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Have a regular PC hooked up to the TV. That’s my smart machine. I control every aspect of it. Fuck Smart TVs.
Raspberry pi with Kodi hooked up to a projector and a NAS serving files works well for me.
This is the way, although the pi is to slow for me at this point and I replaced it with shields.
Also why the are people connecting tvs to their networks…fuck that noise.
I’m waiting for the Raspberry Pi 5 to set up as a media PC behind my tv. There are really good, reliable, and high quality sites that let you stream any movie or TV show. No need to vpn or torrent. Firefox with ublock origin streaming anything I want in 1080 for free.
I should add I have a RP4 and it’s not beefy enough to stream 1080p full screen from a browser to my 4k tv.
Just get a micro desktop, better airflow and has all the ports you may need.
Intel Nuc, Dell Optiplex are really cheap secondhand. And you can run 4K content on them.
I use an RP4 and it’s fine with streaming 1080p h.265 stuff off my NAS drive, though it did struggle a bit with serving up the Planet Earth videos. It claims to be able to decode 4k, but probably not very well.
Yea, the 3b was struggling hard for larger mkv videos in even 1080p. The 4s while much better seem to not be able to handle 265 at all in 4k.
Good to know, I’ll probably hold off upgrading my projector to 4k until the next-gen raspi then, or some other platform.
I love rpis but damn did the 4s get sold out and then spike in price almost instantly. I’m not holding out much hope for the 5 to be much better.
Better or worse than Ps5s
We call it the pirate box and use it all the time. OSMC FTW!
Y’arrrrrr! Blessed be thee who take to the sailing the seven seas!
I mean that’s nice but can you run Netflix/Hulu/AppleTV/HBO through that thing? Or can you only play media that you illegally downloaded?
Of course they can.
Can what?
I haven’t tried. Through a Web browser, maybe. There’s a Kodi netflix addon, I know that. It’s just a Debian box, so any solution that’d work on a Linux machine would probably be okay.
any solution that’d work on a Linux machine would probably be okay.
I don’t think there is a Linux solution. That’s the problem.
What do you mean? I gave you a couple of Kodi plugins that cover most of what you mentioned, plus, you could probably just use a Web browser.
That’s not really a “solution” so much as a “workaround”. It’s unofficial community-maintained software with complicated installation, limited features, and that the service providers can break at any time. And even if that weren’t the case, that’s only 2 providers.
If I need to use a web browser, why wouldn’t I just skip Kodi altogether and just plug in my laptop?
There’s a reason Google TV is an entirely different operating system from Chrome OS.
What about the rest of them?
Do your own googling, I got bored after 3 :p
I also use my pc as a TV with a big monitor. I can watch Netflix/streams through Firefox and control the pc with my PS5 controller connected through bluetooth.
You can do all of those things, but it’s not remotely the same. The browser is limited to 720p, the interface isn’t couch-friendly, and now your PC is connected to a TV instead of a proper gaming monitor.
On windows you can just install the Netflix app or use Edge and it’s not limited to 720p, and you can just use a long hdmi cable and have your pc plugged into a normal monitor as well.
That is all true. It just saves me money not buying a TV 😅.
When I completely replaced my PC, I intended to use my old PC as a media box. But in reality, I’ve basically used my Chromecast for everything. One of these days I’ll probably want to watch something that isn’t on one of my streaming sites, but I’ve been surprisingly resistant to that so far.
Chromecast is the ideal smart device so far, for me. No ads or anything. I use my phone as a remote and basically every video app supports it easily. Open app, press cast, select what I want to play. Exactly what a smart TV should have been like.
What type of Chromecast do you use? I recently bought a Chromecast Ultra for a new TV after being happy with a secondhand one for years (3rd gen, I think). The difference in UI was such a disappointing step down. I don’t want a home screen with apps and ads, I just want something I can stream to from my phone! And I can’t say for certain, but it also feels like I get more ads on YouTube compared to using the older Chromecast.
No you bought a Chromecast with Google TV. A Chromecast ultra is just a 4k version of the original. I used my CCwGTV for 8 months then sold it and got a CC ultra instead. I hate the promoted content from networks and apps I would never use.
Aha, thank you for clarifying. It’s easy to overlook the difference between “Chromecast” and “Chromecast with Google TV”.
Unfortunately, it looks like if you want 4k you are stuck with the Google TV interface. :/[Edit: I was wrong, see below]Well no the Ultra has 4k
Thanks! Looks like I still had it wrong. Corrected above.
