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My Samsung TV got more and more unusable with every update. Over the years, saved apps, like Youtube, started to disappear every time it woke up. Then it would

My Samsung TV got more and more unusable with every update. Over the years, saved apps, like Youtube, started to disappear every time it woke up. Then it would default to their Samsung TV app, rather than your last app. Samsung TV app happened to be on the Baywatch channel every time my young children started the stupid thing. Finally, after it took 2 minutes to load the youtube app, I factory-reset the device, disconnected the internet from it, and put a Beelink mini PC in front of it. Works flawlessly. Samsung product life cycle support seems like planned obsolescence.

napolux 2y ago
I have a similar experience with my high-end Samsung TV from 2013. The TV itself still works perfectly so I'm not replacing it soon (still 1080p, not 4K, but...), but over time, Samsung has steadily removed key features with each update. When I first bought it, it supported Skype video calls (and now the integrated webcam can't be used at all), IPTV streaming, and various third-party apps — all of which are now gone. NEVER BUYING A SAMSUNG TV AGAIN
- pjmlp 2y ago
  The issue is not Samsung per se, it is the smart TV crap we can't get rid of. With luck there are some old TVs still on remaining stock and that is about it.
  - account42 2y ago
    But you can at least for now still use those "smart" TVs as dumb displays for whatever device you want and just ignore the fact that the TV is running a full android stack or similar. There really is no need to scrounge for older devices with inferior display tech.
- mrweasel 2y ago
  This is exactly why "Smart" TVs don't make any sense. My in-laws have a perfectly fine Sony TV, it's nok 4K, but the HD picture quality is amazing still. Apps have slowly started to disappear as they are no longer being updated and new one aren't being added. I don't know how this work, but either Sony or the streaming service must be making the apps, and neither seems interested in maintaining apps for a 10+ year old TV. So when the streaming services are updating their backend, older TV don't get updated applications. Smart TVs make absolutely no sense, the streaming service are moving to fast, so you'll need a cheaper box, or a product that is support for a decade.
  - xp84 2y ago
    100%. I think most people should probably transition their thinking from using smart TV apps being an obvious or reasonable thing to do, to viewing them like the ads you sometimes find in the box when you buy something. They’re basically just ads for streaming services, and they’re mainly there to try to trick you into connecting the TV to the Internet so that it can gather data for them. In the event that one wants the app functionality, they’ll always be better off with a streaming stick. Even in respectable brands of TVs like Sony, the SOC’s are weaker than what you find in that $40 “Chromecast with Google TV.” so they’re pretty horrible to use even while they are current and supported.
- zamalek 2y ago
  LGs, while still smart TVs, are relatively competent at being dumb TVs. Your only other options these days (sans rescuing a dumb TV from e-waste) are commercial panels and projectors.
  - Tijdreiziger 2y ago
    We have a 4K TV from Philips (really, TP Vision), which has Android TV, but you can just set it to an HDMI input and then it works as a dumb TV. Being a Philips (TP Vision), it also has Ambilight, which is nice. It’s a few years old though, so no guarantees that newer Philips (TP Vision) models work the same way.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    If you just use an HDMI input and attach some streaming box to it, Samsung TVs work just fine. Just never touch the remote and only interact with the source and everything works.
- MaxikCZ 2y ago
  My experience with LG wasnt any better. Thorough about a year the tv became increasingly unresponsive. You start it, after 30 seconds the sound andpicture appeared, and for about 2 full minutes it would not react to inputs what so ever (except turning off). So if you happen to turn the tv off with higher volume, you could not launch it in the evening without it blasting for 2+ minutes at night. Abhorent
- bobdvb 2y ago
  Microsoft removed support for Skype on TV, not Samsung. Most apps get removed because the people writing them don't want to support them anymore. The Samsung framework from 2013 was always trouble and it doesn't support many current W3C features that you'd want as a developer. Most people I know are drawing the line at supporting 2014 or 2016 Samsung devices. Could Samsung update their devices to ensure they still supported modern frameworks? Possibly, but they don't really get any revenue from providing OS upgrades and those devices suck in terms of RAM and CPU.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    I hate this idea that software "rots" all by itself when it's just left on a device and is impossible to keep working. I would at the very, very least expect my device to work exactly as it did on day one, for the next 50 years, assuming I don't change the software. It's bits on a flash drive! It doesn't rot, outside some freak cosmic ray from space flipping a bit. If you're saying the software stops working because the backend it talks to goes away, well that's a deliberate choice the company is making. All they have to do is have a proper versioning system and do not touch the backend service, and it also should work forever.
