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

[JohnnyMalaria]

It would be like a perch for pigeons.

Isn't there already enough shit on TV?

[Red Squirrel]

I hate the idea of smart TV too, it's adding unneeded complexity.  A TV should be for displaying stuff and that's it.  The smart stuff should be in an external box.

[CopperCone]

It would be like a perch for pigeons.

Isn't there already enough shit on TV?

I think you misunderstood. I mean if you make a cabinet to place the flat television on top of, the dimensions of space you will get, assuming you want to minimize dimension in the axis towards you, is very small and would be suitable for a pidegon to rest, maybe, and less if you put cabinet doors. A shelf without doors is suitable maybe for placing a thin vase with a few flowers in it. I don't know what else I would like to see looking at a television. Maybe statues. It would just be decorative. \

Otherwise maybe you can fit a firearm cabinet or cleaning supplies on such a thin shelf.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Oh...I had a vision of the pigeon sitting on the top edge of the TV and doing its business. They are messy buggers.

[NiHaoMike]

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).

ATX has been a standard for like 20 years, with no signs of any standard to replace it anytime soon. Plenty of room on the back of a TV to fit an ATX motherboard and (with a right angle adapter) a standard GPU. And still have lots of room left for some surround sound amplifiers.

I think you misunderstood. I mean if you make a cabinet to place the flat television on top of, the dimensions of space you will get, assuming you want to minimize dimension in the axis towards you, is very small and would be suitable for a pidegon to rest, maybe, and less if you put cabinet doors. A shelf without doors is suitable maybe for placing a thin vase with a few flowers in it. I don't know what else I would like to see looking at a television. Maybe statues. It would just be decorative. \

Otherwise maybe you can fit a firearm cabinet or cleaning supplies on such a thin shelf.

Why do the lower shelves have to be the same depth as the top shelf?

[rdl]

Why not fit the TV with just the minimum of electronics needed for the screen to work. You know, like a monitor. Leave the motherboard and GPU in the computer where they belong.

This TV does one thing - display whatever comes over the HDMI cable. The first time it was turned on I disabled the audio and haven't heard it since, and I've never even tried the tuner to see if it works. It's a shame the stuff I had to pay for knowing I'd never use it.

[james_s]

That's another thing that annoys me, the thin-ness race. My friend got a very nice OLED TV recently and it looks great but it's only about 1/4" thick, except for a bulge in the lower section where the electronics are. This made mounting it to the wall somewhat awkward since the mounting point was not in the middle like most TVs so we had to lower down his mount. There is absolutely no point in a TV being thinner than the thickest point. In cases where it's not mounted to the wall there's little point in the TV being thinner than the stand it sits on. It's a fashion statement though, they're just looking for something to get people to upgrade again.

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah there is a certain point of diminishing return with how thing something is.  Take a phone or laptop for example.  Just because it's thinner does not really mean it takes less space, because it still needs to be wide and high enough to be usable.  It might take up less total volume but that does not really matter as far as being able to fit in a pocket or bag or whatever.  I would rather see these devices be a bit thicker with more battery and peripheral ports.

[NiHaoMike]

The TV/monitor + regular PC is what most PC gamers use, but it does have the disadvantage of having to find a place to put the PC box.

A TV that *requires* a PC to work is a hard sell to the mass market. Hence why I would like to see one that uses standard PC hardware for the smart bits, easily upgradable by the user. Even something like a Ryzen APU would be a big improvement over what existing smart TVs use. Current Ryzen APUs are available up to about 1.7TFLOPS, plenty to do some very advanced upscaling.

[Berni]

A box that mounts to the back of the TV and houses a PC? That already exists. They make tiny PCs that have mountings for VESA on them. Normally you use that VESA mount to hold the TV to the wall, but you can use it in reverse to hold a PC onto the TV.

Here is an example of it: http://www.aleutia.com/computers/

There are lots of tiny PCs this days like the Intel NUC form factor, or i even seen whole PCs the size of a laptop harddrive.

But the point is that its not the lack of horsepower that's at fault here, they are sticking some pretty decent CPUs in smart TVs. Its the software being a half-assed layering of libraries and frameworks that nobody bothered to optimize at all. On the other hand PCs have by far the best software of any platform.

[Vtile]

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.

Yes the correct term is bloated. Many consumer applications are still used as they were used "back in the days" when SW did fit to 64kB. Seriously.

Maybe it is just me, but I try to avoid as much these "smart" anything as it is direct synonym for trouble and issues, because it is done with the same amount of beans as the non-smart 64k version back in the days and there is no free lunch. I do have open issues enough at work, no need to take second run at home.

[NiHaoMike]

Maybe one day the smart TV manufacturers will figure out that the cheapest way to get decent firmware developed would be to donate a few units to some LineageOS developers.

[james_s]

I suspect a very large majority of mid to higher end TVs get used with a box of some sort anyway. Everyone I know has some kind of box on their main TV, either a DVR or a home theater receiver, maybe a bluray player, it's really not a big issue. I can't actually think of *anyone* I know who has anything connected to the tuner built into the TV. I read an article stating that less than 50% of the smart TVs sold ever get connected to the internet and most of those that do are hopelessly out of date and unsupported within 2 years making the "smart" portion useless.

