Personally a dumb tv/roku/media server has been my go to choice. This whole smartTV hype is still beyond me.
Could someone please touch on the advantages of a smart TV offerings over my setup?
Could someone please touch on the advantages of a smart TV offerings over my setup?
Unfortunately TV manufactures do such a shitty job with the software. Both in terms of quality/performance/usability, and now with privacy issues and injected ads.
Though even then, I'm always going to have devices plugged into my TV. A combination of my PS3 and PC can access any of the content I might want to watch.
Then I got a Chrome cast. Plug and go, no remotes (you use your phone or tablet) the ugly wires are hidden behind the tv.
Advertisements during your locally stored content, possibly for whatever the hell it is that they are smoking at Samsung.
In practice. Very little.
I'm still waiting for someone to do smart TV right with good software (Hell, just pay a couple of the XBMC devs to port the latest version to your TV) and an open platform with support for third party and DIY software.
In many cases, you can get a similar display separately, branded as a "Monitor" or "Commercial Display" or something similar, with HDMI inputs, etc., but no TV tuner and no smart features.
If you are using locally-stored media, internet sources and/or a cable box as your content sources, you probably don't need a TV tuner built into your display any more than you need "Smart" features built into it.
Netflix works perfectly, and I really can't complain about it. The interface is very user friendly and it is very responsive. I guess it's pretty much the same as you get on an Apple TV or Amazon whatever-its-called box, but it's nice to have it built in.
YouTube works pretty well. It's sometimes a bit slow to skip to the next video, but being able to use my phone or laptop as a remote to queue up content is pretty nice.
iPlayer is pretty hopeless. If I play a SD video it plays in the wrong aspect ratio, and HD video just keeps buffering (Netflix 720p is fine though...). The interface is nice though.
DLNA started off well, the browser is pretty basic but even over wifi I was able to stream 1080p which was impressive. Then some videos I tried just crashed the player randomly after 10 minutes, so I gave up on that.
I've now got a Raspberry Pi with XBMC/Kodi running. It's a bit slow (seems to be inefficiencies of the software, as even idle in the menu it uses 80% of the CPU), but 1080p movies play back fine even over wifi. I use that in place of the DLNA on my TV and use get_iplayer to fix that. They both support HDMI CEC which means I can use just the TV remote to control the Raspberry Pi without any addons.
There are a few other things I should mention too:
The whole interface of the TV is HTML and Javascript (it runs Opera 9 under the hood) and it isn't very optimised. This means even simple things such as pressing the 'Source' button to view the source list (you can't just press it to switch, you need to press this then select the new source from the menu) takes 30 seconds to load.
I specifically bought this TV and an amplifier (both Philips) that support HDMI ARC, this means that audio can be sent from the TV (or peripherals) to the amplifier via just the HDMI cable. When it works it works great, but most of the time for whatever reason it just doesn't. I ended up buying a $3 optical S/PDIF cable from eBay which works as expected (i.e. it just works) and achieves the same end goal. If I'd known it would have been this flakey, I would have just gone that route in the first place and I could have got a cheaper amplifier.
The TV also has Skype built in, and an optional camera for $100. I'm glad I didn't buy that at the same time as the TV...
So what's the purpose of a smart TV? I have no idea. I would prefer a 'dumb' TV, but it seems pretty much everything is a smart TV now.
Edit:
I also looked into building my own interface for it. The 'Smart TV' home screen has ads on it loaded over HTTP, so I setup my router to sent that traffic to my own server and served up a JavaScript redirect. It worked well, but I never got around to taking it further. According to the spec [0] the TV supports 1080p60 x264 at 25 Mbit/s.
[0] http://www.yourappontv.com/documentation/smart-tv-versions-s... (free signup required)
I see an opening for a 'TV Smartify' business selling customized Rasberry Pi's (or some equivalent) that you attach to your TV, plug in with HDMI/power/network, and go. Include a custom OS ready to go, a HDMI cable, wireless Keyboard/Mouse, customer case, and a power supply and sell it upmarked as a convenience (since the target market would be those who wouldn't even know what a Rasberry Pi was).
Because it's zero config beyond entering your account information. For a commercial product not intended for the HN crowd, that's a big deal.
I see an opening for a 'TV Smartify' business
So does Amazon, Roku, etc., etc.
Is that an exaggeration? 30 seconds is far beyond what I would consider unusable, and a TV which takes that long to switch between sources would be quickly returned.
The next time I buy a TV, I'll try out the Source selection in a showroom first.
Making me wait when I didn't have to before isn't acceptable. I don't have to wait with my "dumb" TV. I don't have to wait with my non-infotainment car radio. Whatever benefits you think your new product has, introducing load times makes it instantly unacceptable to me.
But yeah, I'll never own a car with a TV screen in the dash. I'll stick to the used market if I have to. I've heard some manufacturers are sticking a small screen in the rear view mirror using some see-through mirror trick. That seems like a much better solution than what they did to the Miata.
Edit: Actually do you have some links to that criticism? Is it in the press? I'm super interested in the new Miata, but the screen really is a deal killer and I wonder if enough negative press would cause them to reconsider or change it for future years.
It's not really the idea of the infotainment system that's the problem, it's the implementation. As you said, the rear view mirror would have been better received by those who understand back up cameras will be mandated but still don't want a big "iPad" on the dash. As for Mazda's infotainment system - I believe it's the same system as used on the Mazda 3 and 6 so you can look reviews on those vehicles.
https://github.com/blissland/blissflixx
You'll be able stream BBC iPlayer (as well as lots of other stuff) directly to your TV instead of having to download using get_iplayer. Nobody but me uses it yet so be prepared to find some bugs - but it should be fairly usable.