The problem with trying to avoid the current smart TVs is that the industry has started to subsidize the pricing by selling viewing data. It’s going to be harder moving forward to compete on price without having “smart” features that are really a shim for getting the analytics and tracking packages in there.

I’ve been running a pihole on my home network which also actually removes a lot of client side inserted ads during video playback which is another huge upside.

What frustrates me is the lack of options and lack of transparency. Amazon do it right with the Kindle imo—you can get it with ads or pay slightly more and get it without.

My other issue is that I find ads on something that costs > £1000 to be incredibly distasteful. If it was some bargain basement thing fine, but this is meant to be top tier.

Conversely, the advertisers are becoming increasingly less hesitant about doing what they want: exploiting high-end products instead of low-end products. The fact that you just spent north of £1k on a TV is an unambiguous proof you're much more lucrative target for advertising than someone who only buys the cheapest things available.

This is why "pay XOR ads" is a pipe dream: vendors will always turn it into "pay AND ads", because selecting for people with disposable income makes ROI on advertising much better.

But that only works as long as everyone is at it. As soon as you have one brand that makes a point of not doing anything like that and just providing good quality gear, the market of people with enough money to feature in this part of the discussion has another option they may well prefer. And if people buy Apple gear, no-one is convincing me that such a brand couldn't sell a TV with $1000 hardware specs and no junk at $1200 or even $1500 to that market.

How many such brands exist? Apple is the obvious example, but what else? I can think of only single other one - Framework[0] - but it's pretty niche at the moment, and it's too early to tell how successful it'll be. A mass market brand? Can't think of one.

The problem here is, by not doing this kind of shady shit, which is currently normalized as a business practice, you're leaving lots of money on the table. The temptation to pick it up is strong. Maybe you can resist it, but will your investors? Will your shareholders?

If we could figure out how to resist, in a reproducible way, the market pressure favoring antisocial behavior, the world would be a much better place.

--

[0] - https://frame.work/

> If we could figure out how to resist, in a reproducible way, the market pressure favoring antisocial behavior, the world would be a much better place.

Isn't that what regulation is for? If business practices harm society, then you legally rein in the business, financially discouraging them from committing such practices.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/no-chocolate-or-ice-cre...

https://wwwl.foodnavigator.com/Article/2015/01/07/Netherland...

Yet even Apple is sliding into pay-and-ads with special placement for their own offerings.

I'm not arguing that recent Apple is a business to be emulated here. However its success is clear evidence that if something is shiny enough and has otherwise good specs then there is a large market willing to pay a large premium for the shiny.

I’d happily pay a several hundred dollar premium for an ad-free, analytics-free OLED option from LG.

Buy an LG TV that's never hooked into any network and an Apple TV. The only interface I ever see on my Sony TV (which has an LG panel) is the input switcher.

I've got an LG and blocked it on my router from getting outside the LAN.

There is away around this, consistently pressure and lobby our governments to make this illegal or mandate that they provide dumb TVs as well.

Change doesn't happen instantly but a dedicated lobbying campaign and activism will yield results.

My understanding is this is what Amazon Sidewalk is, at least in part, about. Your TV could easily bypass your network, and connect through your neighbours Echo. If I understand, it's opt-out and enabled by default. So, essentially Samsung will pay Amazon a few bucks a months to show you ads regardless of how you've locked down your network, because your neighbour hasn't locked down his.

https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/b?ie=UTF8&node=213281...

This is my greatest fear, that I'll have to resort to wrap around Faraday cages for each of my should-be-dumb devices.

There could be wallpapers for this. AFAIK https://www.erfurt-tapeten.com/en/ produced one which had this as a side effect of thermal insulation. Or still produces. The 'wavies' raved about it a while ago :-)

Can't remember the product name anymore, unfortunately.

Some person maintains this Smart TV focused list for pihole. Most of the domains above are there, and more.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/m...

And, there's one for FireTV

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/m...

I have a Samsung smart TV. I was using Pihole before I got it. I also had to implement a rule on my Mikrotik router to force all DNS queries on my network to go through th Pihole. Then the ads on the Samsung disappeared. Unfortunately, it also broke the OS updates and app store, but all I have to do is disable the pihole filter for 10 minutes to do those jobs and I'm good.

Is there a UK available streaming device that supports:

- AirPlay (audio/video)

- Spotify Connect

- YouTube 4K

- USB MP4 (& MKV)

- Netflix 4K

- Amazon Prime 4K

And is super polished & responsive? If so I'd be interested, but my LG TV, crummy as its ads are, does all this out the box. I'd happily pay some money to have more control.

