5 ms·

A bit disappointing that a hacker community's first reaction is to position against smart TVs. Smart TVs are awesome, we just need open source firmware for the

by mpeg 12y ago

A bit disappointing that a hacker community's first reaction is to position against smart TVs. Smart TVs are awesome, we just need open source firmware for them in the same way that we have DDWRT/OpenWRT, XBMC and such. Imagine the control scheme using a wiimote-style pointer, built-in webcam, quad core CPU and an API to give you access to your viewing habits, or interface with other smart devices around your home. Right now, I turn on my ps4 and the channel doesn't change automatically and turn on game mode, why? I have a smart TV, it should know exactly what I want to do. I do still think this is a bug, and not intended by Samsung. My tv doesn't seem to be affected by it.

pfisch 12y ago
They will never be awesome. It is like having built in navigation in your car vs an iPhone. Built in is proprietary bs that will always be out of date, and hardware refreshes will take like 5+ years because how often do you get a new tv. Right now my roku runs about 1000x faster than my smart tv and is really just superior in every way. Stand alone boxes will always be better because the software will be better and hardware refreshes happen much faster.
- mpeg 12y ago
  I have a few set top boxes too, but I'd like deeper integration with the tv firmware itself, and that's something that they can't do unless the firmware was open. In which case, we could have the same regular updates you get with a roku.
  - fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
    There are smart TV's with open firmware?
    - xai3luGi 12y ago
      http://www.samygo.tv/ http://www.samygo.tv/
- spuz 12y ago
  That really doesn't make sense logically. The physical location of the computer doesn't affect whether it is proprietary or open source, or how frequently it will receive updates. The navigation on your phone is probably better than the one in your car right now, but when Apple or Google take over the car system market you will have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto in modern cars that have high quality software with fast update cycles. There is no reason why the same thing won't happen with TVs. In fact as mpeg, stated if you assume the firmware in your next Smart TV is open, it will be possible to run customer operating systems such as Android or XMBC giving you complete control without the external box or wires. Edit: Though what you say about hardware refreshes is absolutely right.
  - k3oni 12y ago
    I think that a good point he was making has to do with " Right now". How about we compare apples to apples and stop trying to make cases for the future, when google or apple take over the car system can mean 3-5 years from now.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    Hardware refreshes are an absolute killer. I have a 2007 car, which works fine, and a 2010 iPad, which is no longer receiving OS updates. Welding the two together benefits neither. The best compromise would be car-as-peripheral; have all the buttons map to a USB HID device connected to a flush-fit tablet dock. Just remember not to bridge the UI directly to the same CAN bus as the fly-by-wire throttle.
    - VLM 12y ago
      "car-as-peripheral" I have a 2300 pound, 2014 model year, gasoline powered bluetooth speaker, exactly as you suggest. In the showroom they had a "smart nav smart entertainment system" upgrade for only $1200 that was as much of a turd as the typical smart TV. Its hard to buy a dumb-stereo for a car that doesn't have BT pairing today. Mostly I stream podcasts and audiobooks from my phone. Hit play on the phone, put the transmission in drive, thats my commute.
  - mpeg 12y ago
- actsasbuffoon 12y ago
  I agree with your general point, but my Sony TV automatically downloads firmware updates on a regular basis. The apps (Netflix, YouTube, etc.) are updated regularly, though the changes aren't always improvements. That said, the apps on my TV are surprisingly serviceable. I can even stream video files directly to it (though an Apple TV does this with better reliability and video quality). The only unforgivable failure is that it doesn't have a Twitch app, but neither does the Apple TV, XBox One, PS4 (it doesn't count if I can only watch PS4 games being streamed), or Wii U.
  - pfisch 12y ago
    That is fine that there are firmware updates or whatever, but your smart tv is like 1000x slower than a roku 3 and doesn't have the app depth. In 2 years it will be several more orders of magnitude worse than whatever new peripheral I have attached to my tvs, and they will have stopped updating the software on your tv because the hardware can't handle their little tv OS.
laumars 12y ago
Wow, even my "dumb" TV auto-switches channels when a new HDMI signal is received.
snarfy 12y ago
I was never a fan of TV/VCR combos. If one side broke you were stuck with a clunky chimera of a device. The same is true if it becomes outdated. I've seen plenty of old TV/VCR combos hooked up to DVD players. I'm not a fan of TV/PC combos either. The PC side will be outdated before the screen.
pjc50 12y ago
People are starting to realise that the Internet Of Things Controlled By Someone Else is going to have the same petty awfulness as the web; unsolicited increasingly intrusive advertising and surveillance. Smartness becomes just another maintenance liability that requires regular security updates. I'm annoyed enough at having to update Flash again on the Win7/Media Centre PC that's my TV-watching setup. (I put the PC in place after a series of set-top-box/PVRs from BT which came with the "BT Vision" service. That suffered from adverse updates that gradually made the interface infuriatingly slow.) TVs really ought to pick up on HDMI activation/deactivation. I suspect the reason they don't is that it works 99% of the time but there are broken devices which would steal focus.
gvb 12y ago
I don't have experience with any "smart" TVs, but my "DVD player" is running U-Boot and linux. If you download a "firmware upgrade" and run xxd or "strings" on it, it becomes pretty clear what OS is running. I strongly suspect many/most "smart" TVs are running linux. (My fairly ancient DVD+VCR player runs VxWorks.)
njharman 12y ago
Smart TVs aren't awesome. They are the opposite of hacker ethos. They are large, monolithic, proprietary, closed swiss-army knives. Hackers (by and large) like small, open, single purpose tools that they can combine however they like, in new ways not expected.
_cudgel 12y ago
> A bit disappointing that a hacker community's first reaction is to position against smart TVs. I emphatically disagree. "Smart TVs" are recognized as a bad idea, and as such are shunned. It would be disappointing _to me_ if this hacker community didn't think about whether or not new tech was appropriate, and just immediately accepted it as a great new shiny. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
eridius 12y ago
> Right now, I turn on my ps4 and the channel doesn't change automatically and turn on game mode, why? Mine does. There's a really crappy HDMI protocol extension called HDMI-CEC (for Consumer Electronics Control). It allows for precisely this kind of thing. Unfortunately, because it was designed by committee, it's apparently not very good, and it's hard to actually get a setup that works with it properly. Notably, any kind of receiver in between your device and your TV usually causes it to not actually work, or for only parts of it to work (commonly, the receiver allows for power-on but blocks remote control). In my case, I have my PS4 plugged directly onto a Panasonic TV. When I turn on my PS4, the TV turns on automatically and switches to the right input. And similarly, if I turn my TV on when it's on my PS4 input, or if I switch to the PS4 input after turning it on, the PS4 automatically turns on. Curiously, turning the PS4 off does not turn off the TV. Admittedly, this behavior can be annoying, because if I turn off my TV while it's set to the PS4 input (which is maybe 75% of the time), I can't turn it on again without the PS4 immediately booting up, even if I wanted to switch to another input. What I wish I could do is have the TV turn on automatically & switch inputs when turning on the PS4, but not the other way around. Another thing this feature does is let my TV remote control my PS4; for example, I can use the arrow buttons on my TV remote to navigate around the PS4 home screen. This is potentially useful for watching movies, although I haven't ever actually experimented with it. Note that getting this to work requires turning on some settings that are ordinarily disabled. I didn't even know the PS4 had this capability until I started googling for what one of the disabled settings meant. Somewhere in PS4's settings there's an off-by-default setting called "Enable HDMI Device Link". Turn this on. Then check your TV settings for something similar. On my Panasonic there were two settings "VIERA Link" and "Power on Link" which needed to be on for this functionality. On Sony TV's it's probably called "Bravia Sync". Here's a Polygon article with some more info: http://www.polygon.com/2013/11/21/5126628/ps4-remote-control-hdmi-cec-tv-sony-samsung-panasonic http://www.polygon.com/2013/11/21/5126628/ps4-remote-control...

