It’s wild just how much they’re trying to shove AI down our throats.
Since it can’t be LG anymore - what’s a good TV screen for gaming?
Wasn’t LG one of the last good ones left?
The panels all come from two producers (really just one for the very good ones). So, pick whoever you can get the best deal on for your needed featureset and never connect it to the internet.
Maybe I should have bought a projector instead.
Projectors have the exact same problems. Their OSs are awful with ads, too.
My next tv (don’t have one) is just gonna be attached to a laptop by hdmi. That’s it.
Meet ACR
I know it’s not a fix all
But a Pi-hole prevents a lot of this collected data from ever leaving your network to begin with.
If for some reason someone turns on the wifi on my LG tv (I have teenagers and their friends), I have the device itself blacklisted from the network.
But that’s not a reasonable level of granularity for a typical user. We need privacy protection laws to end this sort of behavior from manufacturers.
Could not possibly agree more.
These companies need to be held accountable.
There are ways to keep yourself somewhat safe for now.
Holy shit, I had no idea that exists. My next TV will be a monitor with no internet access.
I’m in the process of making all our media sources and tech independent, starting with my dad’s laptop. I’ve already set up easy remote access so I can always help him with anything. I am NEVER using mainstream shit from now on.
Thrift stores usually have some older dumb TVs if youre okay with 1080p, and Sceptre still makes dumb consumer-grade TVs if you are willing to shop on Amazon or at Walmart
What i don’t get is there is clearly a market here. Why doesn’t some lesser Known TV manufacturer make a dumb TV and steal all those customers from the big ones.
The common “why doesn’t someone just make a ‘dumb’ TV for people who don’t want this crap?” question has an easy answer. Dumb TVs do exist, they’re called “commercial monitors” or “commercial displays” and just show the audiovisual signal given to them by whatever else you hook up, in the manner of old TVs before additional apps or spyware were a thing. As implied by the name, stores and other businesses use them to show what they want without the added guff of the apps and ads they wouldn’t be able to fully control.
Important detail: commercial displays tend to be fuckoff expensive compared to smart TVs of comparable size, quality, and feature set.
“Hey,” you may be thinking, “how do they get away with charging so big a premium for an appliance with fewer features?” And you wouldn’t be out of line to think that. However, what’s going on is more insidious.
The higher price of a “dumb” TV is more correctly thought of as the real price of the appliance. The reason you pay so much less for a comparable “smart” TV is because the companies behind all the apps and spyware, the preinstalled shovelware apps which get you interested to subscribe to their services (Netflix, Hulu, Prime, etc.) and/or send you advertisements, as well as the spyware companies who profit from all the data about you that gets phoned home as you use the thing, pay the hardware manufacturers to put their shit software onto the device at the factory. That money made by the manufacturer from the shit companies goes, at least partially, toward lowering the price of the TV to entice you to pick it up at the store instead of a competitor’s TV.
Look at that big chunk of money you save buying a smart TV over a comparable dumb display, and consider that the shit companies are paying the manufacturer that amount or more for the opportunity to monetize you and your household.
Then, if you have the wherewithal to pay what is now easily considered a ridiculous amount more for an appliance that isn’t part of a system meant to take permanent advantage of you, you can just buy the commercial display instead. Alternatively, you can find clever technological ways to buy the cheaper “smart” one but counteract the ways in which it monetizes you, whether technical ways like jailbreaking or installing alternative OSes (some very early-stage efforts to get this sort of thing going are out there, but still very scattershot compared to the scene for doing so to smartphones) or simpler methods like just never letting the thing onto the Internet no matter how much it begs or enshittifies your user experience (a strategy which will stop working once it becomes cheap enough for the shit companies to just include their own connectivity hardware in the device which uses its own wireless and doesn’t need your network.)
It’s a continuing battle.
Like I just said, Sceptre does. :P
Even monitors are having smart TV antifeatures added. Soon you won’t be able to find a “dumb monitor” — and this is why.
Yup. Make sure it’s not a “smart” TV with a WiFi connection. LG was one of three TV companies (Visio and Samsung were the others) that got caught spying on their TVs HDMI connection and sending usage data on connected devices back to their manufacturers through the WiFi connection.
A wifi connection to where? Were people using unprotected networks?
Vision TVs have built-in WiFi to promote their own, garbage tier streaming service. So you need to connect it to your home WiFi network to use it. But they can also monitor the TVs HDMI port.
So if you have a Roku or a DVD player connected to it, the TV can monitor what’s coming into the HDMI port and then use your WiFi connection to send that info home.
