I just bought this dumb tv. Couldn’t be happier.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CJV6722?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title
It’s not a good tv, but it’s the biggest one I could fit on my desk and it has absolutely no “smart” features.
Just don’t connect smart TVs to the internet. That’s all you have to (not) do
Many smart TVs have firmware that interfere with your ability to switch sources using the remote for your cable service provider, or causes it to default to a specific source menu or app, or auto-switch between sources when it thinks it’s “detecting” them, even if you were actually using the other one.
And older people don’t know how to navigate the new user interfaces that come pre-installed on these smart TVs, especially if they have several connected devices on different ports. Have you had to walk a customer over the phone through using the Video Input button on their cable service remote, only to discover the TV software doesn’t allow 3rd party remotes to access the video input menu; because only the TV remote they lost is able to access that menu?
Or had to look up an article on a customer’s brand of smart TV, and walk them through disabling specific tv settings buried in their menu that prevent the TV from properly detecting and switching between sources, or having to mess with the TV closed captions, because they’re somehow interfering with the closed captions settings on their cable box.
I have. SmartTV software is occasionally a nightmare to negotiate with when trying to get it to work with a customer’s STB or their wifi, or what have you.
My TCL TV flashes a little ring light constantly if it doesn’t have an internet connection. The best part is the LED is part of the IR receiver, so if you cover it up your remote stops working. I’ve dimmed it as much as possible through the hidden service menus, but the option to remove it was apparently removed in a firmware update at some point.
Open it up and replace it with a resistor, can’t blink if it doesn’t exist.
Jesus fucking christ. This is by design; they knew what they were doing.
Rtings needs a category/filter for design and “smart” features that cause issue.
I think I saw a review of the Amazon fire TV and they literally lock controls and tell you some basic af features are locked behind an Amazon account registration or login
I have an Amazon fire TV.
It is not connected to anything, and everything works fine. I just hooked up my shield to it and use that, but basic tv functions (settings and whatnot) work just fine without being logged in.
Everything should work without being logged in. Being logged into your TV shouldn’t even be a thing.
That’s fair, just pointing out in my case that I don’t/didn’t need to login to anything and have full functionality of my TV.
The only logins I would need to do would be for streaming service apps, IF I was actually using the TV OS to watch stuff. Otherwise everything works fine.
From what I have heard, this is not true for all brands. Some won’t work without being connected. Shouldn’t be legal, but here we are.
Yes. I’ve heard some brands will search for nearby devices of the same brands that are already connected to the internet so that even if YOU didn’t connect the TV to WiFi, it still calls home/gets ads.
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In a different thread here on lemmy.
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I don’t know what you’re going through in your life, but I wish you all the best. Just wanted to pass on some information I thought was relevant.
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Too much of a gamble. What if someone already did once and it uses the cached ads? What if they have some preloaded?
Better financially support products that never have ads and that way demonstrate demand.
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Gaming on a TV? Wouldn’t like that low refresh rate personally
My gaming PC uses an LG C2 OLED. 120Hz, 4K, HDR, FreeSync. At the time, gaming monitors with competitive specs were all sold out anyway or way more money.
That said, I don’t connect any TV to Wi-Fi directly, hate all that “smart” crap. The smart TV apps usually all suck compared to just casting from other devices to a compatible cast device. For example I just cast from my phone to Chromecast as my primary method of controlling my TV and consuming media on it.
Yeah, tried to play Dead By Daylight that way and it basically made skill checks impossible.
Edit: Where hte line appeared to be and where it actually was weren’t synced up due to the TV’s higher resolution
Sounds like a skill issue
The game kept checking. No skills found.
144Hz TVs are a thing and common. I’m using a 65" 144Hz 4K OLED right now.
Modern TVs are excellent gaming monitors, and they’re much cheaper than an equivalent PC monitor. Especially LG OLEDs, since they are built with gaming in mind. Input lag is a thing of the past.
They’re not matte.
User-error. Position your screen so that there’s no glare. Ideally, your windows should be behind your display.
When placed in the right spot, semi-gloss is superior.
What’s the burn in like on the oled? I have an LG oled as my TV but haven’t dared buy one as a monitor as oled used to be so bad for burn in
You’re thinking of plasma TVs from like 12 years ago.
I’ve seen burn in on early oled panels which is why I’d never used them in this way, but seems they have improved a lot.
