Comment on The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K
uniquethrowagay@feddit.org 5 hours agoYes I do. I want an actual smart TV with a practical, open source, TV-optimitzed Linux OS. It’s not that software on a TV is a bad idea in itself. It’s how it’s ruined by for-profit companies.
balsoft@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
Nah, honestly, I think stuffing an entire computer inside a monitor and relying on it to generate/show content is a bad idea no matter what software it runs. A dumb TV + a small computing dongle requires only a tiny fraction more labor to produce than a smart TV, but it’s so much easier to upgrade in the future if you decide you need faster boot times or wanna game on the TV, etc. And if the TV breaks before the dongle does, you can also buy a new TV and keep all your settings/media without transferring anything.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
Also to add to this, the life-cycle of a TV display is mismatched from the live-cycle of media playing hardware or just hardware for general computing: one needs to update the latter more often in order to keep up with things like new video codecs (as for performance those things are actually implemented in hardware) as well as more in general being capable to running newer software.
I’ve actually had a separate media box for my TV for over a decade an in my experience you go through 3 or 4 media boxes for every time you change TVs, partly because of new video codes coming out and partly because the computing hardware for those things is usually on the low-end so newer software won’t run as well. In fact I eventually settled down on having a generic Mini-PC with Linux and Kodi as my media box (which is pretty much the same to use in your living room since you can get a wireless remote for it) and it doubles down as a server on the background (remotely managed via ssh), something which wouldn’t at all be possible with computing hardware integrated in the TV.
In summary, having the computing stuff separate from the TV is cheaper and less frustrating (you don’t need to endure slow software after a few years because the hardware is part of an expensive TV that you don’t want to throw out), as well as giving you far more options to do whatever you want (lets just say that if your network connected media box is enshittified, it’s pretty cheap to replace it or even go the way I went and replace it with a system you fully control)