There are loads of small streaming devices that could be stuck to the back of a TV easily, I have Plex running on a Raspberry Pi which I could easily velcro to the back of my TV if I wanted to. It's better than any of the built in "smart" systems I've tried.

[NiHaoMike]

One small feature that would make the built in tuner far more useful is to allow the use of a USB hard drive as a DVR.

[james_s]

It would be garbage compared to pretty much any other DVR on the market, the "smart" stuff built into TVs is already hopelessly inadequate and buggy without greatly increasing the complexity by adding a DVR. That and who records anything off the air anymore? Most cable companies already supply DVRs and if you have cable or satellite you generally need a box already.

[NiHaoMike]

An increasing percentage of consumers are getting rid of cable TV because of the poor value it offers. On top of the high monthly fees including many hidden ones, they often make it hard to use your own equipment, overcompress the video so the quality of the local channels is much worse than using an antenna, and still have too many ads.

Vizio does make some TVs without tuners, but got a lot of negative feedback. Apparently, many still want a tuner without DVR? (To be fair, in the US, there is one free channel - PBS - that is still very watchable without a DVR.)

[Berni]

My smart TV does have some DVR functionality i think since i saw something about it in the menus. I would imagine its just as horrible as all the other features so i never even tried to use it.

Then again i don't have a need for a DVR in the first place because my cable provider also has a web service that keeps a recording of all TV channels up to 7 days in the past or letting you watch live TV. Quality is decent with a 10Mbit/s HD stream. Cable TV is still quite alive here as it provides the best internet (150Mbit) for a reasonable price, and they even do fiber to home in some places. Thats the main reason why we use the cable provider we do, they provide reasonably cheap fiber to home but also bundle DVB-C with it, and they are in general pretty nice to the costumer (No evil money milking practices, technicians come fix stuff or free etc)

I think smart TVs should simply install Kodi on them.

[james_s]

The tuner adds so little cost that there's no point in leaving it out, my point was really only that the "smart" stuff is a waste, under-utilized, poorly implemented and gets in the way more than it helps. Rather than any sort of smart stuff I just want a bunch of HDMI inputs, most people who are going to use streaming are probably going to have some kind of box. Most people watching OTA probably aren't streaming.

[Nominal Animal]

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.

Nope.

Those shoddy setups get aggregated together by the cheapest offshore teams companies can buy, usually still students, with basically zero Linux experience.  They take open source code, stick it together somehow, usually mangling the kernel codebase so bad that kernel upgrades are impossible unless the same team backports the changes to their unholy abortion.  Almost all Linux appliance manufacturers do this, and the results are absolutely horrific compared to e.g. Debian/Devuan and derivatives.

I'd like to address your characterization of Linux devs, but Simon has warned me once already, so I'll just say that that is a very low, petty way of trying to enforce your own prejudices. Shame on you.

[Nominal Animal]

Having quite a bit of experience building both hardware and Linux/GNU systems (mostly HPC) from scratch, and having the know-how needed to actually build an embedded (or even full) system based on the Linux kernel, I believe I know the simple reason why Linux-based appliances are crap:

The manufacturers do not want to pay for the software side to be done properly. They pay for, and get, horrible crap.

(And it really grinds my gears that the community gets the blame. And called names, too.)

The manufacturers hire teams with near zero Linux experience to hack something together. If you look at any Linux SBCs, they always fork the kernel, then do some weird-ass modifications, typically a kernel driver or two of such horrible quality they would never be accepted upstream because of their unmaintainable buggy spaghetti code. There are community efforts to rectify this; but make no mistake, the crappy stuff is produced by the manufacturers, not the community. The manufacturers usually port their mess to a couple of long-term maintained kernel versions, then drop the support when they push the next, incompatible version, of their hardware platform out. The users are left with no ability to update their systems, because they don't use the mainline kernels, and usually there are also proprietary binary blobs glued in, so that the manufacturer is really the only one who can build new installable kernel binaries.

Embedded appliances like TVs, routers, and so on, are even worse, because the manufacturers know that most users don't have the know-how to get into the firmware at all.  They're the kind of spaghetti code that drives programmers insane. They are not even supportable by the community, because they often use binary blobs or closed-source development kits that the community has no access to, to do their own parts of the firmware. (I have a couple of routers with a Linux abortion on them, and can explain exactly why they're horrible, if someone wants to hear that rant.)

There are people like Greg Kroah-Hartmann, who try and help companies integrate their drivers upstream. Yet, the companies find it more cost-effective to produce those shitty systems, and leave the users hanging. (After all, not even hobbyists seem to know that unless the manufacturers additions are pushed upstream, their SBCs are limited to the kernels the manufacturer decides to port to the architecture.)

A lot of the kernel loading time is due to the image (kernel and initial ramdisk) being compressed. This is not necessary, if there is sufficient storage for the uncompressed image. (Although current processors have ample power for currently used XZ decoding, especially if the kernel contains the decompressor optimized for that hardware architecture.)

