7 ms·

Don't get me started about TVs. When I grew up our family TV turned on in seconds, and pressing channel up/down reacted in tens of milliseconds.

Cyph0n 9y ago
To be fair, you weren't getting near-instantaneous full HD quality broadcasting with DVR support on your TV back then.
- dreamcompiler 9y ago
  The problem is that there's no reason one couldn't design a TV that had both full HD and zero boot time with instantaneous channel switching. The reason such TVs don't exist is simply engineering laziness.
  - Cyph0n 9y ago
    > The reason such TVs don't exist is simply engineering laziness. If your answer to the question "why can't a billion dollar industry provide me with instantaneous channel switching?" is "because they are lazy", you are severely misguided (at the very least!). There are hundreds of extremely talented engineers working full-time on these problems. If the solution were as easy as you propose, the issues would be solved. > zero boot time That's not going to happen, ever, but I'll assume you meant "faster" boot times. Probably. Keep in mind that your average set-top box likely goes through a more complex secure boot process than most electronic devices you would ever interact with. Why? Because if people can run arbitrary firmware on a set-top box, your cable company would lose a shit ton of money. > instantaneous channel switching You are bound by the latency required to demodulate a signal being broadcast from some satellite ~30,000 km away from the receiver, decrypt the resulting stream, and finally decode it, all on the fly so you get a nice, continuous, stutter-free full HD broadcast. I am no expert, so there is probably way more stuff happening behind the scene that someone else could probably shed light on. The point of my comment was to demonstrate that things can sometimes be more complicated than they seem at first glance.
    - jimktrains2 9y ago
      When you change channels it has to wait for the next key frame before it can display video.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - Yaggo 9y ago
      > If your answer to the question "why can't a billion dollar industry provide me with instantaneous channel switching?" is "because they are lazy", you are severely misguided (at the very least!). There are hundreds of extremely talented engineers working full-time on these problems. If the solution were as easy as you propose, the issues would be solved. Simple solution: just put 10x decoders/tuners for most recently used channels. I don't think it's really an engineering problem but more about cost-effectiviness, i.e. not enough consumers are willing to pay the premium.
      - dreamcompiler 9y ago
        Exactly. Just having two decoders instead of one would drastically improve the 80% use case of consecutive channel surfing.
        oasisbob 9y ago
        Some TVs including Samsungs have dual tuners. However, even if the read-ahead tuner was perfectly predictive you'd still need to flip through channels fairly slowly, otherwise you'll outrun it - about a second a channel.
    - averagewall 9y ago
      The distance to the satellite has nothing to do with it. You're using big numbers to exaggerate the problem. Decrypting and demodulating have be as fast as the data is coming, otherwise the delay would grow until you never saw the end of the show. So that's not the reason either.
  - katastic 9y ago
    Mine is almost instantaneous. Except it's a lie because the TV is never actually off. It's "Standby" mode consumes a crap ton of wattage and the manual literally says "unplug it" if you intend to not use it for a long time. Not to mention the damn spyware that's included with it...
- lostlogin 9y ago
  Wish I could get that...
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Fair enough, but you were getting useful fallback, the image quality progressively degrading, and even with almost no image, the audio was still intelligible. With digital boradcast, it's all-or-nothing: all is fine, all is fine, until the error correction can no longer save you...and you get soundless picture, with block artifacts. Very useful for emergency broadcasts, when anything unicast will be overloaded as well.
averagewall 9y ago
How long ago? My color CRT TV took a good 10 s or so to warm up the tube before you'd see much/anything. But at least it responded instantly, so you could spend that time walking back to the couch instead of waiting for some stupid menu. Instant and trustworthy response is basically gone from most appliances. I think it's a combination of marketing (has to look high tech) and cost (touch buttons are cheaper than mechanically interlinked toggle buttons. I still can't tell if my computer monitor is on or off because I don't know the weird LED flashing code it uses to communicate that (Holy crap! appliances use something like morse code to tell you important information about their state! How did they get so needlessly cryptic? If there's no picture, I have to check all the cables and push the power button a couple of times to see what happens. Web programmers are as much to blame too. Show me a web video player that has play and pause buttons that always do what they say when they say it.
- mietek 9y ago
  > Show me a web video player that has play and pause buttons that always do what they say when they say it. The only player which ever worked properly — even allowing the user to step through a video frame by frame — was part of Apple’s QuickTime framework. Fun fact: QuickTime will be 26 years old in December. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  mps / mps-youtube :)
thaumasiotes 9y ago
We have some recent TVs. They have no buttons. Including power buttons. If you want to turn them on, you need the remote control.
- cesarb 9y ago
  The ones I've seen don't have physical buttons, but have nearly invisible capacitive buttons, at least for power/channel/volume. For most other functions, you do need the remote control.
bitwize 9y ago
Y'know how they say "don't touch that dial"? When I grew up, TVs actually still had dials you had to turn. The tuner responded instantaneously when you changed the channel. Now get off my lawn you damn kids.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Of course it did, you were directly manipulating the a resistor in its circuit. Getting the channel just right...and keeping it there...that was, of course, the flipside.

