Your LG C2 is a dumb tv - if you dont connect it to the internet. You can even buy a $10 IR remote control on amazon and use that to switch inputs. Or, in my experience, all of my external devices support HDMI CEC and auto switch when i use them.
With Apple TV, you can nip that in the bud. Yes, Apple TV has its own quirks but it’s nowhere near as hostile as built in “functionality” that these tvs try to provide.
And not say that streaming services have every incentive to keep the Apple TV apps improving compared to the tv app itself.
It’s just an overall better experience.
But when it comes to general conversation (and this context), yes it's the same. Unless you are actually using a niche setup of local streaming and the Apple TV box is just a nice interface you keep offline - don't know how well that works. For everyone else, they are just avoiding overlapping TV services, as relying on Apple or Google or Amazon is falling into the same traps.
Worst case, Apple jumps the shark… you can just unplug it. You at least get to keep the display.
That difference in power is felt quite a lot in the user experience.
So it still sounds like a software problem to me.
That would be fine if they were rendering to a 720p screen or had much more simplistic menus like the those found on most A/V receivers, but they’re usually running recent-ish Android or something similar, which has fancy graphics and animations all over the place designed for newer devices which make that hardware choke at the 4K resolution that the majority of TVs now ship with. Exacerbating this are the terrible lowest-bidder smart TV apps which are written terribly.
TV manufacturers will never ship an OS more suitable for the hardware though, because they’re concerned that it will make the TV look less modern than competing TVs. They also won’t ship better hardware because that’d cut $5 per unit off of their margins. As such, it’s best to just write off integrated “smarts” and plug in a streaming box that’s not so anemic.
We were staying at one just a few days ago that had a cheap Samsung TV. The UI latency was so horribly laggy that simply clicking an arrow on the remote to try to navigate to the next menu would take up to 10 seconds to finally register on screen. It was also variable, meaning some button presses only took 1-2 seconds to respond, but some took 10 seconds, and if you pressed more than once you'd end up with a whole bunch of your delayed button presses registering at once and taking you to a menu option you didn't want.
Sad to say, but state of the art in these Android menu systems is horrible latency, most likely because the UI devs are building in new javascript features that run horribly slow on older ARM processors and they just don't give any F's about the actual user experience or testing...
A TV with Samsung MySmart™ HomeOS Android UltraCrap Edition is not the same as an AppleTV, if you care about things like, I don't know... consistent framerate? No random crashes? Bearable UI latency?
Similarly how Apple CarPlay is not the same as car manufacturers' sorry-ass homegrown infotainment trash software.
iPhones are still spying on you, even if you tick the box to disable sharing of device analytics[0][1].
[0]: https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...
It was great for two days and then it downloaded an update that absolutely wrecked the interface. What was smooth and snappy and good enough for me now moves at a snails pace and the tv is practically unusable even after a factory reset.
Opening the menu takes 2.5 seconds from button push to response on a good day for no reason other than vizio must have decided it was time for me to buy a new tv.
I used to like their brand. Now I'll never buy another one again.
99% of the problem with Smart TVs is because of the absolute dog shit UI and the relatively bad HDMI CEC setups they have (at least with mine, if HDMI CEC is on, anytime the TV accidentally or intentionally gets into any of the smart parts, it tells the receiver to go to TV mode, and getting it back to one of the HDMI inputs on the receiver either involves turning everything off, or turning it back repeatedly).
I also have a Hisense Android TV and would avoid any Android TV's.
Ridiculously bad is the „Home Screen“ (Netflix-like UI with every app and suggestions and so one in one place), which needs even longer to start.
And the worst thing is: all of these internal apps are reloaded EVERY TIME I use them. No preloading, no caching. Everything lags and needs several painful seconds to display.
(And then LG did not even bother to pay some cents for the DTS license so that I am unable to watch movies from USB sticks with DTS audio track, and I would have to convert them to Dolby AC3 first on my computer …)
The LG display is nice, though it’s far from perfect, which is a problem of ALL televion sets, and I don’t know why because _monitors_ on the other hand are always pixel perfect, but televisions seem never be able to get configured pixel-sharp, even with perfect video material. It’s ok for the money I poured into. Just a big screen.
An also bad part of LG is the lack of apps and the control LG holds over the store. There isn’t even a web browser available, just the crappy thing from LG built-in, which does not even have all TLS certificates. I wish I had bought a TV with Android.
RS-232 control also has a command to disable OSD, which has the pleasant side effect of disabling annoying smart TV bits like pop-up notifications even when the TV is connected to the Internet (and also superfluous [to me] non-smart TV pop-ups that ordinarily appear when switching inputs and adjusting visually apparent settings like brightness).
Disabling the OSD also disables the bundled Magic Remote, though IR remotes still work (unless locked out with another command) and OSD can be re-enabled via RS-232, or by simply power-cycling the TV.
As a bonus, input switching via IR remote (or RS-232) is noticeably faster than switching via Magic Remote, even if you set up hotkeys, as full-featured LG IR remotes have hard buttons for each input that don't require press-and-hold to activate (this includes sub-$10 service remote knock-offs on Amazon, which work perfectly fine IME, though you may want to steer away from these in a casual setting as some of the service buttons can cause undesirable behavior).
For my own use, I wrote a trivial ASP.NET Web API wrapper around the LG RS-232,
https://github.com/jasminetroll/LgTvControl
While only tested on macOS controlling the TV I own (55SK9000), the documentation it's written against isn't model-specific and I'm not using any platform-specific .NET APIs, so it should work across many TV models and on any platform that supports RS-232 and .NET (.NET 6.0+ as currently configured, though it was mostly developed on .NET Core 3.1, so changing TargetFramework in the csproj file should suffice to get it running on older versions).
I guess you can toggle the internet on and off when updates are published, but it's not the most convenient solution.
Edit: But you can use a USB! Woohoo, thank you repliers!
As Jimmy waited for a reply, as Muggs turned beet red, he again noticed how that poor nose was bent, deformed even, and did the man no favour.
Muggs, anger at a peak, spat out "Twas the babypuncher, Jimmy, the babypuncher. He got me as a babe"
Alternatively, for something more automated, you could just use parental control 'bedtime'. I use it currently to keep the kid from watching TV at certain hours. Could probably do the inverse and block it except for an hour on a particular day, I'd imagine.
Fwiw toggling the internet is an easy fix compared to the "dumb tv" way of updating firmware - putting a bin on a flash drive.
I'll add that "back in my day" a screen could display the video signal on its inputs without ever needing a software update. But I suppose automatic time zone changes are a reasonable reason that code needs to be pushed post-manufacture. Then again, who needs a clock on their TV?
* it is effectively dumb to me, so I don’t care about feature updates
* it isn’t connected to the network, so I don’t care about security updates
It hadn't occurred to me that there could be TVs out there that are so “smart” that they can’t even take an input without a network connection. Such a device would be returned as defective by me, but of course I can see somebody deciding that packing it all up into the car is too much of a pain.
Video codec upgrades and software processing are nice things to have and often worth the update.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/02/08/shocking...
> Once every second, software in the Vizio TVs would read pixel data from a segment of the screen. This was sent home and compared against a database of film, television and advertising content to determine what was being watched.