This

Chromecast hardware wasn't ever sold at a loss, AFAIK. These things were/are pretty pricey for being long-outdated SoCs equivalent to low range smartphone SoCs and a HDMI driver chip.

> My rule for modern TVs:

> 1. Never connect the TV panel itself to the internet. Keep it air-gapped. Treat it solely as a dumb monitor.

A sensible rule, indeed. Next level of dystopia: cellular modems becoming so cheap that every TV, fridge and washing machine comes with one that connects it to the Internet whether you like it or not. And then when we Faraday cage those, the device refuses to function.

Laws need to keep up and ban this shit outright. It sounds exactly like something that the EU could help with.

> Next level of dystopia: cellular modems becoming so cheap that every TV, fridge and washing machine comes with one that connects it to the Internet whether you like it or not.

That's already a reality with cars in Europe.

I also don't like this precedent, but I do still feel cars are quite different. You need a license to drive a car on public roads. The car needs lots of certifications. You need an insurance. You need to prominently display your (your car's) ID for all to see. If you make mistakes while operating a car, the police can stop you and the state can take away your right to drive a car.

This makes it all very different from a gadget you use for entertainment in your own home.

Yeah I agree obviously spyware in cars is way greater threat than one in a TV.

Just to be clear to anyone reading - those SIMs have one purpose only - to automatically call emergency services if you crash.

Do they need a SIM to do an eCall? I'd think not because after all it is a semi-regular emergency call.

So if the car has a SIM it probably could be removed to neutralize it without interfering with the eCall. But eSIMs might be a different problem...

It’s naive to think that this is a) the only current use

Almost everything ever introduced with good intentions gets perverted into something else

Traffic cameras, facial recognition, phone GPS, social media - all can and are used against you in one way shape or form

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have any of those things - I’m saying just open your eyes because e sims are no different

Over twenty years ago there came a mandate that all places with many people gathers (both residential and commercial housing) should have a EN 54‑21 compliant alarm transmitter to automatically notify authorities in case of a fire.

I'm afraid that we are crying wolf right now and are undermining our efforts to permanently shut down Chat Control and the likes when we complain about these efforts with a history of not being misused.

For now...?

The EU actually mandated that cars have a modem ("eCall"), so they could self-report accidents. I think this has been under reported even in tech circles.

You also need to have a spare tire or an inflate kit, that doesn't mean you can throw it at somebody's head or spray them in the eyes. Said in another manner: having eCall doesn't mean that they are authorized to send telemetry back in non-emergency situations or use it to do any other thing unrelated to the main function. Now, if there is not a law that forbids that, car makers are going to exploit that loophole for sure, but that does not mean the EU is evil in this context.

The path is obvious, is it not?

Having two independent cellular modems in a car is obviously silly, so it only makes sense to use the same module both for the mandatory emergency calling and for the telemetry.

Because the emergency calling is mandatory, it'll of course be made impossible to disable the modem - and by extension the telemetry. Oh, you disabled the telemetry? I bet that'll be called "tampering with safety equipment", and your insurance is now void, and your car is no longer road legal.

If the law doesn't mandate that eCall has to be fully independent, it'll 100% be used to spy on you.

> Having two independent cellular modems in a car is obviously silly

They should put mandating exactly that into the law.

But the EU can just (and maybe already does) mandate that such telemetry must be opt-in by the user, and on top of that the data collected that way must be treated accordingly to the GDPR anyway.

> 1. Never connect the TV panel itself to the internet. Keep it air-gapped. Treat it solely as a dumb monitor.

I gave up on this. I turned off a lot of the smart features but couldn’t justify not being able to use the apps.

It’s pretty dystopian my TV spying on me for sure but they’ve already got my phone, my internet history and presumably some pretty good spy satellites

If a drone has my name on it I’m done for either way

OG Chromecast is specifically being phased out because it doesn't offer the same level of control as the current crop of "smart" TVs/devices.

I image they will be much sought-after, unless you are suggesting they are being bricked

Even if they don't brick them explicitly they will no longer provide security updates for them.

I'm on the same boat, smart TV has never been online, all content is just cast from media server/phone/tablet straight to chromecast. It works, no fuss, glitch free, and of course they will kill it.