Cyph0n 9y ago

To be fair, you weren't getting near-instantaneous full HD quality broadcasting with DVR support on your TV back then.

dreamcompiler 9y ago
The problem is that there's no reason one couldn't design a TV that had both full HD and zero boot time with instantaneous channel switching. The reason such TVs don't exist is simply engineering laziness.
- Cyph0n 9y ago
  > The reason such TVs don't exist is simply engineering laziness. If your answer to the question "why can't a billion dollar industry provide me with instantaneous channel switching?" is "because they are lazy", you are severely misguided (at the very least!). There are hundreds of extremely talented engineers working full-time on these problems. If the solution were as easy as you propose, the issues would be solved. > zero boot time That's not going to happen, ever, but I'll assume you meant "faster" boot times. Probably. Keep in mind that your average set-top box likely goes through a more complex secure boot process than most electronic devices you would ever interact with. Why? Because if people can run arbitrary firmware on a set-top box, your cable company would lose a shit ton of money. > instantaneous channel switching You are bound by the latency required to demodulate a signal being broadcast from some satellite ~30,000 km away from the receiver, decrypt the resulting stream, and finally decode it, all on the fly so you get a nice, continuous, stutter-free full HD broadcast. I am no expert, so there is probably way more stuff happening behind the scene that someone else could probably shed light on. The point of my comment was to demonstrate that things can sometimes be more complicated than they seem at first glance.
  - jimktrains2 9y ago
    When you change channels it has to wait for the next key frame before it can display video.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Yaggo 9y ago
    > If your answer to the question "why can't a billion dollar industry provide me with instantaneous channel switching?" is "because they are lazy", you are severely misguided (at the very least!). There are hundreds of extremely talented engineers working full-time on these problems. If the solution were as easy as you propose, the issues would be solved. Simple solution: just put 10x decoders/tuners for most recently used channels. I don't think it's really an engineering problem but more about cost-effectiviness, i.e. not enough consumers are willing to pay the premium.
    - dreamcompiler 9y ago
      Exactly. Just having two decoders instead of one would drastically improve the 80% use case of consecutive channel surfing.
      - oasisbob 9y ago
        Some TVs including Samsungs have dual tuners. However, even if the read-ahead tuner was perfectly predictive you'd still need to flip through channels fairly slowly, otherwise you'll outrun it - about a second a channel.
  - averagewall 9y ago
    The distance to the satellite has nothing to do with it. You're using big numbers to exaggerate the problem. Decrypting and demodulating have be as fast as the data is coming, otherwise the delay would grow until you never saw the end of the show. So that's not the reason either.
- katastic 9y ago
  Mine is almost instantaneous. Except it's a lie because the TV is never actually off. It's "Standby" mode consumes a crap ton of wattage and the manual literally says "unplug it" if you intend to not use it for a long time. Not to mention the damn spyware that's included with it...
lostlogin 9y ago
Wish I could get that...
Piskvorrr 9y ago
Fair enough, but you were getting useful fallback, the image quality progressively degrading, and even with almost no image, the audio was still intelligible. With digital boradcast, it's all-or-nothing: all is fine, all is fine, until the error correction can no longer save you...and you get soundless picture, with block artifacts. Very useful for emergency broadcasts, when anything unicast will be overloaded as well.

averagewall 9y ago

How long ago? My color CRT TV took a good 10 s or so to warm up the tube before you'd see much/anything. But at least it responded instantly, so you could spend that time walking back to the couch instead of waiting for some stupid menu. Instant and trustworthy response is basically gone from most appliances. I think it's a combination of marketing (has to look high tech) and cost (touch buttons are cheaper than mechanically interlinked toggle buttons. I still can't tell if my computer monitor is on or off because I don't know the weird LED flashing code it uses to communicate that (Holy crap! appliances use something like morse code to tell you important information about their state! How did they get so needlessly cryptic? If there's no picture, I have to check all the cables and push the power button a couple of times to see what happens. Web programmers are as much to blame too. Show me a web video player that has play and pause buttons that always do what they say when they say it.

mietek 9y ago
> Show me a web video player that has play and pause buttons that always do what they say when they say it. The only player which ever worked properly — even allowing the user to step through a video frame by frame — was part of Apple’s QuickTime framework. Fun fact: QuickTime will be 26 years old in December. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime
dredmorbius 9y ago
mps / mps-youtube :)

thaumasiotes 9y ago

We have some recent TVs. They have no buttons. Including power buttons. If you want to turn them on, you need the remote control.

cesarb 9y ago
The ones I've seen don't have physical buttons, but have nearly invisible capacitive buttons, at least for power/channel/volume. For most other functions, you do need the remote control.

bitwize 9y ago

Y'know how they say "don't touch that dial"? When I grew up, TVs actually still had dials you had to turn. The tuner responded instantaneously when you changed the channel. Now get off my lawn you damn kids.

Piskvorrr 9y ago
Of course it did, you were directly manipulating the a resistor in its circuit. Getting the channel just right...and keeping it there...that was, of course, the flipside.