    - Hackbraten 2y ago
      Certificates expire.
      - albrewer 2y ago
        Google learning this the hard way with the recent chromecast outage[0] [0]: https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Streaming/Regarding-an-issue-with-Chromecast-2nd-gen-and-Chromecast-Audio/m-p/692041 https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Streaming/Regarding-a...
      - 3np 2y ago
        So don't burn CA pubkeys into your binaries without means for user override. If the software can persist a user-specific analytics ID it can support user certs. This is a solved problem.
- toolslive 2y ago
  what bother's me even more is that they are constantly spying on me (phone home, what am I watching, ...) and pushing advertisements to my TV. My next TV will probably not be connected to the internet.
  - update 2y ago
    I use a pi-hole to block the spying. My experience with Amazon's FireOS & Roku is they phone home a lot.
  - ce4 2y ago
    Why wait for the next TV when you can just disconnect the darn existing box now?
- hbn 2y ago
  Well I'm not sure what use you'd have out of Skype integration when Skype itself is being axed in a couple of months
- KeplerBoy 2y ago
  Still appreciating my 2011 high end Samsung TV. I believe it's the last non-smart product year. It could stream videos from a network share but that's about it. Judging by current trends i will have to replace the attached chromecast before the TV breaks.
- sgt 2y ago
  It's kinda common knowledge at this point that almost all Smart TV's suck, especially Samsung. I went the Samsung route as well - the TV itself is fine, but the software is horrible. The solution (that I hope everyone knows about by now) is to buy an Apple TV and connect it. Once the TV starts, it shows Apple TV from the get-go and not any of the Samsung stuff.
  - account42 2y ago
    > The solution (that I hope everyone knows about by now) is to buy an Apple TV and connect it. Once the TV starts, it shows Apple TV from the get-go and not any of the Samsung stuff. Or just connect the TV to your PC where you have the freedom to run whatever software you want. Why replace one crappy "smart" device with another.
- lostmsu 2y ago
  Why are other apps gone?
jerf 2y ago
I pulled my Samsung Smart TV off the network a while ago, precisely because it was getting slower and slower over time. The allegations of spying pushed me over, but the apparent belief that they own my TV would also have done it. I want a separation between my display device and the thing serving it anyhow, but that's just me in my techie world. The fact that performance got worse with each update, though, that's just over the line for everyone. I mean, if you're going to babble about how you're upgrading my experience, shouldn't you, you know, upgrade my experience instead of constantly downgrading it? My experience gets downgraded, but gee golly, it sure seems like yours is getting upgraded. Well. It's really not that hard to not plug in the ethernet cable. My Roku boxes have also had the same trajectory over the years. As time rolls on, they just get slower and slower with each update. Slowly, but surely. How exactly this is accomplished I'm not even sure, it's not like they're overflowing with new features or doing bold new computations for my benefit. They just get a little bit slower every effing time. But at least replacing my Roku boxes is $20-40 now. Hey, sure, OK, a $40 thing probably can't be expected to work 5 years from now. If nothing else, video codecs do march on and specs may exceed what the hardware decoders can handle. OK. My $1000+ TV does not get that grace. It damned well better be able to turn on in less than 30 seconds, even 10 years, 20 years from now. No excuses.
eckesicle 2y ago
I also had the Baywatch bug. Neo QLED right? Every time you’d start the tv it’d switch to the Samsung Baywatch 24/7 stream. So inappropriate for the children.
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  >So inappropriate for the children. The bug, or Baywatch itself?
mbowcut2 2y ago
I had a smart TV that gradually got slower and slower until it became basically useless. I figured it was just running out of RAM as apps got larger with updates over the years.
hadlock 2y ago
