Some Webos LG TVs, like mine, can be rooted. I can now do wonderful things like install an ad-blocking version of youtube(still works in spite of recent changes). And SSH into my tv and mess around with the Linux system if I want to.

I don't want to hack my tv, I want to watch a film.

It's "hacker" news...

Parent comment's point is that you shouldn't have to hack your TV just to get a half-decent user experience.

You shouldn't have to, but the fact that you can is part of the hacker ethos. We've already gotten past the most fundamental part of hacking, can it be done. The next is can it play Doom. The third is announce it. Then, we just have to get past the boring people asking "why"

I don't want to spend all my waking hours hacking all things in my life. That's not what "hacker ethos" means. Especially not when the "hack" is working around stupid wankery, which, to me, is completely boring and uninteresting and doesn't "build" anything.

I just want to watch a film.

I don't want to hack my forks either. Or my microwave. I just want to heat stuff and then shovel it in the appropriate foodhole so I can get on with things.

Then don't buy the thing in the first place????

I suppose there's an opportune time to hack and a sub-optimal time to do so, subjectively.

Tell that to the VC posters, the corporate drama posts, the psychology links, the biology, space and popular science articles that are on here.

This place isn't for just hackers, not anymore at least. And that brings good and bad.

I’d rather spend the time “hacking” something fun than a smart TV. My time is better spent elsewhere

LG webOS in my opinion is the least bad out of all the smart TV operating systems, and so far (we have a few of these at home & at work) I don't really feel the need to root them as they are ad-free and working fine even after several years of auto updates. This lack of enshittification has urged me lately to buy and prefer LG products over Samsung et al.

I agree, I'd rather use something else, even if only for philosophical reasons, but I couldn't find anything that didn't sacrifice something - or at least that could promise it didn't.

No separate box seems to do all of 4K, Atmos, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HLG without some weird restriction like 'except the Netflix app'. Even worse if you wanted DV IQ I assume, but I think my TV doesn't support it anyway.

And honestly I think I prefer WebOS to Fire sticks' UI for example. Stock Android TV isn't great either. If I was into playing Xbox/PS games I imagine that would make a better 'hub', since it's presumably (I have no idea) more organised around your own content/games at least rather than random adverts and features you don't want. Also probably more money being spent on designing it.

if you have an LG tv, HDR10+ is not needed as the dynamic handling of HDR10 on the tv makes the HDR10 layer look as good as HDR10+. With this is mind, an Nvidia shield pro is pretty much what you are looking for.

> they are ad-free

The home screen on my LG TV seems to devote the top 60% of the page to sponsored content. Is this not an issue for you?

I understand where you are coming from, but I personally think that it's reasonable for a TV to show me sponsored content that is TV shows. I don't see this any different to how Netflix or Spotify show sponsored TV shows or music.

But my friend has a Samsung TV and it shows him ads for things he can buy from eBay, ads for games etc. in a similar area .. and yeah that's nonsense, that would really get on my nerves.

I don’t even have a Home Screen on my C9

I think you can switch it off. Poke around on menus

the webOS on my LG is so out of date that modern apps won't install. so instead, i don't use the webOS, and treat it as a dumb TV with an HDMI input by using an external device for the smart things. there is nothing wrong with the picture that any of the updates would be required. so, just don't connect the smart tv to the rest of the world, and say thanks to all of the others that do to subsidize the price of your TV

An external Chromecast stick also works fairly well (assuming you pay for YouTube premium and Netflix etc to avoid ads, but at least not much in the way of bloatware).

But can you make the UI not super laggy?

I recently acquired a very old Sony TV it reminded me how lag-free TV interfaces are supposed to work. But nooooo LG is like "we're going to make great TVs but the UI is a poorly written web page running on a 386, enjoy!"

Not really, but you can improve it a little by disabling automatic firmware updates. So it at least doesn't get worse.

It's not that hard to get around this. I kept my TV offline and plugged in an Apple TV immediately.

Some TVs constantly display nag screens or blink the power LED at you if you keep them offline.

I can't decide if it's better to check for such things before purchase, or just return it as defective if I end up getting a model that does this.

I also use an AppleTV with my Samsung TV. I did give the tv WiFi credentials so that sometimes if needed it can reach the internet (eg firwmare download), but I set up firewall rules to block all traffic for the tv in steady state.

Trust me, you don't want your TV to download firmware. My Sony TV started freezing every so often after downloading some random update. Since then, it's gone off wifi and only the Chromecast is allowed to connect.

Absolutely return as defective. Make it sting a little.

If it doesn't say on the box "requires constant internet to function" in big bold letters, it should.

What about saying in big bold letters 'requires constant electricity to function'?

That would be a ridiculous requirement, because people expect that TVs need electricity. But the producer can argue that people these days also expect TVs to need the internet, can't they?

They sure as fuck cannot, I've never connected a single TV to the internet. That's something that needs to be explicitly declared.

That would be a for a judge to decide.

They're going to take me to court for returning a TV?