Here’s what my LG C1 panel looks like after three years of heavy use (8+ hrs/day), used exclusively as a monitor. Primary tasks include gaming, watching YouTube in a window, and full-screen music production and video editing. (Edit: What you’re seeing on the right side of the screen is glare, cause the TV is right next to a window.)
I’ve disabled the burn-in protection in the service menu (TPC & GSR) because they dim the screen too much and make text difficult to read. I left the remaining features in the user menu enabled, because they’re not as dramatic, so I don’t even notice that they’re on (logo dimming and pixel shifting). The only other preventive measures I take are autohiding the taskbar and setting the wallpaper to randomly cycle every 30 minutes, but I probably don’t even need to do that. I consider burn-in a non issue.
Thanks that’s really helpful, I have to view large technical drawings and been wanting to replace my multi monitor setup with an oled for media too but was concerned having static images on it for hours at a time.
I think I’ll give it a go.
Its not 1987 anymore.
Instead of buying a TV, look for a digital signage display. It’s a TV, but with none of the “smart” crap on it.
Alternatively, just don’t hook your device up to the internet.
I’ve seen this advice over and over and I have to ask: does it really compare? TVs for me are all about frame rate, and no, I’m not a competitive gamer or anything. What’s the response time on those “digital signage” models designed to show static food menus 24/7 for a decade. I’m sure they don’t have a “game mode”, but what’s the refresh rate? If you’re going to literally pay more for a display sold to corporations, these factors need to be considered. Personally, I got a good consumer TV and just never connected it to the Internet…
The smart stuff isn’t the issue. It is all the connected shit.
There are plenty of smart TVs that you just don’t have to connect to the internet. Then it can’t download ads, be laggy or reboot because of updates, send all your data to the manufacturer, …
Just connect a small PC over HDMI like you would a dumb TV, and other than a slow boot it will work the same.
I can recommend TLC as a TV that doesn’t require an internet connection. But I would steer clear of ever connecting it to a network, the remotes have microphones in them.
My Samsung tv also has microphones for voice control.
Yes, that is most likely what they were designed for.
But I wouldn’t trust these brands to not misuse them for other things.
Take a crayon, jam it in the pinhole for the mic, then scrape the excess off the surface. Problem solved.
There are plenty of smart TVs that you just don’t have to connect to the internet
AFAIK many of them will continue to nag you to connect them to the Internet if you don’t do it. Those nags can be just as bad as ads.
Yes, just don’t buy those brands.
TVs are a minefield, but one that can be navigated.
How does one do that? Which brands are dangerous?
They cost like 5x more because they’re marketed toward businesses. https://www.samsung.com/us/business/displays/pro-tv/bh-series/65-bht-series-qled-4k-uhd-hdr-pro-tv-terrace-edition-lh65bhtelgfxgo/
Alternatively, Sceptre are mostly sub-$1k
Sceptre is the GOAT. I’ve got a 4k dumb panel for cheap during Black Friday a year or two back. It’s fantastic. No WiFi on it (because it is a dumb TV) but a streaming device like nVidia Shield is perfect.
Plus side there though… Like most devices marketed towards enterprise, once they hit the used market, the price drops dramatically. You can get a pretty good deal on a used one.
There’s other business oriented tvs that aren’t just for signage. It’s more for conference rooms.
They are also capable of running 24/7 without ever overheating, no matter the location. And have extra software specialized for signage.
It isn’t just a marketing gimmick.
Yeah sounds perfect for my living room. I’ll definitely pay an extra $3k for those features.
Recommending digital signage for personal TVs is still a bad recommendation.
My understanding is that TV prices are subsidized by bloatware. No bloatware, no subsidy.
If they were, they should be free. Yet there’s still triple and quad digit prices on these things that probably cost like 8% of that to build (because of slave labor probably), and the subsidy on top should mean they’re literally paying us monthly to have their screen.
Or just don’t buy Samsung. Never had this kind of trouble with any other brand except Samsung. Because of this, I’ll never ever buy another Samsung product.
This is good advice, but I really wish we lived in a world where consumers could bond together and get laws passed that make this type of crap illegal so that buying TV’s (or any type of appliance for that matter) didn’t involve having to do research on weird non-consumer hardware just to have a nice experience.
