Why are my consumer electronics so slow to boot/change modes

[Dan Moos]

This question is just one of curiosity. I'll use my home theater sound system as an example. It is a Samsung that has the usual features. Blue Ray/DVD player, HDMI inputs for my TV and game systems, radio tuner, the usual.

Lets say I turn the thing on to watch TV before work, as I often do. From power light to first sound emitted from the speakers is probably 15 seconds or more. This is with the thing returning to the same mode it was on at last power off.

What is happening for all this time? Best I can guess is that some sort of FPGA is loading its firmware from some eeprom. Fair enough, because even though the thing is basically just an audio path switching device, there is whatever OS is needed to provide the functionality and UI.

But lets say I switch from one HDMI input to another. There is still an extremely long delay before the operation, which should be a simple input switching change. What is happening here?

Again, I'm noy trying to diagnose a problem. just want a peek behind the scenes. My TV, which is an off brand, is even worse. Even the radio in my truck takes 5 seconds to get going, and I'd think it would be a simple uController with no special software to load!

[ataradov]

Most of that stuff boots Linux, and they don't really bother to optimize for a boot time, so they just run Yocto or buildroot out of the box.

I'm not sure about HDMI switching specifically,  but with compressed video, you often have to wait for the next key frame, they they may be seconds apart.

[Dan Moos]

My truck radio is particularly infuriating  because, as a sports fan, sometimes I really want the the thing to come on fast!. Old fully analog car radios were INSTANT!. All I get for my slower response is a fancy VFD . Yeah, there are "features", but none that anyone I know really uses.

[ataradov]

I did boot a Linux system on PPC405 (inside Xilinx Virtex2Pro) in under a second, but init was my actual binary, so there were no init scripts at all and the second was an actual kernel boot time. This is obviously extreme, but workable solution for a really optimized system. But if I needed to get an IP address through DHCP or some other heavy-weight stuff, I would be out of luck with this method.

[Miyuki]

Wonder how big difference will make memory mapped storage (as classic ROM used to be) vs storage interface and loading to ram
Not sure if Linux have this possibility

//edit:
so Linux have XIP and AXFS and with fast ROM/FLASH can start much faster (but why optimize, users like to wait and see colorful loading screens)

[Berni]

Yep its booting linux in the background. I hate it.

But its not just that they don't bother to optimize the boot time(Id be perfectly happy with a 5 second boot time), they don't bother to optimize anything at all really.

We bought a new modern Philips TV a few years ago and its one of these fancy smart TVs with USB ports and Ethernet and all that stuff that's expected these days (But playing videos from USB storage is still an awful experience with unsupported formats and subtitle headaches). It takes well over 30 seconds to boot, takes an additional 10 seconds before it starts accepting any button presses from the remote. Once it does accept button presses it takes about 0.3 to 1 second for the press to do the action even if its as simple as moving trough a menu. The menus itself are rendered sluggishly (id say at about 20 fps and lower) and made to look even worse by the fact they are animated so you actually see the stuttering framerate.

They also made a selling point on some TVs at the store that some have a faster dual or quad core CPU or something. And i think this was supposed to be one of the faster ones. Seriusly?! They need to fire at least half of there software department and hire people who don't think of computing resources of being infinite like any PC programmer does.

EDIT:
Oh and i tried firmware updates. They didn't make it any faster, it just messed up my image settings again so that i had to go trough each one with a calibration image showing so that i can get the sliders in a position where it doesn't touch my HDMI signal and just displays the pixels as they are

[Jeroen3]

Modern tv's have a lot of image processing to "beatify" the image, remove codec distortion and interlacing. (all broadcast tv is interlaced)
These filters, especially "motion" filters require some data before working properly. That might explain the delay.

You can try switching all the HDMI's to gaming mode, this should disable most filters. Since gamers want the lowest latency.

[Berni]

Modern tv's have a lot of image processing to "beatify" the image, remove codec distortion and interlacing. (all broadcast tv is interlaced)
These filters, especially "motion" filters require some data before working properly.

You can try switching all the HDMI's to gaming mode, this should disable most filters. Since gamers want the lowest latency.

Oh yes "game mode" is a must, without that the image has 0.5 seconds of delay. Might not sound like much but when you use it on a home theater PC and use a mouse with it, the lag makes it unusable (Really its insanely difficult to click even big buttons). But game mode does not disable all image enhancement, probably about half the sliders become disabled, so the rest has to be manually turned to find the "do nothing" position on the slider. Also game mode is not lag free, i can still see a bit of lag but its small enough to make using a mouse easy again.