I literally told you in my comment, the Chromecast Ultra is 4k
How are you crome casting I suppose it doesn’t help that I only ever Chromecast when I’m at my parents and want to show them a yt video but I’ve found that sometimes my phone is able to make the connection and other days the option is either gone or my phone became blind
Casting is dependent on sharing a network, so maybe on the days it didn’t work you were using the cell data network instead of your parent’s wifi?
Even then you can just set up Jellyfin on that old PC and stream to your Chromecast from it.
Can you Chromecast Jellyfin from a PC? I thought it only worked from the Jellyfin Android app right now.
My only beef with Chromecast is I feel like they are designed to die after 2 years. I’ve gone through three now; it always seems like right around the 2-year mark, it starts having issues staying connected to the network. But I keep buying them because, like you said, it’s basically the ideal smart device.
Did you try getting the chrome cast ultra that has the ethernet port on the power adapter? I’ve had a lot less trouble with connectivity on that one vs the original wireless only.
Every 4 months or so it will lock up and require a power cycle. So I do still have some of the problems you describe.
I did not even know that was a thing. Maybe I’ll get it when my current one shits the bed in 8 months or so.
I wouldn’t be able to use the Ethernet though since the router is upstairs.
Ethernet over power devices are surprisingly good.
They are designed to die, almost everything is now a days. Why build a robust system that lasts forever when you can build a cheaper system that breaks every couple of years and charge as much as you would for the robust system? It’s not like consumers can choose an alternative that doesn’t use the obsolescence model.
I’ve had a couple that died after a year but still have some gen2 and gen3s running fine.
You are better off sticking with the Chromecast and setting up the old pc as a Jellyfin/Plex/Emby server with a playback app on the Chromecast. You can even run a pi-hole on it too.
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this has been an absolute game changer for me. i run an HDMI thru OBS so if i’m watching sports, i can crop out the distracting awful score ticker / now permanent ad space. and an even bigger game changer, i got a USB foot switch that i set as the mute keystroke, so instead of scrambling to hit the right key or find the remote while i’m busy, i can just stomp on the pedal to mute. it’s bliss.
That sounds wonderful especially the mute if you actually have a peddle connected just for that.
Yeah, I just plug in my laptop when I want to use a TV.
Careful though, some smart TVs actually list in the ToS where they’ll take screen captures of what you’re watching for “informational purposes”, make sure you have all data collection turned off anyway even if you don’t use it as such.
The ethernet cable goes to the computer, not the TV.
I’m gonna get a rPi for this purpose I think.
The Nvidia Shield is a very solid sub-pc option. This said, they do still shove ads in your face in the form of a scrolling banner with new shows on it.
It doesn’t bother me too much, though, and you might be able to disable it. Every blue moon it’s useful is the thing.
I do something similar with an Nvidia Shield but inevitably I get regular giant reminders that I need to connect my TV to the internet (for my benefit, surely).
This is what I did for a long time, and I still have a PC permanently connected to the TV (it doubles as the home server).
But once I got a decent smart TV, a WebOS based LG that lets you disable or avoid ads, I’ve been happy to use the TV’s apps with the remote control’s voice or wiimote-like pointer.
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.
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.
Look into plex! They have a dvr option, and you just need some sort of old, but functional PC to run the server and a cheap add-on to connect your antenna to it. It’s amazing if you get clear signals!
There’s also Jellyfin, which is better than Plex as your login doesn’t rely on their corporate servers. Jellyfin is 100% local.
My support also goes to Jellyfin but I have both plex and Jellyfin running because occasionally Jellyfin will have a playback error that I’ve tried to but failed to diagnose. Have yet to have any playback errors on plex, but again my go to is Jellyfin because it’s local, the UI is more customizable and in my opinion the UI is just better.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a playback error on Jellyfin that wasn’t related to my power going out and my NAS not coming back up (thus Jellyfin not having an actual video to serve). Jellyfin has been incredibly stable for me.
Unfortunately I can still reproduce the errors. Happens with a few shows but only when using the Jellyfin app on a fire stick. I’ve never had any playback issues using the Jellyfin app on my Roku TV. So, in those very few situations, I just use plex.