Even if they were to provide security updates, a few platforms no longer work with them. At the very least, now Disney+ refuses to stream to my original chromecast dongle.

My og chromecast frequently crash (I suspect due to running out of ram when casting contents) so I ended up replacing it with the chromecast ultra. The og chromecast is still usable if you can tolerate the crashing, but I imagine it's going to get worse as developers keep updating their cast players (basically a webpage that plays video) with new features that consume more and more ram.

I'm still disappointed they killed the Chromecast Audio... have one uptairs I use regularly. Would have bought a couple extra had I known.

What do you think of Nvidia Shield? I haven't tried it, but I think it should also belong to 2). It's clearly much more expensive than a FireTV, but as you say it shouldn't be subsidized by ads. As an Android device it should be more open than an Apple TV. While I recognize the near flawless UI and high hardware quality of most Apple devices, I disagree with their "golden cage" or walled garden approach.

The Shield Pro is perfect for me and I have no reason to upgrade. Have mine downgraded and de-bloated using this guide [0] running a custom launcher. Like you said being Android and more open helps a lot.

[0] https://florisse.nl/shield-debloat/

Wow, forced ai translation based on.. ip? System lang?

Does this article actually expect the reader to download two random APK files and then install them on their Shield? This seems... dangerous?

I see many people liking their shield, and with good reason it seems, but is it a worthy ecosystem to buy in to when it has not seen a new hardware revision since 2019?

What benefits would a hardware upgrade bring the end user? Not releasing a new model every year sounds like a perfectly good thing to me as long as they keep updating the software without introducing performance problems.

My biggest gripe with the Shield is the newest one has a remote that I really don’t like. Luckily it can be replaced with a third party remote!

I too think yearly updates are a bit too much and I too want to keep my devices for a long time. Still rocking an iPhone 12 (mini).

But support for newer codecs like AV1 and general hardware refreshes to keep up with the underlying Android base would still seem like good ideas to me.

Reading the specs it seems that the Shield also would benefit from being able to detect frame rate to auto-switch via HDMI.

Higher network bandwidth to play UHD Blu-ray rips seems like something people want.

Same, one of mine is from the initial models, and still working and receiving updates... it doesn't have the 4k upscaling of the newer models, but I've been happy and have several in my house.

About half my watching is YouTube on a paid account, the other half via Kodi and the high seas. My SO uses the regular apps for Netflix, Amazon and HBO currently. Having support for hacker-friendly features as well as blessed apps with 4k support has been pretty great.

As another post mentioned, the remote (current and previous) have been less than stellar... I've been using the one linked below[1], which works pretty well, though uses a USB dongle. FWIW, can also pair a bluetooth headset if you want the big screen experience, but don't want to blow out the house with audio sometimes.

1. https://amazon.com/dp/B07RFN8Z47

I have that exact remote. It's fantastic.

This. The lack of a Shield hardware refresh seems insane.

I get Nvidia (the company) has other priorities with higher revenue.

But they have a product, with proven product-market fit, that gives them a last mile connection with end users, in one of the highest utilization home spaces.

How has no one at Nvidia looked at that and said "I'm not saying we orient our entire focus around it, but shouldn't we at least fund it as a strategic priority?"

If datacenter revenue falls off, it's going to look awfully short-sighted not to have diversified customer base when they had the chance.

I've had the same Shield for about 8 years and it's still going strong, has all the hardware decoding I need

Even on the OG hardware, I'm able to use 4K in h.265 or AV1 without issue, it does get hot though.

I use the non-Pro version for 1080p streaming and have for years. It’s great, does what I want and gets out of the way. Some years ago they were forced by Google to use the standard AndroidTV UI instead of their own custom one, which means it now shows ads on the home screen (a carousel of “watch this on service X”), which are inoffensive enough I haven’t bothered to circumvent them. You can swap to your own custom UI if you want with some ssh futzing.

Exactly. I disabled internet access on my LG C1 after an update reenabled the setting that pops up adverts over the top of what you're watching.

What's wrong with Roku? They have a few ads here and there but I've always found the interface to be super slick. And they aren't Google, so not as harmful to share my data with? (a big assumption, I know)

Roku has been bad in a number of ways, but here's one:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/05/roku-disables-tvs-and-stre...

