Smart TVs are everywhere! But who is the master? Amid the overall electronics boom thanks to A.I., one piece of electronics is almost unchanged financially. That is the digital display or flat-panel monitor. With good reason! The entire entertainment and streaming industry wants one of these device
  • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    18 days ago

    I recently bought a new TV and did some research to find the “least worst” TV with regard to internet connectivity and reliance on its “smart OS” navigation to just use an external HDMI port. I can report pretty good news for the Sony Bravia line of Android TVs.

    • there was no requirement to connect it to the internet
    • during setup there is a choice for “basic” which adds only a few default apps (which are uninstallable/disablable by the user)
    • there is a setting called “Power on and remember last input port”. What this means is you last used HDMI1 port when you powered off the TV, when you power it back up again it automatically goes right back to that HDMI input port without any extra button presses or user interaction. In practice this means you see the Sony logo on the screen and just a fraction of a second the graphic circles of part of the AndroidTV interface before it switches to the HDMI1 input where we left off before powering off the tv prior.

    Bonus feature we like:

    • there is a setting you can enable/disable that if the TV is already powered on, when you power on a device on another HDMI port than the one you’re on, the TV will automatically switch to that HDMI input without prompting. So if we’re watching the AppleTV on HDMI1 and then want to watch a Blu-ray, simply powering on the Blu-ray player will also have the TV switch to that HDMI2 input.

    I wish there was no AndroidTV OS on it at all, but the only time I’ve ever seen it was the one time when we went through the initial setup. We haven’t seen or interacted with it since.

    • misterbngo@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      16 days ago

      if you don’t mind my asking which model, currently going through the same process right now and I’m between Sony and LG

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        16 days ago

        I originally went shopping for a Bravia II 7, but found an open box Bravia 5 (which is the one I got) for less than half the cost of the Bravia II 7.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      2·
      17 days ago

      Have you tried using it as a DLNA renderer? For example using BubbleUPnP on a mobile device as DLNA controller to cast content from Jellyfin+DLNA plugin as DLNA server.