Aside from USB playback, an Apple TV 4K can solve most of this. (I don’t know about Spotify Connect but assume it works with AirPlay if not).

Yeah the USB is the kicker. I want to avoid using some crap like Plex, so unless there's a super simple and reliable way of streaming 4K MKVs over the network it is nice to use the pendrive.

I suppose the TV can still use the pendrive even offline, actually.

What advantages does an AppleTV 4K (£169) have over a Roku Streaming Stick+ (£45)?

I stream 4K MKVs from my phone (an iPhone) to my Apple TV 4K using AirPlay all the time. It used to be a challenge getting the codecs right, but there's broader support now. It took awhile to find a good iOS app that supports this, but once I found nPlayer[0] I've never gone back. It's faarrr better than the VLC iOS app.

It works quite well even when my phone is streaming media that's on cloud storage somewhere (nPlayer supports many). But for optimal playback I download the file to my device first.

Of course if you want Dolby Atmos sound, I think you're out of luck. I think HDR should work but not sure.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nplayer-plus/id539397400#?plat...

edit: You can also install app on the ATV that accesses files stored over the network/internet as well, like VLC for ATV. Though I've never found a great one.

App to access files over the network. I think Infuse is pretty good. It supports NAS and if your files are well named then pulls in meta/artwork. Can also be a front-end for Ember/Jellyfin/Plex, but for my LAN media I’m currently going with DLNA.

Infuse is fantastic!

Fun fact, Dolby Atmos support is very much pushed now, not sure how long it has been like this but it says it on the box so perhaps a software update?

I did not realize this was an option, thank you for your comment

So what exactly is the system? You transfer the MKVs to your phone via a cable somehow? Is there any quality hit?

I use nPlayer to access my files over the network/sftp/Dropbox/WebDAV/put.io/HTTP and download to my local device. But like I said, streaming directly from the network works too. But for a high bitrate 4k file downloading first is better since the server=>phone=>ATV transfer can be too slow. (Resolution doesn’t matter, it’s all about bitrate. Some 4k HEVCs are lower bitrate/smaller files than 1080p h264s)

Having an excellent with Infuse and macOS inbuilt SMB!

You can get VLC on Apple TV which makes streaming most things on the LAN simple enough but yeah, just using the USB port on the TV would probably work for that use case. The UI is miles better on the Apple TV and the remotes are very good, but you do need to create/use an Apple account in order to download things (like Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime etc.) from the App Store.

Not sure about the Plex flack here, 4k is fine if not transcoded and sits happily in its own library.

I own both, and the Roku is slow, buggy and has really horrible UX. It doesn't get used at all.

>streaming 4K MKVs over the network

Isn't that covered by your airplay requirement?

I couldn't work out how to do this. I usually just use IINA and an HDMI cable but it's non-ideal - I figured it would require re-encoding or something and sucking on quality.

If you have a solution I'm all ears!

I use Airflow to stream 1080 to a chromecast from my MacBook . Works flawlessly with a simple UI.

My understanding is that it supports 4k and a range of streaming devices but I can’t say if it handles it flawlessly because I don’t have hardware to try it.

Right, I've bought an Apple TV 4K!

I have a 28.99GB H.265 5.1 Atmos MKV file of Linux tutorials that I would like to play on it, sitting on my MacBook.

What is the most painless way to play it on the Apple TV with no loss of quality (other than the surround, which will be played on 2.0 speakers anyway).

Try AirPlay. Should let you wirelessly share the video from your laptop to the AppleTV unit.

Yeah, I have an Apple TV 4K on my LG dumb TV which does all this (AirPlay also being far superior to Spotify Connect), though it's the dumb TV that will play back anything off a USB stick. Willing to bet this TV outlasts a "smart" Samsung by many years.

I like Spotify Connect as it is easy to transfer from desktop to TV

You can do it all with two streaming devices, an Apple TV, and a Raspberry Pi running LibreElec:

https://libreelec.tv

And the Raspberry Pi is $35 so it's not a hugely expensive addition.

The Pi doesn't support 4K Netflix, 4K Amazon or full fat Airplay.

...that would be why I said that and an Apple TV.

I’m using a Mac mini. Just have a wireless mouse and keyboard. Much more versatile than a streaming device. It’s nice being able to zoom from it with family or coworkers.

Doesn't support Amazon 4K from that list.

That would probably cost you more than the TV itself.

Use it for work at night too. I’m fortunate enough to hardly consider price for my priorities (performance, ad-free, versatility).

As others have said the Apple TV gets you most of the way there—presumably you can do USB playback from the TV without connecting to the network?

I can, shame it doesn't support MKV properly, though!