"Few ads here and there" is always worse than "no ads".

I wouldn't assume Roku is better to share your data with. Google uses your data to feed their own algorithms instead of just straight up selling it. Their incentive is to keep the data internal so they alone can extract value from it.

Roku just directly sells it to anyone who wants it: https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/roku-unveils-da...

Maybe this is what I need to do.

I disconnected our living room LG TV from the internet and got a Fire Stick 4K Max, but I hate it; 90% of the screen is advert, and you get a tiny sliver for the 5 apps it lets you see, and you have to go digging for the rest, not to mention the home-screen advertising isn't always appropriate for young children.

I hadn't considered Apple TV because I've never been an Apple user, but perhaps this is what I need.

Though I'm an Android user, all of the Android TV devices seem to be junk or ad-ridden junk.

Is Apple TV the way to go (asking other opinions).

Yes.

The only other one I'd seriously consider is the nVidia Shield (Pro?). But the risk with that is that it's decade old hardware with no updates in sight. It's more for the "My Plex/Jellyfin server has all the movies and TV shows ever" -crowd :)

Meanwhile my 1st gen 4k AppleTV (6-ish years old?) is chugging away perfectly and runs every single 3rd party streaming platform I need - even the local ones. As a market it's just too big to ignore.

And no ads anywhere on the front page. The top row apps get to show their stuff on the top part, but it's not "ads" in my book - unlike Google TV that just shoves full-screen crap of "YOU WANNA SEE THIS MARVEL MOVIE?!" at you no matter where you browse.

I've been aware of the Shield devices for some years now, as an Android user, but something always put me off them.

I lrecently bought the FireTV 4K in a last-ditched effort to find something I could at least have some control over; if I could replace the launcher with something that's just app icons and not all adverts it would have been perfect, but alas, Amazon has prevented that, so onto the next thing.

It's really sounding like Apple TV is the best option for something suitable for the whole family.

Can I ask; what is the purpose of the relatively large storage on an Apple TV, do they support "apps" of some kind?

> Can I ask; what is the purpose of the relatively large storage on an Apple TV, do they support "apps" of some kind?

I’d always assumed that was for rented media

You can play games decently on Apple TV, those require some storage and I believe at least the native Apple apps cache pretty heavily to local storage instead of relying on streaming.

There are "apps" too, but all of them are related to streaming video in some way, except for the games of course.

It's still seeing software updates and can play h.265 and AV1 content in 4K without issue. The latest model is 2019 though... that said works great... latest software update was just a couple weeks ago.

Also, you can swap the Android TV launcher relatively easily.

Happy apple tv user for > 5 years now. It has icons for the apps you want to start on the home screen. You click the icons. The apps start.

It's connected to a samsung tv that's not allowed wifi access. Besides the bad and steadily worsening UX of streaming apps like Netflix, my setup itself never shows me any ads.

Also the apple tv remote has a very solid, premium feel, which i like

Thank you, that's exactly what I'm after.

A quick search, suggests the latest is 3rd gen (2022), am I looking at the right device?

Yes. Macrumors here says “don’t buy” [0], but only because they tend to recommend only if tech is “new”. I have this ATv gen and it’s not perfect, but is really the best streaming box, having used roku and nvidia shield. PS: get the version with wired ethernet if you can…wifi works, but no surprise that wired is more solid.

[0] https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/apple-tv/

I just wish the remote wasn't so small that I can never find it after my girls use it. I've just gotten used to using the phone app.

If you have an iphone, you can search for it. It plays a game of hot/cold with the Bluetooth signal strength i guess, guiding you to it...

You could install Flauncher or another launcher onto Android TV. Then you don't see ads.

Unfortunately not possible on the Fire Stick (4K Max), Amazon have modified it to disallow other launchers; there are some "hacks" but none have worked for me and the closest one I did get to working was too much of a pain for the rest of the family.

I've found no way to root it either so I just want rid of it, every time something appears almost-full-screen on the home page that's inappropriate for the kids with no regard for what time of day it is, my wife gets all the more annoyed by it; she never wanted it in the first place, so the poor experience is not helping my case).

