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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

I own a LG smart TV. Wary of those and other problems I never connected it to the net. I bought it because it cost only 50 Euros more than the dumb model and the display looked much better, which should be the main point of a TV.

If I really want to do smart things with my TV I attach something I control to one of its HDMI ports (phone, tablet, laptop, Raspberry.)

I'm not thrilled about the idea of TV sets with an embedded 5G SIM that I can't disable. Worse if they'll only work if online.

Edit: example of 5G and TV https://5g.co.uk/guides/5g-tv/

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I needed an all-in-one solution for streaming (Netflix, Prime, Spotify, Jellyfin, ...) so I went with an Nvidia Shield Pro on the HDMI port. Any smart TV is a dumb TV for me. I'll make it "smart" myself, the old fashioned way, as you described. One downside of HDMI is max 60 FPS, so its limited for gaming and OKish for interactive (such as navigation through menu or simple browsing) yet should be adequate for any viewing.

60fps is not a limitation of HDMI.

I have an LG OLED that has HDMI 2.1, which can do 4k120fps (at least). Unfortunately current-gen GPUs only support HDMI 2.0, so I am limited to 1440p120fps or 4k60fps for the time being.

OK, it was a limitation of HDMI, and most devices still use that old HDMI standard, so practically it still is a limitation until the new HDMI versions are more common. On my monitors, I use DP whenever I can.

No it’s not. HDMI can do it, it’s the device that you pick that decided it won’t, by picking an older standard.

Apparently HDMI 2.1 which specification is from November 2017 can do it.

My TV itself is even older than that, and a dumb TV doesn't need to be upgraded often. That's part of the purpose of a dumb TV; longevity.

My MBPs from 2015 also don't support it, and Apple only recently released a decent replacement for these MBPs (given the keyboard issues in previous).

My old monitor from ~2014, a BenQ, also does not support it. While I recently replaced it, it still works perfectly fine (it doesn't have FreeSync though), and achieves 144 Hz over DP.

The main disadvantage of DP over HDMI is that if you switch off a monitor that is connected to the computer via DP, then the computer thinks the monitor has been disconnected, and rearranges all your windows for you, so when you come back to the computer and switch the monitor back on it's all messed up. With HDMI, that doesn't happen.

True, that can be a disadvantage (can also be an advantage though).

In my case this was an advantage because my previous GPU had a bug where presence detection for HDMI was only done on boot. So if I forgot to switch my display on before UEFI or before Windows boot manager started, it would boot headless. With DisplayPort you have to unplug & replug at best (though on/off should work because of what you described, not to mention detecting a new display when it powers on).

Only on Windows. This isn't an issue with macOS.

Also some people have pointed out a few displayport edid emulators keep the appropriate signals up to prevent Windows from thinking the monitor is off. I haven't tested it yet as when I first ran into this problem I just switched back to DVI, but a recent Windows or nVidia update (ha - timely with the article) caused my GPU driver to constantly crash with DVI, but when I switched back to DP it now works just fine. Sigh. I guess I do need to see if I can find the right kind of EDID emulator after all.

This has nothing to do with DisplayPort itself and everything to do with a bad implementation in the monitor.

The DisplayPort spec actually explicitly says to not do what these defective monitors are doing.

You can use a Club3D CAC-1085 DP1.4-to-HDMI2.1 adapter to get 4k120 with current GPUs with LG 2019 OLED TVs.

No VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) though, so I'm just waiting for new GPUs myself.

The shield will happily push 4K@120hz at 4:2:0 subsampling if your display supports it. The shield supports hdmi 2.0b.

I did the same with my Samsungs... no internet/network. But in the new one, I can't even use it in a private LAN (for DLNA, ...)... without connecting online. Doesn't bother me too much (HDMI from PC is superior anyway), but it would be interesting to have a solution for occasional uses (like streaming from laptop, maybe phone).

My TV has a PC on one HDMI input, and a Chromecast on another.

Any TV that won't work offline I'd consider defective and I'd send it back.

It works, until I attempt to use "network" when it asks me to register online. Haven't done it, if it was mandatory it would go back as non-functional... Not sure what problems occur if you do it once but then disconnect from internet.

You can give it a shot and then do a factory reset if anything stops working.

Yeah I made this same call. My LG Smart TV has advertisements in the menus and doesn’t have a particularly wide range of apps. So I got an Apple TV and disconnected the internet from the TV. Much better experience overall.

What can you even do with an Apple TV without internet? Did you jailbreak it?

I think they meant to say the TV is disconnected from the internet, but the Apple TV is connected.

You can stream to it over Airplay.

I own a LG smart TV. Wary of those and other problems I never connected it to the net

I own an LG TV and stopped installing updates for the same reason - each update seemed to make it slower.

But the nags get increasingly urgent and my wife eventually installed it.

So now I disconnected it entirely from the network and use a Roku for smart features.

There will be websites that describe how to disable 5G in TVs. In some cases this will be as easy as putting strips of metal tape on the back of the case. In others you'll have to open the case to remove the 5G module or antenna.

I'm not holding my breath about the TV use-case of 5G. The ISPs will just make it too expensive to allow you to watch as much TV as you like.

The embedded 5G won't be for movies, but for ads, telemetry and forced updates.

Well, it looks like enough of us either can't figure out how to attach the TV to the internet, or just don't bother (like me) to the point that -- like with ad blockers -- TV manufacturers are routing around the problem. That they would subsidize a 5G cell connection in order to get direct access to your TV should be seriously concerning. But it won't be, and cries to Congress to block this sort of thing will be met with a big infusion of campaign contributions, and we'll just all have to live with it.

Ok, so if they are going to force upon us a subsidized 5G connection, what can we do to to hijack that connection & redirect it to some more useful - to the user - application?

(Also good to know that the big telcos will be rolling out 5G universally so all those 5G-connected TVs will work in every rural location, even those with coverage from only obscure CLECs /sarc )

The number of users who don't set up WiFi for their TV is not enough to warrant this.

The part that surprises me the most with "Smart TVs", is how bad the non-smart functionality can be. It's like the 'smarter' the TV is, the slower the TV guide is.

Burn out the 5g sim or chip

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