by mpeg 12y ago

pfisch 12y ago

They will never be awesome. It is like having built in navigation in your car vs an iPhone. Built in is proprietary bs that will always be out of date, and hardware refreshes will take like 5+ years because how often do you get a new tv. Right now my roku runs about 1000x faster than my smart tv and is really just superior in every way. Stand alone boxes will always be better because the software will be better and hardware refreshes happen much faster.

mpeg 12y ago
I have a few set top boxes too, but I'd like deeper integration with the tv firmware itself, and that's something that they can't do unless the firmware was open. In which case, we could have the same regular updates you get with a roku.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  There are smart TV's with open firmware?
  - xai3luGi 12y ago
    http://www.samygo.tv/ http://www.samygo.tv/
spuz 12y ago
That really doesn't make sense logically. The physical location of the computer doesn't affect whether it is proprietary or open source, or how frequently it will receive updates. The navigation on your phone is probably better than the one in your car right now, but when Apple or Google take over the car system market you will have Apple CarPlay or Android Auto in modern cars that have high quality software with fast update cycles. There is no reason why the same thing won't happen with TVs. In fact as mpeg, stated if you assume the firmware in your next Smart TV is open, it will be possible to run customer operating systems such as Android or XMBC giving you complete control without the external box or wires. Edit: Though what you say about hardware refreshes is absolutely right.
- k3oni 12y ago
  I think that a good point he was making has to do with " Right now". How about we compare apples to apples and stop trying to make cases for the future, when google or apple take over the car system can mean 3-5 years from now.
- pjc50 12y ago
  Hardware refreshes are an absolute killer. I have a 2007 car, which works fine, and a 2010 iPad, which is no longer receiving OS updates. Welding the two together benefits neither. The best compromise would be car-as-peripheral; have all the buttons map to a USB HID device connected to a flush-fit tablet dock. Just remember not to bridge the UI directly to the same CAN bus as the fly-by-wire throttle.
  - VLM 12y ago
    "car-as-peripheral" I have a 2300 pound, 2014 model year, gasoline powered bluetooth speaker, exactly as you suggest. In the showroom they had a "smart nav smart entertainment system" upgrade for only $1200 that was as much of a turd as the typical smart TV. Its hard to buy a dumb-stereo for a car that doesn't have BT pairing today. Mostly I stream podcasts and audiobooks from my phone. Hit play on the phone, put the transmission in drive, thats my commute.
- mpeg 12y ago
actsasbuffoon 12y ago
I agree with your general point, but my Sony TV automatically downloads firmware updates on a regular basis. The apps (Netflix, YouTube, etc.) are updated regularly, though the changes aren't always improvements. That said, the apps on my TV are surprisingly serviceable. I can even stream video files directly to it (though an Apple TV does this with better reliability and video quality). The only unforgivable failure is that it doesn't have a Twitch app, but neither does the Apple TV, XBox One, PS4 (it doesn't count if I can only watch PS4 games being streamed), or Wii U.
- pfisch 12y ago
  That is fine that there are firmware updates or whatever, but your smart tv is like 1000x slower than a roku 3 and doesn't have the app depth. In 2 years it will be several more orders of magnitude worse than whatever new peripheral I have attached to my tvs, and they will have stopped updating the software on your tv because the hardware can't handle their little tv OS.

