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It's really not that simple.

Google, Tizen, and WebOS are the major TV players, with Roku also somewhere in the mix.

All three of these companies do some level of surveillance, and yet they, or another proprietary device, are often required to watch streaming services.

You can argue that streaming services are unnecessary, but that means both spending a lot of time and money on physical media, or simply missing out, as many shows are now only showing on streaming, and not broadcast anymore.



The answer is to buy a computer monitor and just watch on your PC.


The streaming companies downgrade Linux in streaming, so now you have to get a PC with Windows, and deal with that.


Does bit torrent not work on Linux?


That doesn’t quite work for a large screen in a living room, though. Or are there 55 inch computer monitors these days?


Aorus FO48U is a 48" computer monitor with an LG OLED panel. Only downside is that any resolution/frequency changes need 7 seconds to negotiate.


How often does that change happen in practice?


a) when you turn on the TV

b) most annoyingly, some android TV devices (e.g., nvidia shield, ccwgtv) use renegotiation instead of VRR for framerate matching. The FO48U supports VRR from 48 to 120Hz, which is more than enough to do framerate matching even with blackframe insertion for all desired framerates, but many android TV devices renegotiate instead. That means pressing play on Netflix takes 7 seconds until it starts. Quite annoying.

Still, it's preferable over TVs with shitty built-in OSes.


What's made this a bit more tolerable for me is to set the source's (Apple TV, but it does the same thing) frame rate, HDR mode etc. to the one most likely to be used by the majority of the content you're planning to watch.

But I'd take a few seconds of renegotiation over frame rate juddering any day, at least for film content (maybe not so much for shorter Youtube clips).


Personally I'm hoping nvidia will release a new nvidia shield androidtv box soon with support for VRR, as my AV receiver and the FO48U support VRR without any issues. That'd allow perfectly smooth watching experience for all content, which would be awesome.


Apparently 55" monitors do exist, a quick search yields Dell and Samsung for $2~3K. I don't know about TVs, but similarly sized ones seem available for half or even quarter of that price.


Don't all PC's come with HDMI now?




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