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.

[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.

[james_s]

There is always going to be the issue of the "smart" platform becoming obsolete many years before the rest of the TV. This is a fundamental flaw in the concept that cannot be solved without making that entire platform a separate replaceable component. This could be done by providing a docking bay of sorts where something like a RPi could plug in, but that offers little advantage and several disadvantages compared to just sticking a little box to the back of the TV with velcro.

[JohnnyMalaria]

It's not really a flaw. It's quite a good business model for the manufacturers.

[NiHaoMike]

I don't see something like a Ryzen APU becoming outdated in a media player anytime soon except for gaming.

Why aren't there any TVs with built in surround receivers? Those last at least as long as the TV nowadays.

[james_s]

I don't see something like a Ryzen APU becoming outdated in a media player anytime soon except for gaming.

Why aren't there any TVs with built in surround receivers? Those last at least as long as the TV nowadays.

Because most people who care about home theater want separate components. All-in-one designs have always been the low end, they are for people who don't really care and just want something cheap or portable that works. Those who are more serious about home theater, HiFi, etc are always going to want separate components that they can pick and choose and customize their rig. The more crap you have built in, the less versatile the outcome and the more likely some of it is to be dead weight/bloat to a given individual. I don't want anything built in that I don't need, I want the flexibility to customize my setup to be exactly what I want. There is nothing gained by gluing stuff together unless you need it to be portable.


I'm not wanting to start an OS flame war in saying this but it's the Unix philosophy, dedicated modules that perform one function and do so very well, vs the modern Windows philosophy of trying to do and be everything to everyone and doing very little of it very well.

[Miyuki]

Planned obsolescence is actually necessary to cover the defect of LCD panels. As pixel size shrinks and manufacturing cost and material quality declines, LCD panel lifetime is actually getting very short. It's quite common for a laptop LCD to develop yellow tinge or stripes or watermarks in as short as 2~3 years.

Maybe I have just luck but I have
Lenovo W500 with 1920x1200 (why they have no model with 1200 heigh resolution anymore  ) used daily and only problem is with fan this week replaced and have second ssd, but display work nice after warm up it is ccfl
Lenovo W520 with low res but also work nice

but agree this is old decent build models newer have more issues but people want light and cheap one and change it every few years, why they need new model if it is not any faster 

[james_s]

I would consider an LCD panel that only lasts 3 years to be defective by design and worthy of blacklisting that brand. If it doesn't last at least 10 years then it's garbage not worthy of my money.

[NiHaoMike]

Because most people who care about home theater want separate components. All-in-one designs have always been the low end, they are for people who don't really care and just want something cheap or portable that works. Those who are more serious about home theater, HiFi, etc are always going to want separate components that they can pick and choose and customize their rig. The more crap you have built in, the less versatile the outcome and the more likely some of it is to be dead weight/bloat to a given individual. I don't want anything built in that I don't need, I want the flexibility to customize my setup to be exactly what I want. There is nothing gained by gluing stuff together unless you need it to be portable.

The high end receivers all seem to have a bunch of features that duplicate what other devices in a typical setup are designed to do. Namely stuff like upscaling (which is no better than what is already in the TV and certainly not going to match what a desktop GPU can do) and built in streaming (same problems as existing smart TVs). Not to mention that they take up a lot of space for what they do - it's not hard to find one that has enough empty space to fit a decent gaming PC in.
https://www.cnet.com/news/how-to-save-the-av-receiver/

At least on the low end of the scale, analog input stereo amplifiers - designed just to amplify audio and do nothing else - are very cheap on Amazon. But just going one step up to S/PDIF input really cuts down on the available choices and increases the cost significantly.

[james_s]

I don't care about receiver features like scaling for exactly the same reason I don't like smart TVs and wouldn't want a receiver built into the TV - it's a redundant feature that is already handled by other devices. The receiver is for sound processing, amplification and as a central switchbox for everything. I don't want the receiver built into the TV because I want to be able to pick and choose my components. Likewise I've always built my own desktop PCs, I don't want an all in one iMac, I want full control over everything that goes into it and the ability to pick and choose components to upgrade.