The TV ends up being used as a HDMI computer monitor most of the time. Playing back stuff just works much better on a windows PC. Even TV is now getting often watched via the PC because my cable provider has fixed up there in browser TV watching app that works over the internet. That in browser app actually switches TV channels about 4x as fast as the TV can and the UI never lags.

Its concerning what sort of software polish we get from known brands. I seen cheap bottom of the barrel Chinese brand products that felt more finished.

[amyk]

Its concerning what sort of software polish we get from known brands. I seen cheap bottom of the barrel Chinese brand products that felt more finished.

That's because the big companies feel the need to squeeze in as many "features" as they can to please the marketing drones.

If you just want a big computer monitor, find out the panel in your TV and look online for a matching HDMI/LVDS converter board. Those have basically no image processing (some don't even have a scaler) so should be as lag-free as you can get.

[ConKbot]

Because when it comes to consumer products, the whole development is too lazy, dumb, riddled with feature creep, and/or pressed for time to do efficient programming, and you end up with 4 plus layers of abstraction between the last programming teams code and what happens on silicon.  That makes everything inefficient so way more processing power gets thrown at it, which necessitates an OS running on even mundane things, and you end up with an OS, drivers, APIs, black box libraries, a java VM(cough cough android) and the programmers code running. But hey, processing power is cheap, and pushing beta software on consumers is standard practice now, so development is cheap.

I've seen guys who wanted to throw a DSP as generating an IR remote signal. Like I get that's your main hammer, so that makes everything look like a nail, but holy crap, I've done that in a PIC10F before, and I just tinker/fiddle with code only when required.  /rant

[james_s]

It doesn't help that consumer electronics companies are not accustomed to developing software, and on top of that the software industry as a whole is in a race to the bottom. QA is not really a thing anymore, the trend is rapid or continuous releases. "Who cares if something is broken, we'll fix it in tomorrow's release" only tomorrow's release has new features added and new things broken. No need to test anything in-house, just deploy it to the customer and fix the bugs they complain about. It's a lousy situation, if I'm not being paid to test the software then I'm not going to test it for them. If it's not finished and usable already then I'm not going to buy it.

Another source of delays with anything HDMI related is the HDCP handshaking that has to happen. Absolutely useless copy protection that was long ago cracked wide open yet content owners still mandate that it be used.

[Berni]

Ah yes the HDMI encryption is another stupid thing that only causes problems to the consumer, but fails to stop anyone from pirating anything. Even if they made a new version of it that's truly uncrackable somehow, but what is preventing you from unpluging the LVDS cable from the LCD panel and using a off the shelf video interface converter IC to turn the LVDS back into HDMI.

It always annoys me when technical decisions are made by grumpy old men in a fancy board room while they are still trying to figure out what exactly this new fangled internet thing is and if they can use it to send a fax.

[CopperCone]

maybe cause they try to fit way too much shit on  1 processor with a bunch of interrupts and routines and stuff.

I have an old cornea brand TV tuner/monitor that is the most snappy thing I have ever used. I don't know if it has a specific microprocessor or ASIC for controlling the overlay and IR input or what. Compared to dell, most TV's I have tried, etc, its like lighting. Was made in like 2002 or something. Cost like 600$ back then. With my dell monitor I feel like I am trying to play videogames on a 300 baud modem. It's like a scope.

It's a massive piece of shit in terms of color quality, view angle, etc... but the remote control and menu buttons are like real time. I wonder if its because the EMI properties of modern monitors are horrid and they need to use some kind of ghastly filters for debounce maybe. This 2007 dell is so slow with the display changes.

The display changes take at least a second. On the old cornea you could go between HDMI, VGA, Tuner, Component in almost real time.

[tszaboo]

Funny stuff is, I have a Windows EC7 SBC and it boots in 2 seconds. I never seen a linux machine do that. It is always "Uncompressing linux... " few seconds. Dozen or so error messages, that nobody bothers fixing. Then again, one was written by a company writing operating systems, the other one by a bunch of people wearing sandals and socks, living in their mother's basement.

[T3sl4co1l]

Don't like it?  Don't buy it.