We bought a samsung tv in 2016 and it slowly became unusable by mid-2020. Fortunately it got dropped by the movers and we were able to justify buying a new TV (LG). The LG UI/UX is awful though, I wish we'd bought a sony. LG TVs don't have a way to simply select "HDMI1/2/3/4" you're stuck using it's "smart" detection system, which can only be reset by physically unplugging the HDMI cables from the back of the TV, which is never easy to get to. Apparently the solution is to buy Sony and just pay the extra price. I have a "smart" Samsung TV in my home office but it's never been plugged into the network and has a chromecast and various networked devices plugged in to it as a "dumb tv", that has been working out great, the TV still turns on/off easily and is as fast as the day I bought it (makes sense, it's still running the factory firmware).
- tzs 2y ago
  > LG TVs don't have a way to simply select "HDMI1/2/3/4" you're stuck using it's "smart" detection system, which can only be reset by physically unplugging the HDMI cables from the back of the TV, which is never easy to get to. Apparently the solution is to buy Sony and just pay the extra price. Another possible solution is to only use one input on the TV. Connect an A/V receiver to that one input and connect all your other devices to the A/V receiver. Then you should only need to deal with switching inputs on the TV if you want to watch over the air TV using the TV's tuner. You can probably even get rid of that need by getting a stand-alone TV tuner and hooking that up to the A/V receiver. Many A/V receivers have network interfaces that you can use to control them if for some reason you don't want to use their remote. Most Denon receivers for example have an HTTP server that presents a web-based interface if you browse to it from a computer or mobile device. They also run a simple HTTP based API that is easy to use from scripts. For example here is a shell script that gets the current volume setting of mine: URL=http://192.168.0.xx/goform/AppCommand.xml cat > tmp.$$ <<HERE <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <tx> <cmd id="1">GetVolumeLevel</cmd> </tx> HERE curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: text/xml" --upload-file tmp.$$ $URL rm tmp.$$ which when run gives me this at the moment: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <rx> <cmd> <volume>-45.0</volume> <disptype>RELATIVE</disptype> <dispvalue>-45.0dB</dispvalue> </cmd> </rx>
  - 2y ago
bobdvb 2y ago
I never worked for Samsung, but I built TVs for JVC and LG, among many other brands. I don't work in consumer electronics anymore but a decade ago that was my field. TVs are a wildly unprofitable business. It's astoundingly bad. You get 4-6 months to make any profit on a new model before it gets discounted so heavily by retailers that you're taking a bath on each one sold. So every dollar in the BOM (bill of materials) has to be carefully considered, and not far back the CPUs in practically every TV was single core or dual core, and still under 1GHz. Bottom of the bin ARM cores you'd think twice to fit to a cheap tablet. They sit within a custom app framework which was written before HTML5 was a standard. Or, hey want to write in an old version of .NET? Or Adobe Stagecraft, another name for Adobe Flash on TV? Apps get dropped on TVs because the app developers don't want to support ancient frameworks. It's like asking them to still support IE10. You either hold back the evolution of the app, or you declare some generation of TV now obsolete. Some developers will freeze their app, put it in maintenance mode only and concentrate on the new one, but even then that maintenance requires some effort. And the backend developers want to shutdown the API endpoints that are getting 0.1% of the traffic but costing them time and money to keep. Yes, those older TVs are literally 0.1% or less of use even on a supported app. After a decade in consumer electronics, working with some of the biggest brands in the world (my work was awarded an Emmy) I can confidently say that I never saw anyone doing what could be described as 'planned obsolescence'. The single biggest driver for a TV or other similar device being shit is cost, because >95% of customers want a cheap deal. Samsung, LG and Sony are competing with cheap white label brands where the customer doesn't care what they're buying. So the good brands have to keep their prices somewhere close to the cheap products in order to give the customers something to pick from. If a device contains cheap components, it was because someone said "If we shave $1 off here, it'll take $3 off the shelf price." I once encountered a situation where a retailer, who was buying cheap set-top boxes from China to stick a now defunct brandname on, argued to halve the size of an EEPROM. It saved them less than 5c on each box made. For long life support of the OS and frameworks, aside from the fact that the CPU and RAM are poor, Samsung, LG and Sony don't make much money from the apps. It barely pays to run the app store itself, let alone maintain upgrades to the OS for an ever increasing, aging range of products. And we as consumers have to take responsibility for the fact that we want to buy cheap, disposable electronics. We'll always look for the deal and buy it on sale. Given the choice of high quality and cheap, most people choose cheap. So they're hearing the message and delivering.