I couldn't work out how to do it on my Fire Stick either. But it does work for my Google TV.

I've been using an AppleTV as the primary way to get content to my (dumb, vintage 2007) TV for approximately a decade now.

While my usage has increasingly shifted toward drawing from my personal library through first Plex, then Jellyfin, I've also used Netflix, YouTube, Twitch, Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV+, and probably a couple of other content apps I'm forgetting on it. Aside from some issues with the UI of individual apps (which is, of course, on the developers), it all works great. Many of the apps can even show you a couple of tiles of "suggested content" right from the home screen (for instance, when I select the Netflix app, but before I launch it, it currently shows the next episodes from the most recent two shows I've been watching on it).

There are various ways in which an AppleTV can be better if you're already in the Apple ecosystem (which I am), but you absolutely do not need to be to make excellent use of it.

It can even join your Tailscale network and act as an exit node, giving you a quick & dirty VPN into your home network!

Before you buy an Apple TV you can try installing ProjectIvy launcher and see if that suits your needs. It's basically a simplified launcher UI for Android TV devices.

It's not perfect, not if it suits your needs you won't have to buy another device.

I like FLauncher! Stupid simple and does the job.

That's the one I tried on the Fire Stick, it doesn't always launch, sometimes launches a few minutes after start, and when pressing home it would go back to the default launcher.

I think it's related to the accessibility settings it wants enabled, I was never able to turn it on like it says because the setting just refuses to enable.

A cheap used mini desktop with a linux install on it is also a good way to go. Throw in a wireless mouse and keyboard and you can do not only what an AppleTV or Android box does but also everything a cheap used mini pc can do.

Even something like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/127547167640

Would be a media powerhouse compared to almost any set top box you can buy.

Throw OpenElec or OSMC on it for simple media setup or Bazzite or Ubuntu for a normal linux desktop with downloadable applications for most streaming platforms.

Apple TV 4k has an idle power draw of 0.49W and a 4k streaming power draw of 2.31W. That mini desktop will likely run at around 20W idle and approaches 30W under relatively light load and up to 60W on high loads. Plus keyboard and mouse are generally terrible couch devices. I've already got a NAS and plenty of devices I can stream from. The Apple TV is an almost perfect small and efficient device to stream to.

The down side is if you actually want streaming apps with 4K support for the paid services.

I've been using NVidia Shield TV (pro) since the first gen, still have my OG device as well as the updated models. I'm also running a Beelink SER8 with Bazzite for some living-room gaming and classic emulation.

I'm a Linux user myself, and into hardware and self-hosting, so I have hardware coming out of my ears, but I wouldn't dare try and use a Linux box in the living room.

My wife and kids use the living room TV most, I barely use it, and only then if I'm watching with them, they use all of the streaming services so they want it to play in 4K and "just work", for which Linux is unfortunately not the solution.

Honestly whatever makes you happy is fine. My point is that there are a lot of choices out there that don't require you to hand over your personal data to companies or to pay absurd prices for a sliver of privacy.

But I understand that when you have to account for the other people you live with and their comfort.

I just hook up a (linux) laptop to my TV, personally. I have a mouse (and a bluetooth keyboard which I rarely use) to interface.

I have no idea if that would in some way impact something like streaming quality because I don't have any streaming services; I live in australia where the streaming companies simply don't bother organising streaming rights for worthwhile media. I also like to own things I want to rewatch.

If I wanted to get fancy (and if I had a TV capable of connecting to the internet, which I don't) I might consider setting it up as a media server or look at NAS solutions, but my laptop is perfect for me as is.

I got one of those Google TV Streamer boxes, put a different launcher on it (Projectivy Launcher), and it's been great, no ads or anything.

My new rule for modern TVs is don't have a TV at all. The social role of having a TV is rapidly dwindling. First off, the number of movies and TV shows that merit even being watched is dwindling. Secondly, even if you find something worth watching, the odds that anybody else will want to watch it is small; everybody has been atomized by recommendation algorithms, everybody gets shown a different set of ads and media, there's no longer and shared culture when it comes to media. It used to be that everybody went home and watched NBC or one of the two other channels, all saw the same ads for the same movies and shows, so if you mentioned one the next day everybody knew what you were talking about. This is no longer true, if you try to bring up some Netflix show you heard of last night, probaby nobody else has heard of it. Now let's say you actually talk somebody into watching something with you despite that... What are the odds that both they and you get through the show or movie without reaching for their phone? Almost zero, in my experience.