It sounds like a codec error. I would bet that if you checked the files experiencing the errors it would have some esoteric codec or be a format your host can’t easily decode, or it’s a format the playing device hardware can’t decode but the Jellyfin player doesn’t know that (somehow Jellyfin isn’t getting correct info).
I’ve had that before with a really old avi file with divx. I re-encoded the file to MP4 with h264 and it works perfectly.
Well, thanks friend, tried to figure it out again and couldn’t. But I did a full, I’m going to figure this out and changing some playback settings fixed it. Not sure why it only threw the error on one show, but it’s fixed now…
Now, you wouldn’t have any clue how to setup Jellyfin (or would you be able to point me to somewhere that would help) so it has the option of skipping intros, would you? I’m running it in a docker container on a synology nas.
plex still has some advantages, like it can run natively on more devices (e.g. playstation)
Ooo, there’s a name I haven’t heard in a bit. I had Plex sometime a decade ago. I had a Boxee 2 Beta test device around the same time or maybe later. They were followed by an early Roku which I have neglected to replace and got stuck relying on the Vizio software for the antenna.
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!
Don’t forget to disconnect that “smart” TV from the internet! It usually works for me to tell it to use a LAN connection and disconnect the LAN cable
if only there were a good 10-foot interface for Linux that supported the major streaming services
KDE Bigscreen
HDMI?
Steam big picture?
This is the way.
I’ve seen nas mentioned a couple of times what is that?
Network attached storage. A computer that hosts files, media in this case. You can roll your own or buy one, and they often have other server features.
Basically a home server.
I have a ~$100 tiny form factor dell computer attached to my TV. It was probably used in an office for 5 years before I got it from the dell outlet.
I installed Linux Mint and plugged it into my TV with a wireless keyboard and mouse. It was a painless experience and it works beautifully.
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.
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Just got a used Vizio and I have the same problem. 100% of the time I’m using my Apple TV on one input, but as soon as I turn it off it switches to smart cast. Except it can’t even find my wifi network, so all it does is give me a screen saying it can’t connect. Why can’t it just stay on the input I set it to??
Well you see if they did that then the shareholders would be sad. You wouldn’t want the shareholders to be sad now would you.
I disconnected my Vizio from the Internet and attached a Chromecast with Google TV because it was getting extremely slow after turning it on because it was trying to download a lot of ads
i had a vizio tv in high school, i remember that it quite literally took 10-15 seconds from the moment you turned it on to actually see live picture from an HDMI – it spent at least 2/3 of this time displaying a black screen with a giant ‘VIZIO’ logo. most egregious thing i’ve ever seen.
this isn’t a phone where you turn it off rarely! this is a television!
look! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVth6PP9t14 i timed it to TWENTY FIVE SECONDS
This is our current living room tv. It was perfectly fine until a random update made it take 10-15 seconds to turn on and then 15 seconds if you want to change inputs. It’s still our living room tv but I would not buy another Vizio.
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.
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
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.
We have the burdon of knowledge. We know too much. We were there when a TV turned on and you were presented with channels. Some fuzzy some clear. Sometimes your had to wiggle the antenna. The point is, there is a generation that has never known that. They have only seen a smart tv. They don’t know the greener grass. TV makers are waiting for us to die and the next generation to just accept their shitty product as normal. I hate it. I hate it so much.
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.
My LG TV on the other hand is crammed full of ads. I’ve blocked as much of them as I can but it looks like some of them are impossible to get rid of.
The remote is really cool though, much better for typing.Which model? The only thing my LG has is a small ‘suggested app’ or something in the home menu… But there’s never any need to open the home menu anyway
I have a Nanocell. The ads in question are mostly on the Home screen but every once in a while I get a pop-up telling me to sign up to Paramount Plus or something like that.
Turning off every ad setting I could find has helped a lot.
My Smart TV is now blocked from the wifi, I use a Fire TV stick in the back of it now, it was just far too slow.
Also I can bearly use the TV remote because it takes ages to wake up and reconnect to the TV.
I was becoming frustrated with how slow my Vizio “Smart TV” had become. I went with a FireCube that was on sale. It was overkill but I don’t want to deal with it slowing down again for awhile.
I’m looking at getting back into a PC hooked up to my TV with the fragmentation of the streaming services. It’s becoming as bad as cable again.
I’m on my second TV of the Smart gen, one LG and one Samsung and haven’t had any of these issues, I’ve found them snappy, the menus fully customisable and the updates not slowing them down.