mystified5016 2y ago
This describes essentially all Samsung products: really cool for the first few months then progressively accelerating slide straight into the trash. I'm never buying any Samsung products again if I can avoid it. A forced update bricked my damn phone when it forcibly restarted while I was showing something to a client. Samsung doesn't give a shit. They'll trash the device you paid for and tell you to suck it up and buy a new one.
- withinrafael 2y ago
  Yep, I stopped using Samsung products not too long ago. Reminds me of the time when a Samsung VP (or whatever his title was) showed up at a Microsoft Build conference to promote their TVs and the shiny new Tizen .NET Framework that shipped inbox. I asked if they planned to backport it to last year’s model—which I had just purchased—so we could test with and target existing TVs in the market. He looked me straight in the eye and, with a smarmy grin, said (paraphrasing), 'No, we want consumers to buy new TVs.' I walked away disgusted and abandoned any idea of targeting that platform. Similarly, I vaguely recall a Samsung event that had leadership--CEO?--flat out say they wanted consumers to buy new TVs every year or so. I couldn't immediately find the quote though.
deergomoo 2y ago
I find it appalling that no matter how much money you spend on a Samsung TV, you'll get banner ads in the fucking source switcher. Absolute total disregard for their users. LG still has bits that are ultimately ads, but at least they're less egregious, presented as suggested content in a Home view that already aggregates content from various sources. Not ads for fucking McDonalds and similar. At least that was the case as of a couple of years ago—I disconnected my LG from the internet the day I got an Apple TV and never looked back. Just let me buy a large class leading display without trying to insert yourself into my life, please. I'm already paying through the nose for it.
rplnt 2y ago
Sounds like every Android vendor, woth Google leading the pack. (disclaimer: maybe 5-10 years ago)
eitally 2y ago
Contrary to lots of other opinions here, I bought a 65" Samsung TV at the beginning of covid and I sincerely don't have any significant complaints. The remote is easy to use, launching apps is straightforward, connecting an ARC soundbar was no problem, nor was connecting a Chromecast and an Xbox, and it "just works". Every once in a blue moon (maybe twice a year-ish) I've had to power cycle it to fix a wifi connectivity issue, which may well just be a result of DHCP lease expiration on my network. I have a modern Sony Bravia, too, which is running "Google TV" natively. On the plus side, the UI is just about identical to what you get with a Google TV dongle (which I also have, plugged into an old 32" monitor in front of my bike trainer), but it's also a really heavy interface that's also increasingly rich in ads. If your household is like mine, and holds subscriptions to a half dozen or more streaming services, some of which are bundled and some of which are either discounted or comped via entirely different subscriptions (mobile phone) or membership (credit card), it's really not helpful to have Google show me subscriptions I might want to add-on to my Google TV sub, nor do I appreciate seeing ads for content from things I don't subscribe to. Also, the Sony remote has about 50 buttons -- not a fan. All things considered, I end up having to fiddle with the Sony TV far more frequently than the Samsung one, usually because of network or app issues. We have an old Roku stick plugged into an old tv in a spare room, too, and it's almost intolerably slow. It's primary use case is to plug into our projector for backyard movies in nice weather, so I keep it around, but man is it dog slow.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  > don't have any significant complaints. Are you happy with it spying on you? That's what all Samsung televisions do, and there is no way to turn it off. They advertise on their own web page that they monitor the content viewed on their televisions for targeted advertising. This isn't via some sort of metadata, they take screenshots at regular intervals and upload them to very insecure hosting. I hope you never look at any "sensitive" content on your TV!
  - rossant 2y ago
    Do you have a source for the screenshot thing?
Namidairo 2y ago
I had a similarly negative experience, sadly. Samsung managed to break HDMI-CEC in the final firmware update for one of their tvs, and wouldn't allow downgrading. Which tends not to be great for a tv one wants to use with a Chromecast or similar media box...

