ads - that option simply doesn't exist like it does for the Kindle. At best, you can buy a completely different TV from a digital signage vendor for 10x the price, but that's going to be a completely different product.
And what if I want the smart features, just without the ads and tracking? Where's the "unlock ad-free version" button that Android apps figured out a decade ago?
I have paid to turn ads off and the infuriating thing is you still get ads for Amazon services, usability hints and a tonne of other junk that cannot be turned off (like “you haven’t bought washing liquid in a while, want to add it to your list?”).
Recently, they reprogrammed every Kindle Paperwhite so the UI is almost completely different. Ever since I first saw one in a shop, Kindle Paperwhites have always looked and functioned a certain way… and now it's different. Instead of the “book” that I have muscle memory for, it's now interacting with a computer interface again. If I wanted that, I'd read on my laptop.
Looking “clunky” and “old”, more like a dictionary-bookmark than an iPhone, was a feature, to me. It doesn't need to be slick and rounded with a main menu. You certainly don't have to move everything around so that there's a × button in the top-right corner of things that aren't modal popups; that just breaks the pre-existing “top-left corner to go back” idiom (which still exists for the “library” and reader mode).
And whose idea was it to make it so the “change brightness” menu also drew a cross-hatched pattern over your actual book? That makes it so you have to repeatedly enter and exit that menu (which now takes up nearly half the screen, for smaller buttons than before), unless you've memorised the brightness level numbers. You also can't judge at a glance where to touch for the correct brightness level if you do know it, because they replaced the custom 15-little-boxes interface with a generic slider widget that only uses the middle of the range – making it behave differently to every other identical-in-appearance slider in the OS. So what's the point of making it look the same?
The one improvement is that they removed a banner ad (presumably because they wanted the space for extra UI padding). I don't think that's worth it – but I have no choice, because I don't control my own device.
(They also removed the “experimental” from the “experimental web browser”, which might be an improvement, even though it seems the same; there's less UI space thanks to the pad-pocalypse, and it still can't do Cloudflare DDOS-walls properly. Not that I blame Amazon for the latter problem; my browser can't, either.)
In general, I'm beginning to feel that habitually updating software is a risk.
I have a paperwhite, but I haven't connected it for a while. Generally when I do connect it to a PC to upload more books, I'll habitually update the software. Its good practice right? Guess I'll now have to remember in perpetuity not to.
Recently I updated my Raspberry Pi setup to find that the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS does not support the official Raspberry Pi cameras (it does add a ton of functionality, including a speed boost for Raspberry Pi 4, but nothing that adds stuff in my setup). So I rolled back everything. And I'll have to remember not to update unless they (or someone else) has added camera support back in.
The point is that I used to laugh at the old guys who refused to update their software. Now I'm turning into them. If everything is working the way I want, why update? Especially for personal devices where the impact of "security vulnerabilities" is so low.
My TV is the final AV output device for 3 games consoles running 8 TV apps.
One thing I’d love for it to do is provide unified close caption styling, always on closed captions, automated sound levelling, and automated color / black levelling.
I’m always surprised when I see a tv that has brightness / contrast sliders. That stuff could be easily automated the same way I calibrate my PC display.
I desperately want the this too, but a good reason not to is that I got a message from LG about my tv possibly overheating and having a free motherboard replacement even if it doesn’t, which I would never have known about otherwise (likewise if I disabled the network on it, I guess).
I'm assuming you meant the smart part, and not the image processing part. And all other kinds of audio/video processing. If yes, even I'd love to have that!