Oh, but the alternatives* are too expensive?  Well, I guess it wasn't all that important after all.  Stop complaining, instead be satisfied that your purchase met your capability-cost compromise.

Free market at work.

*Assuming that alternatives are actually available with, in this case, quick startup times.  You'd probably need a computer monitor for that?  In which case, I mean, if you're using it for a computer monitor anyway, that's pretty duh, I guess?

Then, if you still want to watch TV, you're at the mercy of whatever DTV or cable box is available / supported.  Cable-supplied boxes are uniformly terrible, always have been, so no help there.  I don't know if you can even buy and use non-officially-approved cable boxes, if high quality ones are even available at pro-sumer prices.  (I would imagine true-pro boxes are available -- test equipment -- but at pro prices.  Like for testing DOCSIS directly, with stream connect and decode being mere conveniences.  So, that would work for the savvy user, except for cost.)

Tim

[NiHaoMike]

Then, if you still want to watch TV, you're at the mercy of whatever DTV or cable box is available / supported.  Cable-supplied boxes are uniformly terrible, always have been, so no help there.  I don't know if you can even buy and use non-officially-approved cable boxes, if high quality ones are even available at pro-sumer prices.

There's Cablecard that goes with whatever compatible equipment you can get for it. Or for an option that bypasses cable TV being terrible to begin with, get Netflix or whatever instead.

What I would like to see is a "smart TV" that contains a full on gaming PC, preferably one that can be DIY upgraded. The LCD panel would just connect directly to the GPU using DisplayPort, so no unnecessary processing there. Any scaling would be handled by the GPU.

[JohnnyMalaria]

My one and only TV boots in about 5 seconds. There's a big thump at first and a red LED flashes on and off every second until there's a click and the picture appears. It's degaussing. It's a CRT.

[james_s]

What I would like to see is a "smart TV" that contains a full on gaming PC, preferably one that can be DIY upgraded. The LCD panel would just connect directly to the GPU using DisplayPort, so no unnecessary processing there. Any scaling would be handled by the GPU.

That sounds like the worst possible arrangement. The whole concept of a smart TV is fundamentally flawed, it's taking a product with a 10-20 year life cycle and permanently pairing it with a product that has a 1-2 year life cycle. Planned obsolescence at its finest. 

I just want a big display with good picture and a zillion HDMI ports, with a simple remote that doesn't have a bunch of gimmicks. Huge bonus points if the TV has buttons on the front instead of following the trendy herd and hiding them on the sides, top or back, I mean seriously, at least put a power button on the front of the damn thing!

The "smart" part is easy, there are countless devices available that are far superior to anything built into a TV, and easily upgraded. Some are even small enough that they plug directly into the TV resulting in zero additional cables and devices to find places for.

[Berni]

As yes that degaussing thump brings back memories.

My problem with "smart" part of smart TV is barely usable even in the same year as it was released. The whole thing is always horrendously slow, the web browser is even slower and might even get confused with very complex pages, the IR remote is the worst user input device imaginable. The app store has about 10 apps in total in it, most of them suck. Even playing back videos from a USB drive is plagued with problems:
- It supports 3 or 4 video formats (Offten wont support the one you actually have)
- It chokes on high bitrate videos in certain formats or sometimes simply 60fps video.
- It has issues when there are extra features in the formats such as subtitles embedded in MKV files or stereoscopic formats
- When subtitles do work it might get confused at times by its format and not sync them up properly
- Subtitles containing non ASCII characters get them replaced by random garbage
- Skipping trough to a certain part of the video is a nightmare
- Even the menu for browsing the USB drive is often a nightmare.

All issues that are unheard of on a PC.

[a59d1]

Funny stuff is, I have a Windows EC7 SBC and it boots in 2 seconds. I never seen a linux machine do that. It is always "Uncompressing linux... " few seconds. Dozen or so error messages, that nobody bothers fixing. Then again, one was written by a company writing operating systems, the other one by a bunch of people wearing sandals and socks, living in their mother's basement.

One of them is also cartoonishly easy to hack into and does 100x as many disk reads/writes as the other. Guess which one that is.

[OE2WHP]

What I really hate these days, everything seems to have to boot before you can use it. Switching on TV --> booting. Switching on receiver--> booting.... switching on toaster--> booting.... switching on electric shaver --> booting... changing program / setting / inserting toast / use whatever feature --> starting application...............

