Microblog Memes

Have a regular PC hooked up to the TV. That's my smart machine. I control every aspect of it. Fuck Smart TVs.

Nearly hucked my Vizio out last night as I discovered that between last football season and today they have hidden the broadcast channels I receive with my antenna, in their "Free+" offerings and no longer show the channel number when you rotate between them.

This also means that when you choose "Antenna" from the input menu, you get around 15 seconds of black screen while it loads an informative slide about the change and then demands you press the OK button to finish loading their program

Then, to change the channel you must open their fiddly "broadcast guide" and use it to choose the channel you want to watch (after 15 second loading delay for the guide and another 5 second delay once you've picked a channel.

To change the TV from the Nintendo game to Fox took me 10 minutes. Then I realized Fox was showing the Packers game and I needed CBS and it took me 5 more minutes to find the menu again and find CBS.

Just last February this exact same action took maybe 20 seconds? Turn TV on, change input to Antenna, flip channels manually.

time to hook an old pc running linux up to that bad boy. while you're at it, maybe set up a NAS. they can't get to you on open source software!

The most egregious action I've seen was from a Vizio smart TV I bought several years ago. It shipped with a simple remote control, and a tablet with a control app preinstalled. One day I turned the TV on and was notified that in order to use the updated UI I would need to reach out to support to order (and pay for!) a new remote that had additional buttons.

I believe you can still get "dumb" flatscreens, but they're getting rare, and they cost at least hundreds more than their "smart" brethren. So of course those sell very slowly.

The older I get the more I miss the sheer freedom that was built into our daily lives back when technology was just a notch or two less advanced. Phones that stayed trapped on their wall, not in your pocket, tracking you. TVs that were made of dumb stuff that could still pull free content from the air. You had to be part of a special "Nielson family", fully set up with a little tracking box and all that, for the TV to tell anybody what you were watching.

People expected you to basically fall off the earth for 8 hours at work, and didn't expect to contact you for less than a housefire-level emergency, which meant you spent most of the day free, and not just while you were at work. Nobody blinked if you stepped out for the evening to go shopping and could not be contacted for hours. Now people end up in screaming arguments because they didn't answer that text fast enough. It's misery.

I had a shock the other day, watching some YouTube short featuring a young woman (an adult, not a minor) complaining humorously about her mother, who always knows where she is, and thus has all sorts of unwanted opinions on her location. Mother always knows because of an app called Life360, which is basically the kind of spying app that an abusive spouse would hide on your phone. But it's not hidden. You force your children to install it on their phones. It's a leash. So now this adult woman, who of course cannot quite afford to leave home, because economy, cannot simply delete this spying app from her phone without consequences and arguments, so she has no privacy in her movements, from anyone, never mind the government and such. Never mind what actual minors are now putting up with.

We have officially left the era where the adults pissed and grumbled about them damn kids wanting them damn phones they don't need, and we are now in the era where some kid has absolutely been beaten with a belt because he tried to leave his phone in the bedroom and slip out of the house in privacy.

Things like Life360 are normalized among children and parents, so other people will now expect to track you and treat a refusal of tracking as a violation of trust, and probably a sign that you are elderly, thus your rights are becoming debatable.

Again, 5 minutes ago this was evil shit that abusive spouses snuck onto people's phones, suddenly, it's normal, and people will just expect it.

I guess the ongoing shock is that we expected Big Brother to somehow slap a shackle on our necks that we can't take off, but this is all worse. This is putting the shackle on your neck, every morning. It doesn't even lock. You could, theoretically, throw it into the lake at will. Nobody would stop you. But you don't. All the chains are made of other people. The whips at your back are the opinions of children, and what they think is normal. The surveillance cameras do not loom from posts in the sky, no. They're in every pocket. They're much harder to hide from than a security camera ever would be.

I hope I'm just melodramatic, or something.

I hope everyone reading this knows that you can just not connect a "Smart" TV to the internet. Leave it as a "dumb" TV.

Get a separate device like a Roku or AppleTV or Amazon Fire or whatever. The garbage hardware that TV manufacturers slap inside a TV so they can advertise its "smart" features will always be inferior to a purpose built external device.

To say nothing of the security implications of having an unpatched probably unsupported IoT device running on your network for years.