napolux 2y ago

I have a similar experience with my high-end Samsung TV from 2013. The TV itself still works perfectly so I'm not replacing it soon (still 1080p, not 4K, but...), but over time, Samsung has steadily removed key features with each update. When I first bought it, it supported Skype video calls (and now the integrated webcam can't be used at all), IPTV streaming, and various third-party apps — all of which are now gone. NEVER BUYING A SAMSUNG TV AGAIN

pjmlp 2y ago
The issue is not Samsung per se, it is the smart TV crap we can't get rid of. With luck there are some old TVs still on remaining stock and that is about it.
- account42 2y ago
  But you can at least for now still use those "smart" TVs as dumb displays for whatever device you want and just ignore the fact that the TV is running a full android stack or similar. There really is no need to scrounge for older devices with inferior display tech.
mrweasel 2y ago
This is exactly why "Smart" TVs don't make any sense. My in-laws have a perfectly fine Sony TV, it's nok 4K, but the HD picture quality is amazing still. Apps have slowly started to disappear as they are no longer being updated and new one aren't being added. I don't know how this work, but either Sony or the streaming service must be making the apps, and neither seems interested in maintaining apps for a 10+ year old TV. So when the streaming services are updating their backend, older TV don't get updated applications. Smart TVs make absolutely no sense, the streaming service are moving to fast, so you'll need a cheaper box, or a product that is support for a decade.
- xp84 2y ago
  100%. I think most people should probably transition their thinking from using smart TV apps being an obvious or reasonable thing to do, to viewing them like the ads you sometimes find in the box when you buy something. They’re basically just ads for streaming services, and they’re mainly there to try to trick you into connecting the TV to the Internet so that it can gather data for them. In the event that one wants the app functionality, they’ll always be better off with a streaming stick. Even in respectable brands of TVs like Sony, the SOC’s are weaker than what you find in that $40 “Chromecast with Google TV.” so they’re pretty horrible to use even while they are current and supported.
zamalek 2y ago
LGs, while still smart TVs, are relatively competent at being dumb TVs. Your only other options these days (sans rescuing a dumb TV from e-waste) are commercial panels and projectors.
- Tijdreiziger 2y ago
  We have a 4K TV from Philips (really, TP Vision), which has Android TV, but you can just set it to an HDMI input and then it works as a dumb TV. Being a Philips (TP Vision), it also has Ambilight, which is nice. It’s a few years old though, so no guarantees that newer Philips (TP Vision) models work the same way.
- echoangle 2y ago
  If you just use an HDMI input and attach some streaming box to it, Samsung TVs work just fine. Just never touch the remote and only interact with the source and everything works.
MaxikCZ 2y ago
My experience with LG wasnt any better. Thorough about a year the tv became increasingly unresponsive. You start it, after 30 seconds the sound andpicture appeared, and for about 2 full minutes it would not react to inputs what so ever (except turning off). So if you happen to turn the tv off with higher volume, you could not launch it in the evening without it blasting for 2+ minutes at night. Abhorent
bobdvb 2y ago
Microsoft removed support for Skype on TV, not Samsung. Most apps get removed because the people writing them don't want to support them anymore. The Samsung framework from 2013 was always trouble and it doesn't support many current W3C features that you'd want as a developer. Most people I know are drawing the line at supporting 2014 or 2016 Samsung devices. Could Samsung update their devices to ensure they still supported modern frameworks? Possibly, but they don't really get any revenue from providing OS upgrades and those devices suck in terms of RAM and CPU.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I hate this idea that software "rots" all by itself when it's just left on a device and is impossible to keep working. I would at the very, very least expect my device to work exactly as it did on day one, for the next 50 years, assuming I don't change the software. It's bits on a flash drive! It doesn't rot, outside some freak cosmic ray from space flipping a bit. If you're saying the software stops working because the backend it talks to goes away, well that's a deliberate choice the company is making. All they have to do is have a proper versioning system and do not touch the backend service, and it also should work forever.
  - Hackbraten 2y ago
    Certificates expire.
    - albrewer 2y ago
      Google learning this the hard way with the recent chromecast outage[0] [0]: https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Streaming/Regarding-an-issue-with-Chromecast-2nd-gen-and-Chromecast-Audio/m-p/692041 https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Streaming/Regarding-a...
    - 3np 2y ago
      So don't burn CA pubkeys into your binaries without means for user override. If the software can persist a user-specific analytics ID it can support user certs. This is a solved problem.
toolslive 2y ago
what bother's me even more is that they are constantly spying on me (phone home, what am I watching, ...) and pushing advertisements to my TV. My next TV will probably not be connected to the internet.
- update 2y ago
  I use a pi-hole to block the spying. My experience with Amazon's FireOS & Roku is they phone home a lot.
- ce4 2y ago
  Why wait for the next TV when you can just disconnect the darn existing box now?
hbn 2y ago
Well I'm not sure what use you'd have out of Skype integration when Skype itself is being axed in a couple of months
KeplerBoy 2y ago
Still appreciating my 2011 high end Samsung TV. I believe it's the last non-smart product year. It could stream videos from a network share but that's about it. Judging by current trends i will have to replace the attached chromecast before the TV breaks.
sgt 2y ago
It's kinda common knowledge at this point that almost all Smart TV's suck, especially Samsung. I went the Samsung route as well - the TV itself is fine, but the software is horrible. The solution (that I hope everyone knows about by now) is to buy an Apple TV and connect it. Once the TV starts, it shows Apple TV from the get-go and not any of the Samsung stuff.
- account42 2y ago
  > The solution (that I hope everyone knows about by now) is to buy an Apple TV and connect it. Once the TV starts, it shows Apple TV from the get-go and not any of the Samsung stuff. Or just connect the TV to your PC where you have the freedom to run whatever software you want. Why replace one crappy "smart" device with another.
lostmsu 2y ago
Why are other apps gone?