Third party apps from the App Store, such as VLC, will play MKVs (and other formats) no problem.

I used to re-encode MKVs to MP4s for playback on the AppleTV 3rd gen, but since getting the Apple TV 4K (2nd gen), I simply shuttle over the MKVs to VLC from the web interface.

I'm interested - how do you transfer the 4K MKVs to the Apple TV?

In the VLC app on the Apple TV, you can open up the Network Sharing tab. It starts a local network server and is accessible via a webpage like http://living-room-apple-tv.local. Then I simply drag-and-drop the files from my computer to the webpage. On the AppleTV, they'll be cached indefinitely (at least until storage is available, or you delete VLC). I use this to play one-off/occasional video files.

You can also run a file server on your computer, and tell VLC where to access it over the network.

I believe that VLC isn't the only app on the AppleTV that can play MKVs, but it's the one I use.

In case you're wondering, the AppleTV is powerful enough to stream + transcode the MKV files on the fly. I've never had issues, at least with 1080p files. 4K should be fine, too.

Use Plex

I don't think so, but a Sony Android TV would also meet these requirements.

HN is generally down on integrated TVs, but the truth is that they're honestly fine nowadays, and much more likely to have robust integration of services than boxes are. And if support goes downhill after a while, you can buy a box then when there will maybe be better options.

I think maybe a Roku Streaming Stick 4K will do everything there except the USB? (I don't have one but have been considering one; I have a 5-year-old LG Blu-Ray player that covers USB and DLNA pretty well).

With the exception of AirPlay, the Nvidia Shield seems to fit the bill.

There are AirPlay receivers for the Shield IIRC but they are unofficial and unsupported.

A large amount of Kodi/android based tv boxes support that. For example pentoo devices

Nvidia shield pro should be able to do all that with some finagling for airplay.

Roku, I believe, would be something to look at.

A Windows PC?

Where does LG do it? Honestly I've had two LGs for about 4 years now and have not noticed any ads, maybe some in their content store, but that's about it. Overall pretty happy with LG

I have a LG C7 and haven't seen any ads. Maybe it's newer versions or certain regions.

I have a CX and a G9 (essentially a bezel-less C9) in the US, I have not seen the ads

Is HDMI-CEC (Anynet+ on Samsung) a security/privacy risk also? I remember reading something about it being able to leverage connected devices Internet access a long time ago but I can NOT find anything to substantiate that now.

I do disable HDMI-CEC anyway just to stop user-hostile features like Hulu on Roku disabling the input select button on the TV remote.

Ethernet over HDMI is totally a thing but I have no idea if the ports in their TVs are wired for it.

I recently searched for this and couldn't find any device that actually implements this. In any case, Ethernet over HDMI still requires one of the HDMI devices to be connected to the network via some other way and bridge the HDMI connection with that network as to give the other HDMI device a way out. So something like an Apple TV which has no incentive to help spyware should be safe.

4. All of the above.

Ironically, Vizio TVs (one of the budget brands) seem to be one of the least aggressive about trying to display ads in ways which are difficult to bypass. That's what I bought and I don't connect it to the network, and I block these ad domains (among others) network-wide.

For #1, maybe these can be good substitutes:

https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...

Absolutely not, their panels suck.

The only budget manufacturers that give two shit about quality seem to be Hisense, TCL and Vizio.

haha, thanks for correction

I bought the 65" dumb panel TV from them because I refuse all this be, it's fine, and I feel like it's mine, I'm not renting it by constantly paying with ad watching.

This is excellent advice. Shit makes my blood boil, too. I do this for my LG TV but have had a hard time getting a definitive list of domains to add to my blocklist. Does anyone have a lead on this?

I have an LG TV and never seen an ad. Just don't go into their store or home screen. Launch the app you want directly.

> Unfortunately, if you're in the market for a real high-end TV, you often don't have another option

What about Sony?

I will admit I haven't checked very recently, but when I was looking earlier in the year, Sony's offerings were a good bit more expensive than Samsung or LG for an equivalent panel and lacked some features important to me like VRR.

Plus, doesn't Android TV have ads anyway? I haven't used it extensively but a quick search seems to suggest it does.

Yeah, I have a Sony X800H, and I foolishly installed an update early in 2021 that added irremovable ads to the home screen.

I haven't figured out how to roll the firmware back, but I have blocked basically all of the domains it accesses with pihole, and after a cache clear, it only displays default messages imploring the user to check out youtube and other google products. It's inoffensive enough that I haven't continued exerting effort to quash them.

Or Philips

Why would you not want an OLED panel? Are you using the TV for signage or something?