Manufactures know what sells, and they know that all-in-one solutions are low end, low profit that nobody willing to spend the money on top shelf gear is going to buy.

[Bassman59]

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 have an EyeTV-One hooked up to the Mac. That does the DVR work, including pausing live TV. A big hard drive is connected to the machine for scheduled recording. It just works.

[NiHaoMike]

There are new TVs coming out that focus less on the smart features and more on the display itself - they're "big format gaming displays". They weren't able to cut out the smart part altogether because of marketing problems, but they did make sure to implement it in a way that would not add latency like some other implementations do. (That's what gamers dislike about smart TVs - all too many are implemented such that the HDMI latency is pretty bad.)

[james_s]

Here is a list of my computer monitors used between 2010 and 2018, and keep in mind that I don't buy cheap shit:
Lenovo ThinkPad X201 (2010) -- watermark developed 1 year into service, reading light flex cable died 2 years into service
MacBook Air 11" 2010 (2011) -- watermark developed 2 years into service
HP Pavillion 21.5" (2012) -- stuck pixel since day 1
MacBook Air 11" 2011 (2012) -- perfect screen
Surface Gen 1 (2013) -- dead pixels upon arrival, replacement unit has yellow stripes, second replacement was perfect until sold in 2015
MacBook Pro 15" 2012 (2014, used) -- watermark developed when I bought, circa 2 years into service
HP 22BW 21.5" IPS (2014) -- two units, one had bad input source control and stuck pixel since day 1, one had watermark developed 1 year into service
Vaio Flip Z 2015 (2015) -- very uneven illumination on LED lamp side, bad touch screen that registers touches on its own
Dell U2414 (2016) -- two units, both perfect, currently typing on them
Dell U3011 (2017, used) -- bad CCFL aging, uneven color temperature across panel
GPD Pocket (2017, IndieGoGo) -- dead pixel on first unit, yellow stripe on second unit, perfect screen on third unit
MacBook 12" 2017 (2017) -- perfect screen
Dell UP3218K (2018) -- grayish stripe when hot, LCD technology defect, returned
Asus MB16AC (2018) -- perfect screen despite the narrow viewing angle (though it is an IPS)

7 perfect panels out of 20 units, that's how the industry has declined to. And by perfect, I don't even care about color or viewing angles, not even dead pixels -- I just want no stuck pixels and no watermarks.

So overall, monitors are not as ideal or as long life as we expect from a 1990s/early 2000s thought. They are consumables nowadays.

That's a bizarre run of bad luck there that does not mirror my own experience at all. The laptop I got in 2005 still works although it has been retired to the extent that its only duty is to run my DMX controlled Halloween display and the rare occasion that I need a real parallel port. The display on it is still perfect.

My next machine was a Lenovo netbook that I bought in 2011, a couple years ago I gave it to my partner and bought a brand new Lenovo x250. The motherboard failed on the netbook last year and I replaced it with one from ebay, the screen on that is still perfect. The screen on my newer x250 is also perfect.

3 years ago I built a new desktop PC and replaced the 14 year old Sony CRT monitor with a new Asus LCD, the CRT still worked fine but it was huge and heavy and my new PC couldn't do 1600x1200 over analog VGA. 3 years later the Asus LCD is still perfect.

My current TV is a 65" Samsung that is 3-4 years old, I got it for free when it was 2 years old because the LED backlight had failed, lousy design but I tore it apart, repaired and modified it and it has worked flawlessly ever since.

I have a selection of other assorted CRT and LCD monitors ranging from 40 years old to ~6 years old and all of them work just fine. I have a few TVs that I got for free because they didn't work, replaced some capacitors and they're fine now. I actually don't recall ever having any of this stuff fail on me, if it ever failed it happened before I owned it.

[rdl]

"big format gaming displays"

While this sounds a lot like what I've been advocating, I expect by being "gamer" focused they will probably not be suitable for most people and will almost certainly be over-priced and bling-blingy.

[NiHaoMike]

Gaming (in general) is a pretty big market, so it would help to pressure smart TV manufacturers to ensure that the smart features do not add an unacceptable amount of latency.