alt Hacker NewsMy biggest gripe is how terribly slow it is to navigate UI on a TV. The latency between user input and the UI responding can be upwards of 10-20 seconds. Just incredibly user hostile.
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That sounds like you have an overly shitty ‘smart’ TV. Plenty of external devices (I’m partial to AppleTV) have no significant lag.
Or it could be you’re using some niche service that has its own issues.
Mine is so slow to become initially responsive. It (thankfully) comes on to whatever source / channel it was on when turned off, but it takes a good 15 seconds till you can change a channel, closer to 30 seconds to change input source. And when it does accept inputs it frustratingly drops inputs for another 10 seconds or so.
And not always anything to do with the TV.
I have BT TV (https://www.bt.com/help/tv/learn-about-tv/bt-tv-boxes) and the UI is painfully slow at times (UI response to a button press of 10-20 seconds), searching is horribly slow.
Can't wait to ditch it for something more responsive (probably Sky Stream).
I also miss an old TV that had a "q.rev" button to allowed you to switch back and forth between two channels with a single button. Perfect for skipping advert breaks (which is almost certainly why most entertainment systems don't have it any more).
The "smart" TV in my office is hooked up to a chromecast thing and I interact with the chromecast dongle. My TV has never been hooked up to the TV and in fact I haven't even accepted the EULA. The GUI on the TV is lightning fast, and since it can't update itself (and never will!) it will remain lightning fast. If my 4k HDMI dongle begins to struggle, I will plug in a new device via HDMI.
I was not able to win that argument with my wife on the living room TV but our LG (C series) I was able to disable the ads and with a recent update I can now turn off all but the ~4 apps we use (youtube + disney+, + netflix and one or two rotating services). Fingers crossed LG does not push the "brick your TV" update before it's usefule EOL. The HBO app on our ~2016 era samsung was totally useless by 2018. I am hoping we get more than 2 years out of our current TV before the GUI starts creaking under it's own weight. The Samsung also started showing ads in the app menu selection about 3 years after we started buying it (from korean car makers, really good way to ensure I never buy your brands!).
This can be solved by using any number of 3rd-party streaming devices: Apple TV, Google TV Streamer, NVIDIA Shield, ...
I've never experienced an TV OS that was reliably better than one of the above, though a Roku-OS TV came close.
This can usually be improved by turning off all the crap you want anyways (noise reduction - smart dynamic contrast adjustment - anything similar). Opting out of the ad tracking and personalisation also seemed to slightly speed up some TVs as well for me.
Also experienced a Samsung TV at an Airbnb once that was insanely slow - turns out it had very little storage space to begin with and was literally at 0 remaining. Deleted a few larger apps and reinstalled the remaining and it sped up a lot once it had some cache to work with.
I don’t run into this because I never allow the TV to connect to the internet.
I basically use it as a dumb screen with a set of speakers and a bunch of devices connected to it: Apple TV, consoles, etc.
As such, when I do use the TV remote - if I need to manually change sources, adjust picture settings, or whatever - the TV’s UI remains responsive.
I have heard that some brands of TV will try to stealth connect to open hotspots to download updates and whathaveyou, but haven’t run into that issue with LG or, in more recent years, Hisense.
Hey, trying to change the source of my monitor from HDMI-1 to DisplayPort takes 30 seconds.
This is definitely due to the age/quality/model of the TV. I have 4 LG TVs across the house and the newest/biggest is 100x faster than the oldest.
10-20 seconds? What TV are you using?
When Netflix released an awful update that had that problem, I called and threatened to cancel.
Our Samsung running Tizen has the obnoxious need to check if antenna-based broadcasting is available, every single time you open the settings menu.
It never is, it won’t ever again be in Europe. But it checks. And lags. And then whatever you chose in the menu is not what it selected.
Every. Single. Time. Going to settings makes me wince.
Honestly we don't need TVs, just big monitors. I can figure out the rest, thank you.
It is time for a new TV!
People are replying that OP must own an old TV, but that's missing the point: with very old non-smart TVs, menu commands were always instantaneous!
I had a 75-inch TV I inherited, it was on the higher end and the TV UI was supper snappy. Then, I broke it accidentally and got only 1/4 of the money from insurance. Because I barely watch TV, I thought I would just buy a TV of the same size, but on the lower end... both TVs were Samsung anyway. What a huge difference. The image quality is a little worse, barely noticeable after you get used to it. But the UI is agonizingly slow. Every time I turn the TV on it starts showing some channel fairly quickly, but then after several seconds the image gets black because it's loading the stupid UI... and I can't find a way for it to NOT do that! The higher end TV, needless to say, didn't do that. So now, I know what you're paying for when you get a TV for $4,000 instead of $1,000: slightly better image , but a proper computer to run the stupidly heavy UI (probably made using some heavy JS framework, I suppose).