jerf 2y ago

I pulled my Samsung Smart TV off the network a while ago, precisely because it was getting slower and slower over time. The allegations of spying pushed me over, but the apparent belief that they own my TV would also have done it. I want a separation between my display device and the thing serving it anyhow, but that's just me in my techie world. The fact that performance got worse with each update, though, that's just over the line for everyone. I mean, if you're going to babble about how you're upgrading my experience, shouldn't you, you know, upgrade my experience instead of constantly downgrading it? My experience gets downgraded, but gee golly, it sure seems like yours is getting upgraded. Well. It's really not that hard to not plug in the ethernet cable. My Roku boxes have also had the same trajectory over the years. As time rolls on, they just get slower and slower with each update. Slowly, but surely. How exactly this is accomplished I'm not even sure, it's not like they're overflowing with new features or doing bold new computations for my benefit. They just get a little bit slower every effing time. But at least replacing my Roku boxes is $20-40 now. Hey, sure, OK, a $40 thing probably can't be expected to work 5 years from now. If nothing else, video codecs do march on and specs may exceed what the hardware decoders can handle. OK. My $1000+ TV does not get that grace. It damned well better be able to turn on in less than 30 seconds, even 10 years, 20 years from now. No excuses.

eckesicle 2y ago

I also had the Baywatch bug. Neo QLED right? Every time you’d start the tv it’d switch to the Samsung Baywatch 24/7 stream. So inappropriate for the children.