And another feature I am really "grateful" for is the crash logs. Wanna start a recording --> application crashed, crash log has been saved, forcing reboot.....

Processing power has become so dirt cheap that noone longer cares and every nail clipper is driven by java.

[Jeroen3]

Well, one of the real reasons is that software has become vastly complicated and large. It's often the most expensive part of a product you buy. In order to keep the cost of the software low, it is often built very modular.

Microsoft Windows for example, supports a mindblowing amount of different hardware combinations. To facilitate this, it has to detect and load a lot into memory, when you turn it on. In fact, one could say it's a miracle it even works at all.
"Ancient" products had software made specifically for that product only. It didn't need to detect anything when turned on, since there was only one version on ROM. If something didn't work, it just worked strange or threw errors. Or there was no software at all, just one custom chip with all hardware.

You TV is now basically the same level of complication as a pc, often with some old version of linux with applications, put together with some hot glue.
Since linux was not made specifically for this TV, it has to load things on boot. That is a downside. However, the manufacturer saves some cost with the ability to reuse the same codebase on TV of different sizes and input capabilities.

^{Still, they do it poorly and provide little to none aftermarket software support. But that is some other moral problem.}

Perhaps the best way to explain the slow TV would be to think of the software terminating the input processing programs. And restarting them with different parameters. Because that requires minimal effort in the program themselves.
I don't know precisely if this is what happens, but I thinks it's plausible.

The same applies to consumer wireless routers. Changing a setting on one page, rewrites the settings file and issues a reboot. That is quick and easy to do. No risk of memory leaks.

[NiHaoMike]

That sounds like the worst possible arrangement. The whole concept of a smart TV is fundamentally flawed, it's taking a product with a 10-20 year life cycle and permanently pairing it with a product that has a 1-2 year life cycle. Planned obsolescence at its finest. 

I was thinking make it accept a standard GPU and ATX motherboard.

[Red Squirrel]

I find this annoying too especially when you consider older devices that did the same job didn't do this.  For example monitors and TVs.  Back in the day you turn on the TV, it turns on. Yeah you had to wait for the tube to warm up but it was technically on right away, ex: sound worked, channel was on etc.

I have computer monitors that take like 5 seconds to boot up, seems silly to me really.

I think a lot of it is bloat/laziness.  Instead of writing code to do 1 thing they use 20 libraries designed to do 1,000 things, even if they only need to do 1 thing.  This is hilarious with Javascript and web design.  Ask on a forum "how do I do x" and people will suggest all sorts of huge libraries instead of showing how to do it with actual code.

[CopperCone]

Smart TV is just ridiculous. If they can stabilize the size of the hardware maybe you could get cards like nintendo to replace the computer (this won't happen though). I don't want to pay for a chic form factor crappy computer, I am looking at the damn nice display.

I don't see why you could not make some kind of general form factor box that can screw or clamp on the back of a television, connect with a cable, to provide smart functionality. I guess it would not be 1 inch thick. It would also make getting rid of things like viruses easy, since you can take the box to best-buy or something and have them run a diagnostic on the firmware, or just get another (cheap) box, without having to worry about moving a 50 inch curved television or something.

What benefits do super thin televisions have? You can't really make use of the space in front of the television anyway, since it will block the view, so if you have a ledge or something it basically gets occupied anyway, you need line of sight to be free between the couch and the television. You don't wanna put stuff behind the television because you might knock it over or scratch it and it blocks cooling air flow.

If you wall mount it, and you really need that wall to be thin, then you probably have room for an auxiliary box near by mounted to the same wall.

Given how thin those TV's are now, its not like you can make useful cabinetry that would be as thin as the television, what would you put on it? It would be like a perch for pigeons. A useful cabinet + the free space requirement would mean that you can fit some kind of box near the TV usually.

It seems like the only people that really need the space savings would be people living in micro apartments or something?

And maybe they can even make the control boxes in different form factors with the same functionality so you can pick something that matches your decor.

I think unless its portable or has some kind of aesthetic user interface like a washing machine, there is no real need to integrate processing hardware that goes obsolete 3x faster then the main product? And you can have dedicated companies that are good at software and digital design rather then giant LCD displays?

This whole situation is like putting a clock on a coffee machine. But worse because you have things like changing USB standards, changing ports (mag safe type things), video compression standards and algorithms, processing power requirements all happening at a rapid rate. The LCD does not change so quickly.