EDIT: some morons in my replies keep on saying shit about “voting republican” and We Do In OtHeR CoUnTRiEs. I’m not american, I don’t live in america, and I cannot remember the last time I set foot in america. Shut the fuck up, nobody asked you.
Just look at the printer situation. It’s gonna get worse. Much worse.
Books it is then
As long as brother b&w laser printers are still not enshittified, everything’s right in the printer world.
We can you idiots just keep voting Republican
Also commas
Consumer rights is a bipartisan issue, Dems fuck us over too.
This kind of fucking attitude is why Dems always have sand in their potato salad. "This wouldn’t happen if democrats never lost an election :( " Miss me with that shit. Trump is talking about using military force to annex Panama and Greenland and making Canada the 51st state and you’ve got online Democrats sitting in the corner timidly and indirectly suggesting that maybe ads wouldn’t be so bad under them. The Democratic party deserves to get bullied until they grow a spine and start giving people a real reason to vote for them besides “republicans bad”. Call me when we get AOC hopped up on barely sub-lethal amounts of cocaine and she bites Gavin Newsom’s head off like a praying mantis.
Are you sure. Maybe if we lean in a little further right these “moderates” who are considering authoritarian rule might just change their mind.
In other words, you wish we lived in a democracy instead of a plutocracy. 'Cause that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. This thread is squarely about the FTC failing to do its goddamn job, because this should not be legal.
We do have that in other countries (so in this world), and you’re going to laugh, but the Dutch one is literally called the Consumentenbond.
Looked at the CES reveals and aside from some minor improvements, its nothing but overloaded AI crap.
Even on TVs from 10 years ago, the first thing you had to do was turn off the stupid auto frame generation, smoothing, lighting, and other effects so you can actually enjoy your content in original detail and correct FPS.
My wealthy coworker buys top-of-the-line, really expensive TVs, and then just leaves all that shit turned on.
It took me way too long to figure out what was going on with those settings. One of my relatives tv’s was like this back in the day and at first I thought it was just their “HD” setup which made me completely write off getting anything HD because of the fake look like a soap opera. It wasn’t till I was gifted a blue-ray player that I realized their tv just had horrible “enchancement” shit.
Well yeah, minor improvements really stack up.
A friend is buying a TV or a screen for console gaming anyway and man, the TV’s are actually pretty decent for gaming nowadays. I haven’t checked out any for several years.
I bought a UHD LED tv in like 2016 and what a POS it is compared to these modern models. I mean I haven’t had it for years gave it to my sister but still.
I thought they looked pretty damn nifty. And AI isn’t a curse word when it comes to everything. I get being annoyed at the marketing, I am too, but, like isn’t Nvidia DLSS AI? That’s shit’s actually good.
DLLS and similars are nice for running newer games on outdated hardware.
Sadly it also enables studios to cheap out on optimization, you shouldn’t need upscaling for 1080p medium on a new GPU.
Sadly it also enables studios to cheap out on optimization, you shouldn’t need upscaling for 1080p medium on a new GPU.
Well that is a food point in late stages capitalism.
I was idealistically thinking about it light might be beneficial for those 480hz and whatnot screens coming out.
And for these new Blackwells like for 5070 the vram is still only 12, but they claim they have a much better resolution compressing tech or something.
Idk man but to me just thinking everything AI is “ick” is sort of ludditic. Yeah it’s a garbage overhyped marketing term but some of the
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Yeah, people who don’t have to use it professionally don’t understand how useful a tool it is.
Feel like I’m the only one that likes the soap opera effect to some extent 🙈
It’s fine for tv, but it causes input delay for video games.
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I’ve seen LG getting trashed alongside the other offenders in the industry in smart TV discussions. I have an LG CX65 OLED from 2020, and I’ve always seen the onboard WebOS as pretty serviceable. Have they gotten a lot worse in the last few years? And/or does it vary by product price?
There are definitely some advertising options to turn off in the menus, and with all that taken care of the only UI I use is a row of app icons that pops up. No ads anywhere, and I don’t seem to be logged into the TV with any kind of account. (Though typing this reminded me that the cheap LG LCD in my son’s room does want a login in order to update firmware)
Note I said it was serviceable, not great. The UI could be more responsive on better hardware, but it’s also convenient for my family to just be able to use the Wiimote-like motion pointer built into the remote.