Ylpertnodi 2y ago
>So inappropriate for the children. The bug, or Baywatch itself?

mbowcut2 2y ago

I had a smart TV that gradually got slower and slower until it became basically useless. I figured it was just running out of RAM as apps got larger with updates over the years.

hadlock 2y ago

We bought a samsung tv in 2016 and it slowly became unusable by mid-2020. Fortunately it got dropped by the movers and we were able to justify buying a new TV (LG). The LG UI/UX is awful though, I wish we'd bought a sony. LG TVs don't have a way to simply select "HDMI1/2/3/4" you're stuck using it's "smart" detection system, which can only be reset by physically unplugging the HDMI cables from the back of the TV, which is never easy to get to. Apparently the solution is to buy Sony and just pay the extra price. I have a "smart" Samsung TV in my home office but it's never been plugged into the network and has a chromecast and various networked devices plugged in to it as a "dumb tv", that has been working out great, the TV still turns on/off easily and is as fast as the day I bought it (makes sense, it's still running the factory firmware).

tzs 2y ago
> LG TVs don't have a way to simply select "HDMI1/2/3/4" you're stuck using it's "smart" detection system, which can only be reset by physically unplugging the HDMI cables from the back of the TV, which is never easy to get to. Apparently the solution is to buy Sony and just pay the extra price. Another possible solution is to only use one input on the TV. Connect an A/V receiver to that one input and connect all your other devices to the A/V receiver. Then you should only need to deal with switching inputs on the TV if you want to watch over the air TV using the TV's tuner. You can probably even get rid of that need by getting a stand-alone TV tuner and hooking that up to the A/V receiver. Many A/V receivers have network interfaces that you can use to control them if for some reason you don't want to use their remote. Most Denon receivers for example have an HTTP server that presents a web-based interface if you browse to it from a computer or mobile device. They also run a simple HTTP based API that is easy to use from scripts. For example here is a shell script that gets the current volume setting of mine: URL=http://192.168.0.xx/goform/AppCommand.xml cat > tmp.$$ <<HERE <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <tx> <cmd id="1">GetVolumeLevel</cmd> </tx> HERE curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: text/xml" --upload-file tmp.$$ $URL rm tmp.$$ which when run gives me this at the moment: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <rx> <cmd> <volume>-45.0</volume> <disptype>RELATIVE</disptype> <dispvalue>-45.0dB</dispvalue> </cmd> </rx>
- 2y ago

bobdvb 2y ago

I never worked for Samsung, but I built TVs for JVC and LG, among many other brands. I don't work in consumer electronics anymore but a decade ago that was my field. TVs are a wildly unprofitable business. It's astoundingly bad. You get 4-6 months to make any profit on a new model before it gets discounted so heavily by retailers that you're taking a bath on each one sold. So every dollar in the BOM (bill of materials) has to be carefully considered, and not far back the CPUs in practically every TV was single core or dual core, and still under 1GHz. Bottom of the bin ARM cores you'd think twice to fit to a cheap tablet. They sit within a custom app framework which was written before HTML5 was a standard. Or, hey want to write in an old version of .NET? Or Adobe Stagecraft, another name for Adobe Flash on TV? Apps get dropped on TVs because the app developers don't want to support ancient frameworks. It's like asking them to still support IE10. You either hold back the evolution of the app, or you declare some generation of TV now obsolete. Some developers will freeze their app, put it in maintenance mode only and concentrate on the new one, but even then that maintenance requires some effort. And the backend developers want to shutdown the API endpoints that are getting 0.1% of the traffic but costing them time and money to keep. Yes, those older TVs are literally 0.1% or less of use even on a supported app. After a decade in consumer electronics, working with some of the biggest brands in the world (my work was awarded an Emmy) I can confidently say that I never saw anyone doing what could be described as 'planned obsolescence'. The single biggest driver for a TV or other similar device being shit is cost, because >95% of customers want a cheap deal. Samsung, LG and Sony are competing with cheap white label brands where the customer doesn't care what they're buying. So the good brands have to keep their prices somewhere close to the cheap products in order to give the customers something to pick from. If a device contains cheap components, it was because someone said "If we shave $1 off here, it'll take $3 off the shelf price." I once encountered a situation where a retailer, who was buying cheap set-top boxes from China to stick a now defunct brandname on, argued to halve the size of an EEPROM. It saved them less than 5c on each box made. For long life support of the OS and frameworks, aside from the fact that the CPU and RAM are poor, Samsung, LG and Sony don't make much money from the apps. It barely pays to run the app store itself, let alone maintain upgrades to the OS for an ever increasing, aging range of products. And we as consumers have to take responsibility for the fact that we want to buy cheap, disposable electronics. We'll always look for the deal and buy it on sale. Given the choice of high quality and cheap, most people choose cheap. So they're hearing the message and delivering.