They might refuse to accept your return, and you might have to enlist the help of the legal system, if you want to force them to accept it. Of course, details depend on your jurisdiction and on the retailer / manufacturer and what warranties they give you (or are forced to give you), etc.

> [...] blink the power LED [...]

You can fix that with a piece of tap or blu-tack.

This is why i bought a Sony. They have a ton of features packed in but won't scream if you don't ever connect them.

Convert the Smart to DumbTV by offloading all apps to your favorite streaming device (for example, Apple TV or Nvidia Shield). If it helps, don't ever enable internet connectivity to the Smart TV.

This gets most of the way there, with buying a monitor instead of a TV. You just need to take the next step and get a pg42uq. OLED, super accurate color, great response time, and unfortunately the answer to the question what would modern TVs cost without the app/telemetry subsidies.

It was always surprising me than digital signage screens without all that TV crap were many times more expensive than just consumer equipment.

yeh it's a shame my TVs work so fast when I first bought it but becomes noticeably laggy with each update

It doesn’t become useless junk. You can still use it as a display without any of the smart features. Connect to a Roku or Apple TV (which also automatically turn on when the TV turns on) for smart features.

I've honestly never used the smart features of my TV. It's an old 4K LG (Netcast era), so it's been in service for 6+ years. The "smart" stuff always sucked: riddled with privacy policies, generally quite slow, and could honestly be replicated way better with a media stick / NUC.

A NUC is generally the way to go for smart TV functionality in general, IMO: you get way longer support, and it's much easier to diagnose problems as compared to some locked-down, proprietary, do-it-ourselves OS.

Worse yet, now high end monitors (Samsung Odyssey G9 OLED) are offered with poorly implemented smart TV hub features.

The only thing that works well on their smart TV hub features is the ability to block signal from my current-gen Chromecast.

Coordinated asshole design.

How does that blocking work?

I have no idea, except that it blocks video output, and comes up with a prompt to log in to whatever service via the TV. I can cast just fine from e.g. a webpage or a podcast app. But Netflix or Max or Prime? Forget it.

There are some business/enterprise displays offer a "framework" approach by using a RPI CM4 to control everything. Unfortunately, that is out of reach for most consumers lacking a corporate sales account.

That also makes me wonder how much TVs are being subsidized with ads and sponsored content. Those businesses displays cost significantly more than a regular consumer TV.

Well, an OLED will be pretty much dead after six years anyways.

Also, you cat reset an old, slow TV, put it in "dumb" mode, then add something like a Vero V or another box.

This depends a LOT on both how, and how much the display in question is used.

You can make an OLED visibly burn in within a couple months if you max the brightness, cover it in static content and then leave it running constantly.

Or it can last a decade if used lightly, on lower brightness, with good burn-in compensation software, with few to no static images.

A decade is still a really short lifespan for a TV

Is it though?

2004 is the first year I remember watching a HD widescreen TV show (Lost). There were a handful of test clips and the like earlier, but they were a rare thing. E.g.: there's a HD video taken of the aftermath of 9/11 because the operator was just learning to use this (at the time) brand new technology.

That lasted about a decade, and then 4K become a thing around the 2013-2014 timeframe. I got a Sony 4K TV in late 2013 and a Dell 4K monitor in 2014.

However, both of those were standard dynamic range, albeit with a fairly "wide" colour gamut.

I got my first OLED HDR display in 2021, and an OLED HDR TV in 2022.

In other words, every "generation" of television technologies has lasted about a decade before being superseded by something significantly newer and better.

Display technology still has some ways to go. No current consumer panel reproduces 100% of the Rec.2020 colour gamut. Similarly, there are no consumer panels that can reproduce the full HDR10 or Dolby Vision brightness range of up to 10,000 nits. There are 8K displays that are close to that target spec, but they're either one-off experimental models or more expensive than a luxury car.

A decade from now, around 2033 mark, I full expect something like VR technology to have replaced TVs for many people. Apple's new headset (available next year!) will set a new quality bar that no traditional TV can ever hope to match, such as an extremely wide field of view, stereo, and very bright HDR in combination. Sure, they're expensive now, but after a decade of further development? They'll be amazing and cheap.

In your future, do households with more than one person exist? Because no matter what the tech is that'll never happen. We have a family, and after dinner if we want to watch a sitcom and laugh, we ... what .... go put on our own individual headsets and lay in bed? What happens on Sunday and it's icy outside, and we want to put a james bond movie on with the booming sound, have a glass of wine while the kids make hot chocolate, how do we do that? If I'm a single dude with disposable income I can see the vr headset with insane quality being pretty awesome, but for ANY kind of household with a family or roommates, I just can't fathom that kind of dystopian nightmare.

Teenage kids will likely want to play video games or watch their own thing.

Many young people live by themselves and can't afford a "huge" TV. Meanwhile VR will give them a virtual TV as big as they like.

Another potential future technology that might obsolete the current 55-85 inch typical TV sizes is "OLED wallpaper", or something similar that would allow wall-sized televisions.

Even before the 2030s I expect something like quantum nanorods to replace OLED panels, potentially allowing up to 10,000 nits in an affordable panel that doesn't suffer from burn-in.

