This “dumb tv” trope comes up in every one of these discussions. We are the minority and most people want a tv with a Netflix all and not to have to buy a set top box. There isn’t a market here.
I bring it up here because they’re reversing the LG firmware and modifying it. I would love a fork of this work that does nothing.
While a developer, this kind of work is outside my current wheelhouse and I just don’t have the time to learn and fork it myself. So throwing out my desire. Half hoping someone out there wants it more than I do.. and half just expressing my frustration with modern TVs.
I think there could be a bit of a market in installations / events.
Often smaller installs / live events people want simple non-smart screens for all kinds of things (on stage, in waiting areas, musician cues, info to crew, signage, etc), and although it's possible to buy expensive "monitors" that do it - being able to use cheap and large domestic kit with much faster startup and no extra crap, and no logos being displayed while booting or if it loses signal or whatever would be very desirable.
These are called digital signage displays - they have rs232 control ports, are a bit more ruggedly built, have a bit more cooling and are twice as expensive if not more than a civilian tv - if somebody sells one to you at all.
Most of the time - at least within events, we end up using "Hotel Mode" to disable some of the features or force the LCD to always boot up into a specific source.
The fun part of open source is that a market of 1 interested person is enough.
As an extreme case, Linus Torvalds decided to write a terminal emulator, do it straight on the bare metal for his PC, accidentally deleted his OS in the process, then got carried away a bit trying to survive without real OS. None of these decisions made any business sense, yet we have the entire Linux ecosystem out of it.
Not that much smaller, though. Of course the market for things-that-are-X is larger than the market for things-that-are-both-X-and-Y, since the latter is a subset of the former.
I wonder how many people in that majority category you’ve described are likely to want to install custom firmware though.
I’m a “hacker” with multiple LG TVs around the house (in fact I exclusively buy LG TVs) and I have no interest in putting custom firmware on those TV sets. So I can’t imagine there’s many inside the Venn bubble that are both laymen enough to want Netflix, technical enough to know about custom firmware but also motivated enough to want to install it.
So the number of people who want dumb firmware might not be disproportionately less than those who want custom smart firmware.
Not wanting to commit digital piracy makes you a "layman"? What other options are there? I'm assuming you're using "Netflix" as a placeholder for all similar streaming services, but even if not, there are still many shows only available there that you simply can't legally watch without it.
I think, given the context of the thread, they mean that a layman would be more likely to want a TV with Netflix built-in as opposed to an external device that typically performs better and is more flexible.
The point being exactly that since we're now entering a time where open source TV firmware is a thing, profit motives don't necessarily trump everything else anymore.
Making a firmware that does "nothing" is probably less work than making one that does a lot of things. So even in the new currency (developer time) it might be cheap and make some people happy.
Not true, pre-install a removable box. Preferably this becomes a standard where Google, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia share the same form factor. Now my LG TV from 2020 is missing out functionality, even though the hardware could support it.
Why would it need to carry a network connection (apart from CEC), when the point is that the display itself shouldn't be connecting to the network? Standardize on a certain barrel connector a certain distance away from the HDMI port, with the ethernet/wifi on the other side of the module.
It'd be great if say Google pushed TVs in this direction ("Google Display with smart cube. Never have an outdated TV again" or something), but I bet the decommodified dumpster fire of baked in software benefits them too much. After all, the last thing any of those companies in the business of selling "content" wants people to do is to end up plugging in a Kodi box. It's like banks with overdraft fees - by abusing your customers, you make them worry that switching will result in even more abuse, thus encouraging them stick with the abuse they already know.
Yes, I know, also power, just not a usable amount. Ethernet over HDMI is rarely implemented and caps out at 100Mbps. Even if you have it, that still leaves you with a power cable and big ugly box to put somewhere.
That makes it pretty much perfect for an open source project, then. Suitably motivated individuals with some technical skills can build and use it if they want to and the majority can remain blissfully ignorant of its existence.
Even if true (and I don't think it is), that is irrelevant to an attempt to reverse engineer an existing smart TV and create custom "dumb" firmware for it. All that needs is people with the desire for it and the technical skills to pull it off.