LG sucks in many ways. I have a cx as well. I rooted it and blocked updates and all lg services, which helps a lot
If you update it though lg automatically and silently opts you in to data sharing without your explicit consent, which is bullshit and disgusting, but you can turn this of by unchecking a box in settings, which is easy enough. Although given how they handled it I don’t necessarily trust them to honor the opt out and thus traffic from the tv has to be to whitelisted servers (I don’t use any webos apps aside from ad free youtube app)
That said imo compared to all the other smart tv options webos is one of the best options. Especially if it’s rooted (though rooting it is becoming much more difficult these days). Then you can install adfree youtube with sponsorblock, permanently block updates, etc.
Android tv is absolute garbage and loaded with more ads than anything. But at least android doesn’t break when you use adblocking; my old Roku tv doesn’t allow you to set custom dns servers and when you set an ad blocking dns server at a router level the TVs apps break. Android still works although googles ad game is so strong that even blocking all their ad networks still allows some ads somehow, even deleting caches. I’m pretty sure android tv just has ads installed in it
Of course the best thing to do is never ever ever connect your smart tv to the internet at all and buy a secondary device to utilize for watching media. I recommend ugoos devices. I use the am6b+ but they have other/newer devices that may fit your use case better. Stripped down android with 0 ads but can still run all streaming apps/dolby vision licensed and you can flash them with Coreelec so they natively boot to kodi
can still run all streaming apps
So can it run them at full resolution instead of the penalty-box resolution that they all force on the PC?
I have an LG, which is…fine.
But what I do like about it is that I basically never have to interact with its OS. 100% of my content is watched through an Apple TV. I turn it on with the ATV remote and it goes immediately to the correct HDMI input.
I have a newer C4 and I don’t think it’s bad. It’s not too obtrusive and there are guides to opt out of everything, but then again I’m not too concerned with data privacy in regard to my television, so I might be biased
I will be very sad when my 16 yo Sony Bravia TV dies
I still have a Panasonic plasma TV from 2008. Still going strong.
That thing likely gulps down electricity unfortunately and a replacement would pay for itself. Just don’t connect it to the internet and use a good streaming box and you’ll have none of these issues. Lemmy hates apple but the Apple TV is great.
I’m in the exact same situation. Old bravias were just about perfect for a television. I dread to think of what they are like now
So smart TVs are now smartass TVs?
Always have been.
No way, tell me that isnt real. I remember hearing a patent about being able to deliver ads over hdmi but dont tell me it actually got implemented.
picture looks like a 'shop. look at bottom right corner of tv.
but, it’s inevitable. corporate greed knows no limit, knows no boundaries.
Isn’t that just the plant blocking part of the TV?
The plant is also receiving blue/white light from the ad. Pretty sure it’s legit.
I’m not sure the picture is edited, but in either case, it would be a lot easier to paste it onto a screencap of the game and open that full screen on the tv…
It’s a plant blocking the TV. If this is edited it is actually done really well.
I totally believe this kind of thing could happens, but I’d expect broader outrage if it were.
When I set up my LG tv it wanted to show promoted content on the Home Screen and the screensaver.
I never connect my TV to the internet. People jerk saying they add wireless modems to them but in reality they don’t have to, most prime leave all the telemetry and “AI” features enabled.
Look up Amazon’s “Sidewalk” network. They don’t need your internet. They have your neighbors internet.
Wrap the sides and back in metal net so it becomes a faraday cage in those directions blocking waves (only half joking? idk if this’d work)
WiFi bounces, and can take multiple paths. Won’t work.
Cover the front too then, noballs.
I too, like to buy a brand new 8K OLED TV just to watch it through a microwave door.
If you’re lucky, the mesh interferes with its internal electronics and you’ll have a new grill, too!
That ad is not over HDMI. Its a smart TV it inserts the ad on its own.
Just dont give the thing internet access then…
Easy as
That works unless your neighbor had unsecured WiFi. The TVs will phone home in any way they can.
It’s probably only a matter of time before smart TVs are designed to use mobile data. I can easily see companies doing that to ensure you have no way to avoid the ads.
then the tv goes into a faraday cage. simple as
Setup your own WiFi with the same SSID and block all ports. Bonus points, it will drive your neighbors crazy and maybe get them to up their security stance.