I'm not an advocate for smart TVs, but my experience has been different. I found a deal for an 86 inch LG, and it's been nothing but smooth for me. No advertising built into the os, always has the apps I use right on the bar. The air mouse onnthe remote is reminiscent of owning a wii.

So when are we gonna start rooting smart TVs?

For those with similar problems, use pihole dns to effectively block all that bullshit

Also, do NOT buy a Samsung TV, it's the worst offender of them all. Nothing but bad experiences with itl

Alls I can say is that when the “smart” tv has “run out of memory” so it intermittently cuts out when I’m trying to beat Ridley in Super Metroid, it’s time for a lobotomy.

I never add "smart" TVs to the network and I block unknown mac addresses at the router. All apps are loaded either on a gaming console or a Roku (the lawyer units with more power). If you keep your TV off the network (and uninstall the apps), you'll never have performance issues.

Some years ago around the advent of smart home devices I bought a huge fullhd Hisense tv for cheap. It has zero smart capabilities, and essentially acts as a big second screen for my computer, and I couldn’t be happier with it.

I am scared once it is time to replace it for something more modern I won’t be able to find one without all the smart crap I don’t use and don’t want.

Link to the original toot

https://aus.social/@burgerdrome/111045551054809770

This is the future that Stallman warned us about. They mocked him and said it didn't matter. It's not going to get better until everyone stops buying TVs with spyware built in.

Vote with your wallets or quit bitching. Self hosted is an option these days. But that means not being lazy. And people are really lazy.

I've had a Vizio "smart" TV for about 3 years. It is my first experience with a smart TV and it has been a massive pile of shit since day one. Most recently it has decided to show a black screen every time I turn on the Nintendo Switch. In this state it does not allow me to do anything but turn it off. So I have to turn it off, turn it back on, go into settings and restart the TV. It will then work for a single play session, but as soon as I shut the Switch off I will undoubtedly have to go through this same process the next time I want to play.

This is only the most recent issue I've had with Vizio's garbage ass software. To those saying to just unplug it from the internet, trust me when I say the solution is not that simple. It was even worse before any updates, but with each update they break something else. There is no "good" software version to leave it at.

As an aside, isn’t the whole point of the Fediverse that we should be able to move content around? It’s sad that the only way to upvote a Mastodon post on Lemmy is through a screenshot or a link. Why can’t it just be a post that we can upvote?

Translate: I don't like Smart TV.

But seriously... there must be something wrong with manufacturers if they think these "features" are even adding value to their products

In my country you are charged a license fee for the privilege of owning a tv. That's why I always only had a PC attached to a monitor instead.

Nowadays that is replaced with a dirt cheap orange pi running libreelec (Kodi) which also runs pi-hole in the background for all of the other devices on the network.

The setup is a bit of a hassle but it's a vast improvement on the interface and functionality of friends "Smart TV" experiences in my opinion. I even set it up to work with an old TV remote as the pi has IR built in, although there are phone apps to do remote control also.

I tried to find the article, but of course it is lost to the anals of the internet. (Yes, I know what I said). I saw an article a couple of years ago about how there was a push in China that would use the built-in cameras in smart TVs to watch how many eyes were looking at the screen during rented features and charge extra if there were more than some small threshold of people watching it. I think 3 people were allowed for a single rental price and it would be charged again if more than that watched.

This is likely coming for us. Also... Yo ho ho.

I've got a TCL smart TV from like 5 years ago. It's absolutely great. Never had any issues with overbearing ads or anything.

Thank fuck.

I have two TVs. Both are max 1080p. I am absolutely fine with that. One is not a "smart" TV. The other I only turn on when I'm using Airflow, which the TV boots directly into with its built-in Chromecast, skipping the "smart" bullshit. I will use these TVs until they break or there is some major change where they become totally obsolete like CRT TVs.

They also spy on you and know what you watch, even if it's not played from their apps and is just a raw display input. https://www.consumerreports.org/video/view/electronics/televisions-streaming-media/4151762767001/your-smart-tv-may-track-what-you-watch-and-say/

I bought a little antenna DVR box and it's absolutely delightful. it has the interface of a 2000s VCR, doesn't connect to the internet, doesn't have little ads and promo screens anywhere, has a simple plug and play DVR that records drm free mp4s to any USB device I plug in, and just stays on doing what it's doing, no shitty little we noticed you haven't hit a button in 2 hours! screen. i feel like I'm in a nursing home. it's beautiful