It's done. The cultural significance of TV is toast. Our culture is too atomized, too personalized for shared experiences. Large TVs, centerpiece of the living room, are becoming an anachronism that date people as being from a previous era when television was still a shared cultural experience.

I like rewatching old TV shows and films, streamed from my Jellyfin server.

For me, my rule is to get a Google TV, because I can change out the launcher to Flauncher. At least that way I don't see any ads. Google may well still be tracking me, but they do all over the web and I have an Android phone so they've already got plenty of data on me. I just avoid their ads so that it minimises the profitability of that data.

I agree. My Google TV with Projectivity Launcher shows zero launcher ads unlike my Apple TV. As a bonus, it lets me install SmartTube and use DeArrow and Sponsor Block.

I just wish I could get something similar as a native iOS app. Although I can use Safari extensions, the Safari YouTube experience on iOS is terrible.

I love Projectivity Launcher on my Google Streamer, but I can't figure out how to really replace the built-in launcher. Sometimes the device falls back to the default launcher until I press the "home" button on my remote.

Have you tried installing Launcher Manager? https://www.techdoctoruk.com/launcher-manager-for-android-tv...

I had that same issue, and to solve it, I connected to the TV with ADB and disabled the default launcher.

I use Flauncher too. I also use Netguard from F-Droid and block everything except streaming apps and their dependencies. I only unblock Google when a steaming app requires an update. I'm slowly dropping subscriptions and moving to Jellyfin though too.

I just want a massive screen to watch my content on - everything else you mention is irrelevant.

>First off, the number of movies and TV shows that merit even being watched is dwindling

The first item in your list to others is subjective

That's a popular and socially safe point of view, but it's completely wrong. Artistic merit, like truth and beauty, is an objective quality completely orthogonal to cultural differences or personal opinion. To illustrate this orthogonality, I invite you to realize there exists art which has great merit and yet which you personally do not like. You should be able to do this, if you can't manage I can provide my own examples for you. The existence of such art proves that personal preferences don't weigh on the recognition of artistic merit.

You're acting as if your personally held philosophical beliefs aren't contradicted by some of the most famous minds in history.

How interesting! These great minds you speak of, are they objectively great, or only subjectively? If they are only subjectively great, then why should a lazy appeal to them sway me? And if they are objectively great minds, then how does that not acknowledge my premise?

I'm teasing you, I do acknowledged that there are great minds, past and present, who disagree with me. And I trust you can acknowledge the same, there is no shortage of great minds who believed and argued that objective truth, beauty and merit really do exist. The question I have for you or anybody who disagrees is this: can you acknowledge the existence of media you don't like one bit but nonetheless acknowledge as having merit which transcends your own personal opinions? I can easily, I can't stand Shakespeare's Othello, and I simultaneously acknowledge it as possessing a great deal of objective artistic merit. For me, there is no contradiction here because merit is not a function of personal opinion.

Using flowery language does not automatically make you correct, and even if on the hard facts you are correct, it comes across as condescending and arrogant.

What you're saying, "There are shows on TV worth watching and the art form is still evolving, and one person not liking it doesn't mean that it is bad" would have come across much more cleanly if you had stated it plainly.

> What you're saying, "There are shows on TV worth watching and the art form is still evolving, and one person not liking it doesn't mean that it is bad"

That's not even remotely what I'm saying!

I would instead say that media is only "evolving" insofar as it is being optimized by media corporations for reliable fiscal return. No risks allowed, everything needs to be cookie cutter, no risks, barely any new IPs even, the industry just wants to get committees of nepo hire "writers" to remix shit they can be reasonably confident will find reliable audiences, and that means pandering to viewers instead of challenging them. Every decision gets run through test audiences, opinion polls, and legions of executives and their consultants. Art cannot be created in such an industry environment. All they can make is base slop.

That I acknowledge there are great minds on both sides of the debate means that I wouldn't treat it as a hard fact when talking about it in an online forum, which was the explicit point of my response.