Same. Our OLED LG and roku TV have had no ads. While I have my old laptop connected to the LG anyway I don’t actually need it, it’s just for gaming and the browser.
Depending on what you use it for, I actually found the built in browser to be rather useable
I have a 10 year old LG whose smartness was left updated long ago and I love it.
Because the vast majority of times people complain about this stuff, they have no idea what they’re talking about.
If you buy a nice TV and spend 2 seconds going thru the options you won’t have a single issue OP is complaining about.
Edit:
Apparently OP banned me for saying their meme doesn’t make sense…
The only thing that a “cheap” TV would do is slow down overtime, because it’s cheap and has the absolute bare minimum processing speed.
You need that processing speed to properly up sample to 4k from streaming.
If you want a cheap one, buy a decent 1080p so it doesn’t have to upsample.
Rtings.com is a good resource.
But it should be common sense that buying a cheap product will give you poorer results.
Why should you have to buy a nice TV for this issue to not be an issue? Why should shitty TVs have built-in advertising and glacially slow “smart” functions? Either don’t include that as TV software or fix it.
Capitalism baby!
They want to make the same profit no matter the product you’re buying. On nice TVs they make it by making more profits on the sale, on cheap TVs they make it by selling ads.
The reason the cheap TV is cheap is also because it’s using (even) older hardware so it’s no wonder they’re slow…
The price of the TV is subsidized by the ads, promoted apps, and usage tracking. But usually poor hardware to keep the cost even lower. That’s why the models with Fire TV OS and similar ones are usually the cheapest.
I don’t buy it. Before “smart” TVs, you could get TVs just as cheap.
TVs have improved in quality since smart TVs we’re introduced. However, it’s kind of like everything else. They have stopped producing the old dumb stuff.
It’s another reason why I advocate that we should compensated anytime our personal information is used or harvested.
Quality? Built in apps when a roku is 30 bucks? Is that whats so expensive?
I couldn’t get a TV anywhere near the size of the roku for the same price. 350 bucks for something 3x as large as a 400 dollar boob tube in 2002. Also it still has no ads.
Because that’s why the TV is cheap, as they make money back on serving you adds.
Apparently OP banned me for saying their meme doesn’t make sense…
I don’t think OP can ban you, just block you. And considering in this comment you implied they are stupid, while in your other comment you implied they are straight up lying, it wouldn’t surprise me.
OP is a moderator. (Not the person being replied to, but the actual OP.)
Interesting, not sure where to see that though. I checked the modlog, this person was not banned (from here).
On my instance, at least, you can see an M badge next to OP’s name under the post title.
I checked the modlog for this particular community (just in case it didn’t end up in the instance’s general logs) and can confirm, this user was not banned.
As a lowly kbin peasant this mis-feature hasn’t reached me yet. No implicit argument to authority over here.
unhelpful and rude comment. the only advice you have to offer is ‘buy an expensive tv’. do you think people buy cheaper tvs out of ignorance?
I know plenty of people who could afford a high end model but love a “bargain” and feeling like they got one over on the manufactures not realising they’re playing right into the plan.
Partially, yes they do.
It’s been years since the black Friday secret about TVs have been spread on the internet, yet people will still but them. A cheap TV with our without ads will suck because you get what you pay for.
Also the meme is obviously overexaggerating because it’s being memey. Most TVs don’t restart on their own for example, or get slowed down by updates. If you have any specific examples please share and shame the models.
The expensive TVs run the same software. Occasionally faster but equally ad filled.
LG doesn’t really have any ads
The top 2/3 of the Home Screen is ads. A big Sponsored tile plus a row of “Top picks for you” which includes sponsored content.
They also store your watch data.
For me when I press home the top 2/3 is the show I’m watching, bottom is my row of apps. The only ads I see are ‘recommended apps’ filling the start of the LG content store which is the default tab. But then I just hit the search icon and can pick the app I want.
Perhaps it’s a different market with less consumer protection? I’m in the EU
My grandparents have a cheap 2014 1080p LG LCD webOS TV that they never connected to the internet but it is and always was very slow, and the LED backlight became dull blue in places. Our dumb CCFL-backlit 2007 768p Sony Bravia has <100 ms response time in menus as opposed to 1~5 s, and is awesome with a Linux HTPC (which frankly should get an upgrade to an SSD but no big deal – I can still start streaming any major movie in <3 minutes).