I noticed the Visio is very aggressive about you enabling the WiFi connection even if you just want to use it as a monitor. (i.e. if you disable the TVs WiFi, it will nag you to turn it back on every time you turn the TV on and not let you use the TV until you do it). I’m guessing this is deliberate because Visio values collecting the HDMI data more than their streaming service.
Get a monitor, you don’t need a wall sized tv. I got a pair of Displayport monitors for free, and they perform admirably.
I think the one I have is 50 inch and I think it could be a bit smaller, yeah. A monitor might work better . I just use it for my switch and some tv shows/ambiance.
Ive been eyeing up signage displays and 50"+ gaming monitors.
I don’t want the smart in my display, I want the smart attached to my display.
Back to crt. Analog everything
I saw a 16:9 CRT in the trash a few years ago, it had just started to rain, the time it took to arrange secure transport it was soaked, so I passed. I didn’t feel like I could deal with the size and weight of the thing if I had to repair it as well.
But they do show up now and then.
one of the many prices you pay letting a “Smart” TV connect to the internet.
Irony is LG has their own open weights AI: Exaone 32B.
https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE
It’s… not terrible. Especially for a multilingual, locally runnable one. But they gave it a license from the depths of hell, that even forbids reverse engineering and basically claims all its outputs, so no one uses it.
https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE/EXAONE-4.0.1-32B/blob/main/LICENSE
Anyway, I find it darkly hilarious that they choose to snub their own research, and their Tenstorrent partnership, and shove copilot in instead. How much you wanna bet they namedrop OpenAI in their earnings report?
This is corporate enshittification at its purest.
I’d assume microsoft is writing them a fat check to do so
Some best buy asshole convinced me to buy LG this last time because “it’s the same screen as the bravia, but lower price so you can get the sound bar too!”. Yeah fuck that, Sony doesn’t jerk me around. WebOS doesnt even fucking WORK unless you agree to every sharing option and update. Next time I’ll just pay the extra.
Sony is also a terrible company with a long history of anti-consumer behaviour.
That’s fine, I now own both and I can say objectively that LG is way worse to work with and Sony has been easy. I have money, I want a TV. I don’t want LG.
What does LG even get out of this?
M$ is probably paying them handsomely for it.
Don’t buy LG, noted. Also, maybe buying a dumb TV with great panel and then adding android fire stick that you can manage the way you want is the way all along?
Watch out for the android TV boxes. They are being used by China to backdoor into US critical infrastructure. Seriously.
This just barely covers the depth and scope of the issue. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fbi-badbox-20-android-malware-infects-millions-of-consumer-devices/
No, don’t even buy LG.
I bought a dumb LG panel for my bedroom and I had to buy black enamel paint to go over the status LED. When the panel it’s off, the indicator LED it’s BRIGHT. BLUE. BLINKING. And it’s so powerful that I still see it because the light leaks from the small plastic vents. I also had to additionally insert a Shelly 1pm smart relay in the socket and program it with the logic “from 8pm to 8am if power usage is under 5 watts, cut the power; repeat the check every minute”
When the panel is on, instead, the status LED it’s off 🤷🏻♂️
I can turn off the light in the menu on mine
Or just buy whatever smart panel and do the same. Might as well take the subsidy from the smart panel and just leave it off your network
Mine periodically displays a wi-fi not connected overlay if it’s not connected.
Connect it to WiFi but dump it in a subnet that’s not allowed to send traffic out? That’s wild though.
That’s diabolical
Seems hard to find those types of displays. Some people bring up commercial displays but they are expensive and it seems like a lot of then do have smart features.
My next TV, I’m going to look into whether the PCB can be swapped with a computer monitor PCB made by the same company.
Perhaps, with some soldering.
The issue is the firmware.
Then follows a class action lawsuit because the AI exposed children to unsuitable materials and the thing is gone the next update.
“”“gone”“”
How the fuck would you even use it on your TV?
You don’t use it. It uses you.
You must understand: It’s not your TV, it’s LG’s, and they will do with it what ever they want, and not to your benefit. This is the future we chose.
This is the future we chose.
I don’t recall be given options.
We do have the option of not buying their crap. We have the option of never connecting them to the internet if we ended up buying it. We have the option of blocking all their services and domains in our networks. We have options. Granted we have a limited range of options, but we do have options.
Stallman outlined our choices and told us this is where we were headed back in the 1980’s. Since then, we have consistently made the wrong decisions. All is not lost, but the situation is dire.
The choices are there, you just have to be willing to inconvenience yourself.
You can’t shop your way out of enshittification.
We have all always had the choice to make politics something that the people do, and not something that is done to us.
