If you are looking to upgrade your TV and want a long-lasting option, you may consider getting a Samsung AI TV powered by Tizen OS. The reason is that Samsung announced plans to offer seven years of Tizen OS upgrades for some of its Smart TVs.
↫ Sagar Naresh Bhavsar at Neowin
Since buying a dumb TV is no longer possible, you might as well get the one with the longest possible support lifecycle. This new policy covers Samsung TVs from 2024 onward, as well as a few modls from 2023. There’s no word on if the ads that I’m assuming are part of Samsung’s smart TVs will also receive seven years of updates.
Or, you know, get a good Android TV box and never plug your actual TV into your network to begin with.
*nod* Ideally, paired with what my brother did… find a Black Friday/Cyber Monday deal on a suitable Commercial TV to bring the price down toward what an ad-subsidized consumer TV costs.
(For anyone not familiar with what a Commercial TV is, they’re what are used to build the digital signage in malls, stores, franchise restaurants, etc. where, if it changes its mind about supporting faithfully pretending to be dumb TV, it would risk having giant corporate and franchise customers cancelling all orders overnight and never trusting the brand again. The one my brother bought is from Sharp’s AQUOS line and is one of the less extreme ones that’s only rated for a 16-hour-per-day duty cycle. It lacks the compute module slot that Jeff Geerling’s TV has, but it does support being controlled via RS-232C.)
Thom Holwerda,
Not to disparage anyone who finds this solution works well for them, but what I find very annoying about android based multimedia centers is google’s almost intentional aversion to supporting local sources, be it movies, music, home videos, etc. All my computers transparently interoperate with each other using file shares. But with android I can’t do it, the necessary NFS drivers are striped out of android. There’s so much arm twisting to rope users into proprietary cloud subscription services. Even my daughter is getting google drive ads.
At least Ghost Commander has a module to connect with samba shares, but it’s so much more tedious to have to select files, copy them over, open/edit them locally on android, then go back to ghost commander to upload the files back to the NAS so that they can be saved to the LAN. Network sharing is so darn useful and the inability to do this with android and modern streaming TVs is such a let down.
Incidentally, if anyone actually has a good solution to open and play a NAS based music playlist on android, I’d like to hear how you did it because I’ve given up and stream from a computer instead…it’s just not a portable solution 🙁
With your android TV box run Kodi. It has great networking solutions. Or you can replace Android with CoreElec which is designed for Kodi.
franko
I did have a CoreElec device attached to the TV at one point, but my wife went and bought a roku instead because it couldn’t run the streaming services she wanted.
I just tried kodi on my phone and it streams music from my NAS! Thank you for suggesting it, I didn’t think about it.
The UI isn’t as good as other music players , but not a single one that I tried supported local network shares and they were useless since I cannot mount shares on android. I realize kodi is meant for a TV, the UI is tiny and cumbersome for a phone. Another issue is that the music stops playing as soon as the screen turns itself off. Maybe these can be fixed, I’ll have to play around with it.
There are a number of UI skins you can try that may work better suited for your use-case. Or, just create your own.
Another option is to install Jellyfin to any hardware (even works on a raspberry pi 3) to play your local media (mp4, mkv, mp3, avi, etc) using your smart TV’s DLNA, Android app, iPhone app, web client, Chromecast app, etc. Works even better on faster hardware (to support multiple users and transcoding).
MLAZA,
I don’t have a smart tv that supports it and didn’t want to provision yet more hardware (I’m already out of outlets and would be using two devices to stream local content to the tv…) But it’s not a bad idea. Thanks, I’ll keep it in mind.
Not that this will happen, but if Jellyfin supported the commercial streaming services, the roku would become totally redundant and I could replace it without upsetting the rest of the family.
https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/1022/external-media-channels-i-e-netflix-audible-tidal-spotify-etc-integration
I expect to keep a TV for 20 to 30 years but I guess we should thank Samsung for their effort.
I’d love a “dumb” TV which just focused on actual display modes, with no gimmicks (AI nonsense is nonsense on TVs too).
The way it is now though, the built in apps on my LG OLED have a distinct advantage over anything I plug in (a Roku). The picture is night and day (sometimes literally – I just can’t make the picture bright enough for some scenes for the Roku, while the built in apps are fine, at least once I access the service menu and disable some stuff…)
But there’s other nonsense in the TV world, which would be almost impossible to explain to a regular. It really seems LG in particular, crushes blacks in dark scenes on purpose, but only on their lower and middle tier products. There literally no reason a TV which can display full bright scenes brightly, can’t display dark scenes, just a little bit lighter. This is an intentional design, baked in to their color profiles and curves. There’s no damned reason for it, except to make it seem like the display has less capabilities.
I do wonder – are there folks hacking “smart” TVs at the level where you can play with things like swapping out device profiles?
Another trick is to accept none of the terms the AI TV tries to get you to accept when it goes through set-up. The TV will try to make you feel stupid and unsafe as you do this. However, this eliminates all the information sale revenue streams from monitoring your content, so the TV reverts to being pretty dumb, which is what you want. Of course your TV won’t get updates either. But why would you want them? You need a monitor for your selected box that delivers your content. Let that get the upgrades. In summary, what Samsung is really offering is to spy on you and sell your info for longer. So forget it.
Iapx432,
I down own one, but does that actually work? I don’t intend to buy a new TV until the current one dies, but I am curious.
Many TOS screens aren’t optional. I believe this was even the case on my current phone that I bought intending to root and jailbreak to run lineageos. My intentions were a mute point though because it still forced me to “accept” terms and conditions. There was no ability to disagree and proceed to use the phone. I don’t know what the process is like on smart TVs, but if it’s similar then you might have to “agree” before you can use it.
Worked perfectly on my LG OLED65C9PUA from 2019. It was a big upgrade for me and I remember the TV seemed very pissed that I was not accepting terms. I got lots of warnings. And then it became a dumb TV. It auto detects inputs and I use the menu if there are more than one. I think I must have accepted terms first because I got a taste of content being pushed at me. My guess is I reset to factory and started over. You do need to connect to the internet. I never disconnected. Not accepting terms seemed to be enough to keep the tv off my case. .