I’m genuinely gonna blow up if I have to spend another second using this thing.
To start, the home screen is chock full of ads and news, literally takes up at least a 1/3 of the screen and its a big ass screen. Then the remote has this scrolly wheel that is also the select button but it scrolls really easily when you press it and if it scrolls it brings up a cursor that completely interrupts what you’re doing. This happens often while typing. Then, should you deign to search a movie on the movie machine, you are faced with multiple instances of the same movie on different platforms. If you, like me, do not know what your parents have full subscription, partial subscription, and no subscriptions to then you will have to click on one of these to find out if it is streamable for a fee, with ads, not at all, not in your zipcode (for which you need to type in your zipcode EVERY TIME), or actually available. This information is not available in the menu so you have to actually go to the application offering the movie. If it is unavailable on that platform and you want to check another platform you can press the back button which brings you back to the homescreen or you can press the home button which brings you back to the homescreen. In either case you will have to navigate to the search button, search the movie again (if you typed the movie using the remote keyboard then you can simply click the presearched title but if you used the mic you have to speak it again), and click another platform only to repeat the process.
IT GENUINELY TOOK ME OVER AN HOUR TO SEARCH UP 10 MOVIES AND NONE OF THEM WERE AVAILABLE!
When they make a thing so unusable that you wonder if they’re trying to kill the medium on purpose
Idk how tf they live like this. My dad has been trying to turn the house into a “smart home” as well and I stg half of the house doesn’t fucking work. The bathroom light simply does not turn on (the bulb works) even though I can see the motion detector flash. So I have to shower and shit in the dark or with the door open and if do the dog will be in there with me and I love her but I am not a dog person. Some of the outlets simply do not provide power until they suddenly do for no clear reason. I’ve been here 10 days and I just figured out how to turn the bedside lamp on by plugging it in to a different outlet instead of the surge protector it was in. The surge protector was clearly receiving power as the light was on. Sometimes when I press the ceiling light button it strobes and there is no clear pattern as to when it will and won’t. Sometimes the light turns red. Yesterday the TV just turned itself off. I have to speak to the coffee machine. I put a towel over the kitchen motion detector because I don’t want the fucking lights to turn on without my sayso. ELECTRONICS DO NOT DESERVE AGENCY AND I’M SICK OF PRETENDING OTHERWISE
This is the future.
https://hexbear.net/comment/7355541Actually plausable
smart tvs are insane. i got into projectors over a decade ago, and thankfully its fairly easy to get a “dumb” one whenever it comes time to replace. all my content is set up through an android box that let me change the interface to something equally dumb/simple and i have steadily replaced all my streaming apps with jellyfin. nothing ever autoplays or makes noise.
but sometimes I have to see how my parents watch media and its fucking reprehensible. its all shitty, sluggish and puzzle palace UX with autoplay noise-making ads and its like a gordian knot to find something that isn’t being promoted down your throat. so naturally, they watch the worst, most criminal of garbages and have never heard of anything worth watching.
its torturous to interact with those systems.
they watch the worst, most criminal of garbages and have never heard of anything worth watching
Not me being reminded by this comment that my slop anime updates today
Oh hey we have the same setup 😃
How many remotes you got? That’s the weakness of my setup, too many remotes. 1 to power the projector, 1 to control the android box, and if anything needs to be changed on the surround receiver, 1 for that too!
my android stream box is an nvidia shield tv which can be programmed to control the volume on my receiver. so its a 2 remote setup.
1 to turn on projector and select source (PC, stream box, nintendo). 1 to control stream box or adjust volume.
guests are mostly blown away by “projector”, but to me the real beauty is its ease of use and simplicity.
edit: i have everything set up as a two channel stereo set up. ive thought a lot about going to a set up with surround channels, but honestly I found surround sound to be gimmicky. so having everything down mixed to stereo means a lot less to futz with besides volume.
Oh nice yeah we have very similar setups lol. Currently all my signals pass through the receiver before hitting the projector so I’m still stuck with that remote but in practice I use only 1 input so it’s fine! Someday I might have equipment with eARC so I can simplify some more.
Do you run into issues hearing dialog on the mixdown or do you just have good speakers that compensate?