Andriod tv’s take a long time to boot because they literally have to boot an operating system when they fire up, there’s no way around that in any settings.
That said, I don’t have any of the other issues because my tv has never had net access and I have a pc with wireless keyboard/mouse hooked to it, and typing this while sitting on my couch.
So when are we gonna start rooting smart TVs?
It’s now patched in newer firmwares, but there was an amazing root for LG TVs last year: https://github.com/RootMyTV/RootMyTV.github.io
I feel like I saw some universal mod kit somewhere that replaces TV electronics except for the screen driver/backlight. Maybe just in my dreams. Or maybe I’m confusing the universal CRT rehab kit that was detailed by various retro tech educators recently.
No you are right they does exist on amazon.
Got a link? I don’t even know what to search for but I’m curious.
YOU ROCK. I’d upvote you 10 times if I could.
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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.
Why the hell would I connect my TV to the internet? It’s a display device.
You will take my Display Port/HDMI/RCA input and like it.
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.
You have an LG TV? Cause I have one and want to go Office Space on it because of that shit. Not only will I never buy another LG TV, I’ll never buy another LG product because of it.
My LG TV is great … But I’ve never connected it to the internet and I never will.
Yeah mine was vlaned off from everything else and ethernet connected. I factory reset it and took it off the internet completely, but the problem still pops up every couple of months. Unplugging it and letting the capacitors discharge (like 15-20 minutes) seems resolve it for a few weeks but it just happens again.
Glad you got a good one, but the issue is something that apparently plagues their TVs. Just looking around on forums for “LG out of memory” and you’ll find people with a ton of different models and firmware versions complaining about the same issue. LGs fix for it also hilarious cause they’re like, “Have you tried deleting all your apps?” Which really is just admitting they have no clue why it keeps happpening.
Yep, it is an LG. However, after doing a factory reset and plugging a roku soundbar into it, I’ve had no problems with it since. I did the same with our other tv, a Samsung—sans the reset because I never bothered setting it up with Wi-Fi access in the first place.
I too saw all the complaints from others, which led me to the soundbar because I figured that if they’re going to suggest deleting all the apps as a solution, I may as well make sure and make it permanent.
Sounds like a memory leak. Because your not diging thru menus, your using HDMI, either its doing some background task or its the hardware excelerated video decoding. either way, the company using their own product would find bugs like that as fast as you did.
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“None of this applies to me, you all must just be dumb”
What do you mean the robots are turning on people?! Mine has always been a good boy. He always lets me get easy access to his off switch. You must be dumb! Its almost like you need to spend 100 hours with one to fix the “killing people” thing.
Not every model has such generous user respectful features. Just because your TV doesn’t have issues, doesn’t mean it isn’t an issue that plagues smart TVs. There are blogs dedicated to document which models allow telemetry disabling, user update control, performance, etc. There are numerous consumer reports, data privacy analysis from different firms, and they all point that there are issues with smart TVs. Some even point that even those with options to disable tracking, ads, and privacy options, still collect quite a lot of data they sent back to their corporate home. So it’s not that users are lazy, dumb or any other negative thing you want to imply about others, you’re not a special boy, this are legitimate issues.
But it is important that the problem does not lie in the fact you have ‘a smart tv’, it lies in the fact people buy ‘shitty smart tv’s’. Those of use with good working smart tv’s (mine’s 5yo LGC8) read these posts of people saying “never buy a smart tv, always buy another device for it” and roll our eyes.
You have internet. Just so some research and include in your criteria that the new tv mustn’t be shitty. Don’t reward the marketbros by buying shitty tv’s.
You have the same TV I do. That thing has been nothing but shit for me. I currently have it internet disconnected after doing a factory reset and it still goes out of memory and starts chain resetting after it’s been plugged in for a couple of months.
Before the factory reset I had it vlanned off and opted out of telemetry tracking, uninstalled all the bloatware apps, and spent a good while waching idle traffic to make sure nothing was sending data… None of that mattered for me. You’re attributing something to skill that is 100% luck.
Maybe it’s a different market with less consumer protection?
Regarding memory I’m using 2 out of 4 gigs with about 10 apps installed so I don’t know how you’d run out of it after factory reset and no internet. I’m reading there are 2gb LG’s as well but I’d think C8 all have 4?
My solution: Buy a very large monitor.
Then connect some streaming box to it you can easily replace if/when it gets shitty, instead of having to replace the whole TV.