mystified5016 2y ago

This describes essentially all Samsung products: really cool for the first few months then progressively accelerating slide straight into the trash. I'm never buying any Samsung products again if I can avoid it. A forced update bricked my damn phone when it forcibly restarted while I was showing something to a client. Samsung doesn't give a shit. They'll trash the device you paid for and tell you to suck it up and buy a new one.

withinrafael 2y ago
Yep, I stopped using Samsung products not too long ago. Reminds me of the time when a Samsung VP (or whatever his title was) showed up at a Microsoft Build conference to promote their TVs and the shiny new Tizen .NET Framework that shipped inbox. I asked if they planned to backport it to last year’s model—which I had just purchased—so we could test with and target existing TVs in the market. He looked me straight in the eye and, with a smarmy grin, said (paraphrasing), 'No, we want consumers to buy new TVs.' I walked away disgusted and abandoned any idea of targeting that platform. Similarly, I vaguely recall a Samsung event that had leadership--CEO?--flat out say they wanted consumers to buy new TVs every year or so. I couldn't immediately find the quote though.

deergomoo 2y ago

I find it appalling that no matter how much money you spend on a Samsung TV, you'll get banner ads in the fucking source switcher. Absolute total disregard for their users. LG still has bits that are ultimately ads, but at least they're less egregious, presented as suggested content in a Home view that already aggregates content from various sources. Not ads for fucking McDonalds and similar. At least that was the case as of a couple of years ago—I disconnected my LG from the internet the day I got an Apple TV and never looked back. Just let me buy a large class leading display without trying to insert yourself into my life, please. I'm already paying through the nose for it.

rplnt 2y ago

Sounds like every Android vendor, woth Google leading the pack. (disclaimer: maybe 5-10 years ago)

eitally 2y ago

Contrary to lots of other opinions here, I bought a 65" Samsung TV at the beginning of covid and I sincerely don't have any significant complaints. The remote is easy to use, launching apps is straightforward, connecting an ARC soundbar was no problem, nor was connecting a Chromecast and an Xbox, and it "just works". Every once in a blue moon (maybe twice a year-ish) I've had to power cycle it to fix a wifi connectivity issue, which may well just be a result of DHCP lease expiration on my network. I have a modern Sony Bravia, too, which is running "Google TV" natively. On the plus side, the UI is just about identical to what you get with a Google TV dongle (which I also have, plugged into an old 32" monitor in front of my bike trainer), but it's also a really heavy interface that's also increasingly rich in ads. If your household is like mine, and holds subscriptions to a half dozen or more streaming services, some of which are bundled and some of which are either discounted or comped via entirely different subscriptions (mobile phone) or membership (credit card), it's really not helpful to have Google show me subscriptions I might want to add-on to my Google TV sub, nor do I appreciate seeing ads for content from things I don't subscribe to. Also, the Sony remote has about 50 buttons -- not a fan. All things considered, I end up having to fiddle with the Sony TV far more frequently than the Samsung one, usually because of network or app issues. We have an old Roku stick plugged into an old tv in a spare room, too, and it's almost intolerably slow. It's primary use case is to plug into our projector for backyard movies in nice weather, so I keep it around, but man is it dog slow.

jiggawatts 2y ago
> don't have any significant complaints. Are you happy with it spying on you? That's what all Samsung televisions do, and there is no way to turn it off. They advertise on their own web page that they monitor the content viewed on their televisions for targeted advertising. This isn't via some sort of metadata, they take screenshots at regular intervals and upload them to very insecure hosting. I hope you never look at any "sensitive" content on your TV!
- rossant 2y ago
  Do you have a source for the screenshot thing?

Namidairo 2y ago

I had a similarly negative experience, sadly. Samsung managed to break HDMI-CEC in the final firmware update for one of their tvs, and wouldn't allow downgrading. Which tends not to be great for a tv one wants to use with a Chromecast or similar media box...