On another front, I've noticed a lot more people watching something like TikTok, YouTube, or Netflix on their hand-held devices instead of traditional TV. I can picture a future super-thin, super-light Apple iPad with an OLED HDR display becoming very popular, especially for people on a budget that can't afford a huge TV.

The comment you replied to wisely stated 'for many people', and not 'for all people'.

You are likely right about your specific use cases. Though you might also want to see how early on some people predicted that TV would never take off, because families just didn't have the time for it.

We don't have a TV at home, and we would just do different activities in the situations you described. (But, yes, those activities in these situations would likely not include hanging out with headsets on.)

We're outlier in the TV market. 95% of buyer don't care Rec.2020 and continue using TV until it broken (maybe 80%?). OLED isn't for who use it for a decade.

...it is? I buy a new TV every two to three years as notably better tech comes out.

We probably have different definitions of "notably better"

I definitely think notably better is fairly subjective here.

I have a 4K OLED from 2018. Since then, I think the only notable improvement in the models from the same manufacturer is maybe enhanced-ARC? That is a neat feature, but not sufficient imo. Maybe a 120Hz refresh rate, but very little content even uses 60, let along 120 - at least in the cinema and TV space.

Anecdotally, My cheap old TCL dumb LED tv light burned out after about six years which is about average from what I’m seeing online but maybe I can fix it. But I did use it as suggested with a mi box.

> Well, an OLED will be pretty much dead after six years anyways.

Why is that?

They get dimmer as they age and might also develop "burn-in".

This really isn't an issue these days if you research your screen. Rtings.com has a good series on their website and YouTube testing OLED burn-in, and there are many TVs where this is not an issue. Also check out Wulff Den on youtube and his videos testing the OLED Nintendo Switch. He does get some bad burn in after a year, but that's also because it's on a still image at max brightness and never turns off. I don't mean a year of standard usage. I mean 8,765 hours of it displaying the same image.

Screensavers became necessary again?

For OLED computer monitors: yep!

They were never necessary to begin with: automatically turning the screens off (or at least to 'black') is never worse.

Not just that. OLED TVs nowadays have a screensaver that kicks in when it detects stationary image for more than a few minutes.

They also shift the image around by a few pixels to prevent logos and tickers from permanently marking the screen.

And when turned off, they also try to level the brightness of individual pixels by displaying different patterns - again to combat "burn-in".

> Well, an OLED will be pretty much dead after six years anyways.

How much TV are you people watching such that this statement becomes even remotely accurate? My 2017 LG OLED display says it has 6400 power-on hours and it looks as good as new.

The average American watches five hours of television every day, or just shy of 11,000 hours over six years.

https://www.marketingcharts.com/television/tv-audiences-and-...

Lots of people leave their television sets on for almost the entire day, even when not watching. Never understood that.

SO does that. She'll put the show on pause, go do shopping, come back and resume. All while leaving the TV on.

I've tried to get her to change oh so many times, all in vain...

No rational explanation either. Just... that's how she rolls I guess.

enable energy savings and turn off the tv after 2 hours. problem solved! Most tv's show a popup when they are about to shut off because of power savings, and with a button on the remote you can reset the timer.

This is extremely passive aggressive, tell me you’re single without telling me you’re single. People’s preferences being different than yours is not a technical problem to be worked around.

I’m not the one complaining here. My wife turns off everything before she leaves the place. Even if its just a quick walk with the dog :)

I had a girlfriend who would flush the toilet before using it. She said "it's cleaner this way". I tried to get her to stop, but it was a futile effort.

Before and after, I'd hope. :)

That doesn't kill LG OLEDs thought, that results in a nearly black screensaver (just a small slow "firework" effect). Wastes a touch more energy than turning the tv into sleep mode (since nothing actually turns off anymore), but hard to believe that would shorten life much.

Gives a feeling of having other people around and staves off loneliness.

That explains a few things.

Still, the objective tests from RTINGS seem to suggest that it's the LCD sets that look all fucked up after a few years, while almost all the OLED ones look perfect. And they OLED sets aren't showing a downtrend in overall brightness over time.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/longevity-results-after-10-m...

That's insane to me. I can't stand watching TV. I feel my life being sucked away.

That actuality sounds pretty standard. That would be from 5pm-10pm. Evening news, game shows, then like two 1 hour long shows and it’s already been five hours.

Many people leave the TV running in the background while they do other things, like eat dinner.

For the lifespan of the screen, it doesn't matter if anyone actually directs their eyes at it.

Try sitting down.

Yeah, that's a wild claim to me too. My 2018 LG C8 has about 5800 hours on it and it is indistinguishable from new. (Though I've never run it at max brightness because it would be blinding.)

Confusingly, the contrast control has a higher effect on image brightness (in the ordinary English language use) than the brightness control does.

Funny, I use an LG OLED 48" TV as my monitor. It's really the cheapest option for a 4k 120hz OLED, although I'd prefer 240hz as GPUs are getting more powerful.

Doubt it. Most people only care that their TV is huge and cheap. Visual quality is a distant afterthought.