laumars 12y ago

Wow, even my "dumb" TV auto-switches channels when a new HDMI signal is received.

snarfy 12y ago

I was never a fan of TV/VCR combos. If one side broke you were stuck with a clunky chimera of a device. The same is true if it becomes outdated. I've seen plenty of old TV/VCR combos hooked up to DVD players. I'm not a fan of TV/PC combos either. The PC side will be outdated before the screen.

pjc50 12y ago

People are starting to realise that the Internet Of Things Controlled By Someone Else is going to have the same petty awfulness as the web; unsolicited increasingly intrusive advertising and surveillance. Smartness becomes just another maintenance liability that requires regular security updates. I'm annoyed enough at having to update Flash again on the Win7/Media Centre PC that's my TV-watching setup. (I put the PC in place after a series of set-top-box/PVRs from BT which came with the "BT Vision" service. That suffered from adverse updates that gradually made the interface infuriatingly slow.) TVs really ought to pick up on HDMI activation/deactivation. I suspect the reason they don't is that it works 99% of the time but there are broken devices which would steal focus.

gvb 12y ago

I don't have experience with any "smart" TVs, but my "DVD player" is running U-Boot and linux. If you download a "firmware upgrade" and run xxd or "strings" on it, it becomes pretty clear what OS is running. I strongly suspect many/most "smart" TVs are running linux. (My fairly ancient DVD+VCR player runs VxWorks.)

njharman 12y ago

Smart TVs aren't awesome. They are the opposite of hacker ethos. They are large, monolithic, proprietary, closed swiss-army knives. Hackers (by and large) like small, open, single purpose tools that they can combine however they like, in new ways not expected.

_cudgel 12y ago

> A bit disappointing that a hacker community's first reaction is to position against smart TVs. I emphatically disagree. "Smart TVs" are recognized as a bad idea, and as such are shunned. It would be disappointing _to me_ if this hacker community didn't think about whether or not new tech was appropriate, and just immediately accepted it as a great new shiny. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

eridius 12y ago

> Right now, I turn on my ps4 and the channel doesn't change automatically and turn on game mode, why? Mine does. There's a really crappy HDMI protocol extension called HDMI-CEC (for Consumer Electronics Control). It allows for precisely this kind of thing. Unfortunately, because it was designed by committee, it's apparently not very good, and it's hard to actually get a setup that works with it properly. Notably, any kind of receiver in between your device and your TV usually causes it to not actually work, or for only parts of it to work (commonly, the receiver allows for power-on but blocks remote control). In my case, I have my PS4 plugged directly onto a Panasonic TV. When I turn on my PS4, the TV turns on automatically and switches to the right input. And similarly, if I turn my TV on when it's on my PS4 input, or if I switch to the PS4 input after turning it on, the PS4 automatically turns on. Curiously, turning the PS4 off does not turn off the TV. Admittedly, this behavior can be annoying, because if I turn off my TV while it's set to the PS4 input (which is maybe 75% of the time), I can't turn it on again without the PS4 immediately booting up, even if I wanted to switch to another input. What I wish I could do is have the TV turn on automatically & switch inputs when turning on the PS4, but not the other way around. Another thing this feature does is let my TV remote control my PS4; for example, I can use the arrow buttons on my TV remote to navigate around the PS4 home screen. This is potentially useful for watching movies, although I haven't ever actually experimented with it. Note that getting this to work requires turning on some settings that are ordinarily disabled. I didn't even know the PS4 had this capability until I started googling for what one of the disabled settings meant. Somewhere in PS4's settings there's an off-by-default setting called "Enable HDMI Device Link". Turn this on. Then check your TV settings for something similar. On my Panasonic there were two settings "VIERA Link" and "Power on Link" which needed to be on for this functionality. On Sony TV's it's probably called "Bravia Sync". Here's a Polygon article with some more info: http://www.polygon.com/2013/11/21/5126628/ps4-remote-control-hdmi-cec-tv-sony-samsung-panasonic http://www.polygon.com/2013/11/21/5126628/ps4-remote-control...