Surround has been neat but it came at the same time as a speaker upgrade so I’d probably be just as happy losing the two rears if it meant a speaker upgrade.
i don’t think i run into problems with the downmix. android seems to have an OS level downmix to stereo in its settings. a lot of shit i DL/watch is stereo anyway.
i might consider a center channel soundbar someday.
my speakers are… interesting. two big ass tower sony speakers i got for free 10+ years ago. a neighbor asked if i wanted them, because the wiring was tore up. i bought some speaker wire, rewired em and they’re awesome. like 36" tall boxes. can shake the house. they’re still pretty incredible.
im sure i could drop some hundos and get some better audiophile setup, but i told myself i would rock these until i blow em out.
Holy hell I didn’t even mention the autoplay but its infuriating
netflix has autoplay and it makes it so irritating to find something to watch bc you can’t read the descriptions quickly enough to not get the stupid trailers to play
Webos cons are what you listed but the pros are that it’s the most “defeatable” smarttv os if you hate ads. Google tv and Roku are insanely oppressive about serving ads and will get around almost all of the usual tricks. That said lg is one of the most consumer hostile companies out there right now so don’t install their updates because they have, on several occasions, added increasing levels of data tracking that is automatically opted in (and in the case of their computer displays added a bunch of adwares/malware bullshit that installs as “drivers”)
If you haven’t updated in a bit look and see if you can root it. Depends on the version of webos and I don’t know what’s recent but https://cani.rootmy.tv/ is generally up to date. On the webos homebrew store there are a number of apps to limit tracking and stop ads (ad free youtube with sponsor block, kill Amazon tracking, etc) and you can block updates
A more simple approach is to block lg update and ad servers on your network (you should still do this even if you root it tbh)
||snu.lge.com^ ||su.lge.com^ ||su-ssl.lge.com^ ||snu-dev.lge.com^ ||su-dev.lge.com^ ||nsu.lge.com^
Are the domains to block, formatted for adguard dns. Your router probably has the ability to block domains if you can’t/don’t want to run a local dns server like adguard or pihole. But I strongly recommend them for anyone who despises ads and wants to work toward limiting tracking and profiling (especially if you combine them with something like unbound). They aren’t perfect as ad networks figured out long ago how to work around dns filtering but they eliminate a lot and work on devices like smart tvs that can’t download things like uBlock
Disable ACR and tracking in the settings: https://smarttvs.org/disable-acr-tracking-smart-tv/ (this varies by version of webos)
Of course, the best and easiest approach is to never connect a tv to the internet. The ads are one thing, the tracking and profiling is another. It doesn’t matter if you use Jellyfin or a Blu-ray player. That’s what ACR is, it scans and fingerprints every 15 seconds or so and identifies what you’re watching regardless of source to sell to advertisers.
Great advice I’m sure but I’m not rooting my parents TV for a better user experience during the two weeks I’m dogsitting
Fair point. I set up my parents tv and gave them an Adblock dns and they somehow found a way to both update the tv firmware and factory reset the router, undoing everything. I think some tech support person talked them through it. Now they can have ads because I only have so much patience
I set up a jellyfin server for my parents. They have a little roku box hooked up to their old (dumb) tv that runs a client app for it. I have told them that I will put anything they want on there, except cop shows, and have put thousands of hours worth of shows and movies I know they like and that they have told me they like on it.
But roku also has free streams of some shitty cop shows advertised in the main menu, and it’s distressing how often they end up watching that instead.
Sounds like Roku needs better Parental Controls.
I once put a pihole on my parents’ home network. My mom complained that she was no longer able to see the ads she wanted to click on.
i’m sorry
Lately, she’s been going on youtube and watching those “AI storytime” videos where a slop generated voice plays over slop generated images narrating a slop generated story.
My father was a network engineer most of his life, I know he can and does do better than this. he has a Plex but I don’t have access to it or him atm so it is completely unavailable to me.
I am thankful that he has taste (mostly) and does not watch the slop shows advertised on home screens.