The newer models already have the option to enable Google assistant and interface with it via a microphone in the remote control. Sounds like it’s no longer an optional feature and is being AI enshittified.
My guess is voice control
This, this finally made me reach back my LG TV and disconnected the Ethernet cable.
It seems TV aren’t even owner by the owners anymore. I don’t watch TV nor game anymore but seeing the amount of ads when just turning on tvs at friends houses is wild and now with this it’s doing way too much to just be a display. Whoever decides to start making dumb tvs again at mass with all the newer tech like hdr and dolby atmos in it will have a booming business but I guess no residuals after the sale no unlimited growth for investors.
For now, at least in Europe, I have removed every single ad on TV just buy going to the terms and conditions and not giving them consent. But I am using Samsung smart TV and I’m in Europe.
If you root your lg oled you can truly block automatic updates. You can also install ad free youtube with sponsorblock integrated plus a bunch of other stuff that is of varying utility depending on your use case.
In general though just don’t connect it to the internet and get a $100 box for jellyfin from china (ugoos am6b+ works great and can playback basically anything but av1 natively if you flash Coreelec, the android side can still run streaming apps if you insist or iptv apps like tv mate since iptv support in kodi/jellyfin suuuucks).
Lg has proven they don’t respect consent by silently opting you in to data collection with updates. The updates never add features or bug fixes, just ugly UI changes and shit like this. It’s almost never worth updating unless someone is specifically saying “you should update, it fixes/adds ____
In the future don’t support them but at the same time it’s the “who the fuck can you support/oh you use an iphone under capitalism” problem. Yeah you don’t need a big tv, you don’t need an oled, you can buy a far more expensive commercial display, etc. I dunno
If you root your tv…
My brother in christ.
Exactly. This is already so many levels 9f wrong up to this point.
You buy a $400-$3000 tv and eliminate big parts of the feature set (dlna, phone/laptop as remote, airplay/casting, etc) because you let their nonsense prevent you from connecting something you purchased to the internet so the vendor won’t ruin it.
Or you buy any other brand where rooting isn’t even an option and the ad penetration is often worse because they’re almost all based around amazon, androidtv, or Roku, all of which are much more developed and mature. With tricks like not allowing you to set a custom dns for Adblocking (Roku does this) or hard defining a cloudflare DNS to circumvent ad blocking dns if you set it at the router level (android does this).
If all the options are shit, make one that works
I have tricks too. My firewall forcibly redirects any outbound request on port 53 to the internal ip of my pihole. You’ll take my dns and you’ll like it Roku.
Not connecting it isn’t going to necessarily matter in the future if TVs start using meshnets to spy and install adware/bloatware/etc. regardless of if you’re connected or not like has been looked into for a while.
Raising the importance of both having a rooted tv and independent analysis of network traffic related to these devices
ugoos am6b+ works great and can playback basically anything but av1 natively if you flash Coreelec, the android side can still run streaming apps if you insist or iptv apps like tv mate since iptv support in kodi/jellyfin suuuucks
Not Netflix though, right?
We cancelled our Netflix subscription earlier this year, but I am just curious. To my understanding to install Netflix you have to use trash tier HTPC devices.
The android side should be able to run Netflix with Dolby vision/hdr/atmos though I have not tested this because I don’t have an account.
The reason it works for Dolby vision playback in kodi/core elec is because it’s licensed. That’s why you end up having to dual boot, you need to retain the blobs on the android side to make the DV profiles work. It’s fucking dumb and Dolby vision is dumb and proprietary but technically superior but hdr10+ is open but lg doesn’t support it, it’s all fucking dumb. HTPCs dont work great with DV, at least for pirated content (not sure about streaming). They’ll play some profiles with specific software configurations but not all. Generally you end up tonemapping
Anyway it’s licensed for Dolby vision because it’s primarily meant as a box for streaming apps, so I assume Netflix/hbo max/etc would work. I don’t have accounts so I don’t know. I only use the android side for iptv
For DV it’s understandable. IMO Dolby and DTS are kinda of a scam (e.g. their lossless codecs). They are welcome to make authoring tools, but the standards should always be open and not subject to unaccountable entities that operate in a unreliable jurisdiction.
The reason I am asking about Netflix is because we got a relatively powerful Chinese Android set-top box (that is supported by a local distributor) and it couldn’t play videos in the Netflix Android app or even when logging in via web browser. The distributor said that Netflix support requires a license. After doing some research, this seems to be true for many non-American brands.
We cancelled Netflix and we are not buying any new subscriptions from American firms. I am just curious about the whole license issue.