If you can recognize the greatness of somebody you disagree with, then you should also be able to recognize merit in media you don't personally like. And if merit can be thus decoupled from personal opinion, that affirms my point that objective merit really does exist.

Except... art and beauty (idk about truth) are subjective. You can attribute grades and points to art or TV shows, but whether any one person likes it is entirely subjective.

But of course, you mention "merit", which if my English is correct is "the amount of work / effort / skill involved". But I personally do not like the duct taped banana, and the work / effort / skill involved is minimal - and yet it's considered art, and people go out of their way to view it.

The Mona Lisa is "fine" (in my opinion), took skill to make, but it wasn't considered particularly exceptional in the works of Da Vinci - until it got stolen. It has objective "artistic merit", its beauty is subjective, but its financial and cultural value exploded through the roof due to its story.

I agree that the days when “everyone” watched the same show are done. But if you can find a small group to watch a show with (better in person), then there are better shows available for that experience these last several years, even if the average quality has gone down.

What are some of your favorite shared experiences to replace tv?

Yeah I mean it isn’t like there isn’t decades of content you can catch up on or anything.

This works until eARC breaks and you have to update (LG C6, never connected to the internet, only using AppleTV). And then of course the next LG update will break eARC again.

It frustrates me that this is where we have come too.

I refuse to connect any of my TV's to the internet but I have to wonder how long until a few different things happen:

- The TV's just connect to unsecure Wifi and collect the data anyways (I think there were reports of at least one manufacture already doing this at one point?). Or just make a deal with xfinity to use their mesh network that seems to be everywhere.

- The TV's don't work without being connected to the internet.

- The manufactures find out that the cost of adding in a cellular modem is justified by the increase in data they can collect.

I would love the idea of buying a modern TV without any of this crap shoved in, I happily use my Apple TV for everything that isnt video games.

It bothers me though when it seems like to fix an issue with HDR or something I need to update the firmware. I have wondered on occasion if this is intentional to "force" people to connect. If I have to do this I will run an ethernet cable to temporarily connect.

99.999% of TV's are connected directly to the Internet by their users without any restrictions. Investing in additional hardware or operator deals to capture the remaining .001% isn't typically worth it, for now.

For one of our Samsung TVs, we were able to put the update on a thumb drive (we're old, we still have some around) and then use that to install the update on the TV.

It's kind of funny, we bought these TVs because they were "smart" (when they first came out) but they were so clunky and unreliable we disconnected them and used either PS or Apple TV for other things. Now we wouldn't connect our TVs to the internet for anything, and only use PS5s for specific things. We mostly just use our Apple TV.

Mini pc + HDMI. Oh look, everything is free and no ads

I’ve thought about doing this, what kind of device do you use for input?

I have a Logitech K400 Plus portable keyboard and it works great for general use, but I end up using my Apple TV on the couch instead since I prefer using a TV remote / gamepad to navigate.

I have a Logitech K830, it's great. Alas they're not manufactured any more.

Modern equivalents are a lot cheaper. I think they might not have the backlight feature which is extremely useful, and I've dropped mine many times, even spilled coffee over it, and it still works flawlessly.

a game controller works also really well with something like Steam Big Picture and Media Players

i just use the cheapest wireless keyboard and mouse I can. I’m accessing content through the browser so there’s enough typing that I wouldn’t want a non keyboard personally.

Imo you only need remote like hardware if you’re planning to scroll through Netflix style walls of content.

I just use an Apple TV box these days, but ~15 years ago I was running a Windows 7 Media Center PC for DVR and a few saved movies. The best remote was a TiVo Slide Pro (no longer made, and my wife broke the one we had). Normal TiVo remote buttons on top, slides open to expose a small keyboard. They occasionally show up on eBay or if you have a local source, use that. You'll need one that has the RF dongle to be able to use the keyboard with anything other than an RF-capable TiVo.

just make sure at least one side of your TV connection doesn't support HDMI Ethernet Channel ;P

100%. Roku's privacy policy is the most wildly invasive thing I've ever seen - basically everything that used to be just conspiracy theory.

This is what we've been doing for a few years now. It works.