Most embedded Linux devices do not have an optimized system at all. Today, they may even run systemd. On an embedded system, an old-style init system can be optimized to load in minimal time on a specific set of hardware. There is absolutely no need for the bootup to take more than a couple of seconds, even when it is as complex as any computer. Heck, you could even prepare a hibernation image, so that the system does not need to boot up, just wakes up from the (normally read-only) image; and boots only once after each firmware update.

Why aren't our embedded Linux systems and appliances like that, then? Because the companies want to minimise expenses, and don't want to hire people who know how to do that stuff. They do not want something that works well, they need something that they can sell. It is sufficient if it works most of the time.

So, please, stop calling the developers names just because their work is used to produce shit.  Blame the companies who put out the crap instead.

[Jeroen3]

I'm afraid you are correct. Companies rush everything, and software should not be rushed. Since you'll then be building a house of cards.

"Linus Torvalds declares Intel fix for Meltdown/Spectre ‘COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE’"

Writing code is hard. I'm currently working on a C++ project that I made a year ago, in a hurry....  ^{Please help.}

[Nominal Animal]

I'm afraid you are correct.

It's getting blamed (well, only by association in my case), over and over again, for things not under the open developers control, that tweaks my nerves so bad.  I'm sensitive! 

I'm currently working on a C++ project that I made a year ago, in a hurry....  ^{Please help.}

If its on Linux, the email address I use here is solely for the purpose of helping others with tricky/complicated/hard Linux/programming/math questions.  I don't use Windows, though. (I like to help with designs and implementations that are robust and maintainable in the long term, although I usually prefer to work at the core issues, usually lower level libraries written in C, than UX and such. I usually do that at stackoverflow, but sometimes via email too. Always for the express and sole purpose of helping others write better code for Linux and POSIXy systems.)

[Bassman59]

An increasing percentage of consumers are getting rid of cable TV because of the poor value it offers. On top of the high monthly fees including many hidden ones, they often make it hard to use your own equipment, overcompress the video so the quality of the local channels is much worse than using an antenna, and still have too many ads.

Of course, the cable TV companies are also the ISPs, so they just raise the cost of internet-only packages to account for the loss of revenue from the people who drop the TV service. And the cost of the internet service just keeps going up, without any apparent increase in service quality.

Vizio does make some TVs without tuners, but got a lot of negative feedback. Apparently, many still want a tuner without DVR? (To be fair, in the US, there is one free channel - PBS - that is still very watchable without a DVR.)

Over-the-air digital TV broadcast looks a LOT better than whatever you get from the cable TV transmission of the same programs. Also, with the transition to digital broadcast, the stations can now transmit several channels instead of one, so there are a lot more channels available. Whether the new channels are interesting or not depends on the viewer. But they're there, and an external DVR is easy enough to connect.

[Bassman59]

I hate the idea of smart TV too, it's adding unneeded complexity.  A TV should be for displaying stuff and that's it.  The smart stuff should be in an external box.

Exactly. No smart TV here. For years we've had a Mac mini under the TV. HDMI out to the TV, and a standard Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for control. Sure, at $500 it was more expensive than any of the set-top box offerings, and the EyeTV One was another few bucks. But there are no downsides. (OK, one, if I want to watch BluRay discs I need to buy a BluRay drive.)

I have KRK studio monitors connected to the TV, so the audio is plenty good. We can stream audio from iTunes libraries or any other service. We can play CDs through it.

System updates are simple, Apple pushes out updates to macOS, it gets installed. Done.

If new services become available they're just a browser click away. If a service goes away, the icon doesn't remain on the "smart" TV screen. We watch HBO, Hulu, Netflix, all through a browser. (iTunes video is of course through its own interface.)

The computer doesn't spy on me. (Siri is available but it's disabled.) I'm sure that the streaming services keep track of the shows we watch, but that's to be expected.

We can play video games on the TV (yes, Virginia, there are a lot of video games available for the Mac), though I'm not much of a gamer. But, you know, Doom3 through studio monitors is pretty Unreal.

The TV doesn't support 4K, but I don't have any compelling reason to spend hundreds of dollars on a new set just to get 4K. 

And, yes, there is an antenna attached to the TV for receiving over-the-air digital broadcast. That works well.

So please, TV vendors, make non-smart TVs available for those of us who want them. Four HDMI ports and an antenna port suffice, really.

[NiHaoMike]

Over-the-air digital TV broadcast looks a LOT better than whatever you get from the cable TV transmission of the same programs. Also, with the transition to digital broadcast, the stations can now transmit several channels instead of one, so there are a lot more channels available. Whether the new channels are interesting or not depends on the viewer. But they're there, and an external DVR is easy enough to connect.

How many of the channels would you actually want to watch without DVR? In my experience, it's only the PBS channels and maybe some local niche channels. The rest waste too much time with ads.

I personally have a 4K Seiki, MVA panel with a 1080p120 game mode. No built in smart features or fancy upscaling since that's what the PC is for. The few times I want to watch something from the antenna, I use a HD Homerun and a script for recording to disk.

I still like the idea of a smart TV that's actually decent, which is why I advocate open sourcing the platform like what LineageOS did for smartphones.