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supersync

I’m dead serious

I’d pay an $80 to $100 premium for a dumb TV

I’d even consider replacing a couple

Smart TVs are just terrible

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Buy digital signage/conference room screens.

https://www.viewsonic.com/us/products/shop/digital-displays....

The premium for a dumb TV screen is about 500-1000$ though. Are you ready to pay that?

Because manufacturers will earn more than your 100$ with ads and all other smart features on you if they don't let you buy a dumb screen.

> Because manufacturers will earn more than your 100$ with ads and all other

Is there any evidence that this is the case?

[0] indicates they earn some 10-20$/year for vizio and 40$/month ([sic], article probably meant year) for Roku from advertising. With a lifetime of a TV at about 5 years this puts you in 100-200$ extra territory.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-adver...

How much cost do the extra electronics impose?

Very close to 0.

TFA provides the evidence that they profit more from this that from what they get from the hardware itself. So more than $400 over the tv's lifetime these days ?

Yes. At this point I will pay a potentially very large premium solely to give the proverbial middle finger to surveillance capitalism.

This one only costs $370, cheaper than comparable 'smart' TVs https://www.walmart.com/ip/Sceptre-55-Class-4K-UHD-LED-TV-HD...

This only works if you consider the panel a commodity that is interchangeable. TVs are so so different from model to model.

The quality of the picture is much lower than high end budget tvs like the Hisense 55U6G. If youre buying a TV primary for the panel, to watch video, being "dumb" isnt going to take preference for me over the better panel.

I've switched to buy computer monitors since I realised I don't watch TV anymore. Even if I did there are more than one way to watch TV on non-TV devices over here (some free, some paid, some both, e.g the quite awesome molotov.tv, which gives a TV experience quite better than any smart TV)

The other day I was reading the HDMI spec. I realised, in almost full horror, it’s stupidly streaming pixels instead of image deltas. When every TV has memory enough for several full frame images, this is just crazy.

You're thinking of bandwidth savings?

Rethink that. If HDMI were delta-compressed, then what happens if you exceed the bandwidth limit for several frames in a row? To be reliable, it needs to have as much bandwidth allocated as is needed for bitmap streaming. And in that case, why not just stream the bitmaps...

And when gaming latency is a big issue, so buffering a few frames to have margin for a complex one would be unacceptable.

In this case the console would just stream full frames.

It could also send deltas and achieve much higher variable frame rates.

The need to stream pixels at a constant rate feels like scanning a CRT and makes generating video signals a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

> what happens if you exceed the bandwidth limit for several frames in a row?

There's no way deltas would exceed deltas that are just full frames. If you can't send a full frame over the wire, then you are trying to push too many pixels and need to downsample on any of the 3 dimensions you have to play with.

The assumption that a target (or source) device has a buffer and encoding hardware capable of delta pixel encoding is would drive costs up to the point where HDMI would not be an accepted industry standard. If you see any of popular video standards (both connectivity and formats like H.264) they avoid framebuffer and memory requirements like the plague.

Having said that, DSC exists and has been adopted by both HDMI and DisplayPort standards. But only on the highest end of capability because it costs a lot to implement on both sides.

> The assumption that a target (or source) device has a buffer

A full-frame 8K image with 32 bits per pixel takes up 128MB of RAM. An FHD one is 16 times less, 8MB. This is not a lot of memory for an appliance in 2002, when HDMI was introduced.

This was an absolutely huge amount of memory for an appliance component that costs a few cents. It still is.

What appliance that can generate or display FHD video costs a few cents?

You only need a frame buffer if you are holding a frame.

How much more complex would that make each end? How long would it take to compress each frame?

For a late '90s/early '00s digital spec, that doesn't strike me as terribly surprising. Especially since it was a replacement for analog signals. Also means way fewer components and much simpler firmware.

Sounds clever but it’s pointless because you have to guarantee that you have enough bandwidth for the worst case, in your scheme when every pixel is changing every frame, anyway.

Agreed; it's the "constant work" principle https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/reliability-and-cons...

Sure, but if you are not on the worst case (as in a desktop or anything where you don’t need every pixel changing on every frame) you can get higher spatial and temporal resolutions than you’d get from the dumb pipe as designed.

Encoding would add latency and it is not free. A single frame in 4k UHD 10-bits takes more than 10Mb (1/3 of the L3 cache on modern CPUS).

And you are already paying enough because of HDCP.

I've recently came to despise HDMI too. When I realized how many OFFICIAL standard revisions are there and how many fakes are on the market... With DisplayPort you have one cable serving you for a DECADE of HW revisions, supporting all framerates and resolutions. With HDMI you have to buy a new cable for each upgrade and when, for example, HDMI 2.0 says "Supports 4K" it only means 60Hz, and you have to buy a "8K" cable to connect a 4K gaming display. Not to mention varieties of "ethernet-enabled", "ARC-capable" and other bullshit out there on the market. And some rare proprietary HDMI cables too! Not to mention some 2.1 cables are actually optical...

Don’t know your exact specs or the premium you pay over consumer level but I buy/install commercial display panels and when I need a new TV or such, I just grab one of them. No extra stuff, fast input switching etc etc

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