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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
by xahrepap 5y ago
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.
- anontrot 5y agoI'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!
- deanc 5y agoThis “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.
- xahrepap 5y agoI 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- beezischillin 5y agoIt's not really worth it for them to make dumb TVs either, I assume, since that implies they can't shove ads and telemetry into them.
- black_puppydog 5y agoThe 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.
- summm 5y agoDeveloper time is paid only once. As soon as it is paid, the manufacturer loses out when he is not putting the spyware everywhere he can.
- Talanes 5y agoThe manufacturer is completely irrelevant to the development in this case though, so sod what they want. Which is GPs point. Open source TV firmware means that the manufacturers motives are no longer the totality of the conversation.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y agoWell, what it does is reinforce the idea that privacy is a luxury. You can get it ( to an extent ), if you pay enough.
- omnicognate 5y agoEven 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.
- taneq 5y agoThat 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.
- deckiedan 5y agoI 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.
- colordrops 5y agoThese exist. Even LG sells them. They are just a lot more expensive.
- 3guk 5y agoMost 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.
- baq 5y agoThese 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.
- colordrops 5y agoYou can buy some brands on B&H.
- laumars 5y agoI 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.
- franga2000 5y ago> laymen enough to want Netflix 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.
- whazor 5y agoNot 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.
- pjerem 5y agoThat’s HDMI.
- franga2000 5y ago...which can't carry power or a network connection - both things that could easily be provided to the module through a single slot connector.
- timthorn 5y agoHDMI can certainly carry Ethernet
- franga2000 5y agoYes, 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.
- timthorn 5y agoThe bit rate of all the current streaming providers and Bluray players fits well within 100Mbps, so I'm not sure that's really a limitation?
- mindslight 5y agoWhy 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.
- awill 5y ago>>There isn’t a market here. I can assure you there is an even smaller a market for a reverse engineered open source LG TV firmware.
- TuringTest 5y agoAnd an even smaller market for a reverse engineered open source LG TV firmware that does nothing, I'm afraid.
- hyperman1 5y agoThe 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.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoNot 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.
- beebeepka 5y agoOh, there's a market all right. I want one
- ryall 5y agoExactly! When it comes to home media I prefer the Linux model of small utilities connected by pipes.
- colordrops 5y agoSorry to be pedantic but it's the unix model.
- black_puppydog 5y agoWhat 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.
- can16358p 5y agoI 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.
- denton-scratch 5y ago> that everyone knows how to operate 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.
- pkulak 5y agoOkay, then you gotta pay for it. And the problem is, no one really wants to pay for it. https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-advertising-inscape-data-privacy-q3-2021 https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-adver... 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.
- denysvitali 5y agoNothing stops you from disconnecting the antenna or having a faraday cage around the tx/rx components
- tpxl 5y ago> 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_.
- shurane 5y agoThis 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.
- laumars 5y agoI 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?”).
- revax 5y agoI think the closest thing you'll find are hospitality TV. Display used in hotel, restaurants and the like.
- gorgoiler 5y agoMy 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.
- brindy 5y agoI 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).
- baq 5y agoI ignored this message until my friend’s tv psu let some smoke out. So yeah, it was worth it.
- fy20 5y agoAre 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: https://www.samsung.com/us/business/displays/4k-uhd/ https://www.samsung.com/us/business/displays/4k-uhd/ There's an infographic on the differences here: https://image-us.samsung.com/SamsungUS/b2b/resource/2016/07/13/b2b_resource_INFOGRAPHIC_LFD_ConsumerVSCommercial_JUL15IDG.pdf https://image-us.samsung.com/SamsungUS/b2b/resource/2016/07/...
- dkdbejwi383 5y agoThese 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.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago> 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".
- Ericson2314 5y agoWow what a document. Commerical products are always nicely so much less bullshit. Funny to read the manufacturer say so!
- amne 5y agoI 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.
- washadjeffmad 5y agoSceptre makes "dumb" TVs: https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.html?sort=tbt.parent_pdtype&order=DESC https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm... 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.
- grepfru_it 5y agoHisense 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
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- jonatron 5y agoIf you're willing to take your TV to bits, you could replace the motherboard with a generic LCD controller board from aliexpress.