Almost all modern smart tvs have automatic content recognition so even using Jellyfin means they can profile what you watch and sell it to advertisers. They can also do a bunch of nonsense like look at WiFi networks, Bluetooth devices, paired mobile device ids (do you ever use your phone with a remote app to control it), etc to build a much stronger profile on you as well
The only thing that manages to serve me ads is one mobile game and it’s hilarious how bad its advertising profile of me is. It runs ads in languages I don’t speak for services I would never use in cities I don’t live in.
I can’t give my parents a similar level of protection from advertising, unfortunately.
THE TV NEVER NEEDED TO DO ANYTHING MORE THAN HAVE SETTINGS, CHANGE SOURCE AND VOLUME. UNLIMITED DESTRUCTION ON “SMART” TVS BRING BACK CRT’S
UNLIMITED GENOCIDE ON THE SMART TV
Yeah gonna agree with this; my PC is hooked up to my TV and I do everything off my PC
My mum doesn’t have a TV. She and my dad were never big TV watchers and when I moved away from home ages ago they simply gave me the only TV in the house and never bothered to get a new one.
Linux smart TV when? All smart TVs are dogshit
You can take a smart TV, never connect it to internet and plug a linux/android box to it instead.
Gonna say the fact it’s an LG is the problem; I bought six air conditioners from them that all went bust at the same time and all needed constant repairs; I got a DVD rewriter that can only read and not write at all; I got a TV from them and the image burned into it fairly fast, and it never stops pestering me with messages, it NEVER stops pestering me with messages
I learned my lesson and I’m never getting another LG product again
Watched a landlord have to replace his fancy LG fridge 3 times, spending a ton of time on the phone with their customer service and having service techs come and look at it. Lived there for less than a year. Just no.
I’ve never needed someone out to repair the Cheapest White Fridge.
not in your zipcode (for which you need to type in your zipcode EVERY TIME)
Sounds like it’s a guessing game - pick the right code for your movie to load.
I was fully prepared for it to “load” as in give me the option to pay for it. It was just checking for availability.
Ok, I’m probably just missing something silly, but… even then, why does it need to be your zip code and not just one it’s available in?
Like, yes, that’s still a super shitty experience, I just don’t get why it’s actually preventing anything outside of giving up out of frustration of not finding one that works?
Oh it doesn’t, like I could manually put new zipcodes in but in order to reset the zipcode I would have to go through the whole process again. Navigating back to the homescreen and relaunching the application and searching for the movie which would just be fucking miserable to brute force.
Is there another site you could use for whatever the streaming thing is to look up a valid code?
I gave up but tomorrow I am lugging my entire desktop PC into the living room with an HDMI cable and pirating something.
that sounds like a better option than finding the code to let you buy somethingNotwithstanding my boomer behavior problem, jellyfin does work really well for casting video around the house and LG tvs do have a jellyfin client in their “app store”
I have an LG TV too and I only ever use it connected directly to my jellyfin server by HDMI. One time I plugged in an Ethernet cable and allowed it to do a system update. Big mistake, because it then decided to not recognize my HDMI cable. Fortunately, I was able to do a factory reset.
for which you need to type in your zipcode EVERY TIME
Worst thing about that is all these devices are maxxed out with surveillance so it probably actually knows the exact latitude and longitude among other factoids, but that info is not available in a way that could help the user. Only to the ad bidding services or other random shadow entities who pay for access.
I misunderstood the title as being that you somehow got profound catharsis from the UX
just overcome by the sheer elegance & beauty
My parents’ TV also has a scrollwheel built into the remote. It’s a bit annoying… but the physical wheel itself is just the best sensory experience ever and absolutely worth the frustration.
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Remember when tvs had dials
No greater haptic feedback than the wrench you needed because the nob fell off.
because the nob fell of
I’d love a physical dial on the TV itself as a standard feature on modern TVs. Even if it didn’t do anything.
I’m not quite old enough to remember physical controls on the television but I remember CRTs and a lot of odd button types on the early remotes that came with them. I miss CRT monitors and TVs. They had a real “warm glow” effect you just can’t replicate on a modern flatscreen. Or maybe I just miss them because I was so young when Dad threw the old family TV away and bought a shiny new flatscreen model.
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You could probably get a universal replacement remote if there’s one compatible with that model of tv