Open the TV and unhook the Wifi antenna then
Frankly if it ever comes to a time it’s impossible to prevent internet connection on any TV for whatever reason in my life, I’ll take off the back of the TV and desolder/destroy the transceiver.
It will all be integrated into a single SOC. You can remove nothing or everything. In the future we will have tinfoil hats for or TVs.
Seriously? If this is true… That’s insane… I can’t even imagine that…
That’s nothing. Check out the Amazon Sidewalk protocol for some real nightmare fuel.
2019?! How does no one else think this is a bad idea?
I’m flabbergasted…
holy shit that’s horrifying
That’s the same thing to normal people. Technically it doesn’t matter which source you are on and you’ll still get the ad.
Which then travels… over HDMI. I realize that’s not what you meant but technically…
It doesn’t need to travel over HDMI. That to move signals from one device to another. If the hardware that is outputting the display signal itself wants to insert other data into the signal it’s receiving, it can directly. It doesn’t need to send it through another cable. It’s probably modifying an signal received through HDMI (or other cable), but it doesn’t need to send the modified signal again.
I’m just stupid and not thinking.
This sounds like the mental math I did, but I forgot to carry the reality.
Why would this need “deliver ads over HDMI”. It’s on the telly, ie the HDMI signal has already been transmitted and now the TV itself is overlaying web-derived images in one corner, the same way it will overlay the guide or whatever when you open it.
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Lmao you can tell no one on lemmy is a baseball fan. This is a meme making fun of the most recent World Series coverage where for the first time they started showing this dumb “Shohei Ohtani is up to bat in X batters” graphic as you see there
American sports ads are wild. They will never cease to shock me.
Sorry I’ll reiterate, this isn’t an ad. The graphic it’s spoofing is shown during the game and is relevant information to it. It was just a bit silly and pandering to people only watching for this one star player.
I don’t know if you follow any sports but imagine if a soccer game popped up a little graphic saying “this star player everyone loves will be substituted into the game in X minutes!” Thats what’s being made fun of here
I know. I watch american sports and I was just commenting generally on how many ads are shoveled into the viewing.
When you get told you got got by an online joke and you just double down your own biases.
I think my comment was misunderstood. I dont think an american sports ad popped up in front of someones dark souls game. It was just a general comment on how wild american sports ads are. Sometimes I watch NBA and even the replay cam is an ad.
Oops, stepped on another $1200 landmine did you? Should have researched where you put your foot. Everyone knows this neighborhood is littered with landmines. No, there’s nothing we can really do about it except hand out these exhaustive charts and navigation tools. Of course they need to constantly get re-updated and are themselves periodically hijacked by the pro-landmine industry to turn into a second-tier grift. But that just means you have to research who you research for your TV research.
Don’t worry, you’ll get it eventually. God gave us two legs for a reason.
Four legs good, two legs BETTER!
Still, Dark Souls the best.
Dark Souls sucks.
Must be a skill issue
No. It’s a “the game is too grindy to be fun for me”-issue.
Nothing to research. They’re all the same bad or will get bad in the foreseeable future. Only thing that matters is the screen technology and the specs of your external media center.
My LG has none of this. Any advertising/ai can be disabled as can the network itself.
You mean it doesn’t have any of this yet :)
I say this as someone with two LG TVs. Sure you can just not connect them to the internet, but a lot of people rely on the “Smart” part of the TV to view all their content.
I have a TLC that does none of this, too.
Wasn’t there news lately that LG wants to display ads in pause?
Sure they want to but they let you disable all of this in the settings. Also a TV with no internet likely will be an unable to serve adds.
That’s what i say; use the TV as dumb display or deal with enshitification now or later.
Btw, i have an LG too but i always understood them letting you disable stuff them just anticipating GDPR lawsuits. But seems it’s the same in US? Maybe they really want you not having a bad experience.
Pretty sure it’s a business decision. The risk of showing ADs and getting a bad reputation
I mostly like my LG tv, and it’s nice that I can use it without agreeing to their T&C or logging in. It does really piss me off that if I wanted to change picture settings (brightness, color, etc) I’d have to turn their adware settings back on.
“likely” lol as bad as the adpocalypse has been, at least things aren’t pre-loaded with bog-standard ads for offline delivery
Yet
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Not as bad as this, but when I moved to a new town I got a free big TV with my new ISP. I was going with that ISP anyways so a free 4k HDR TV on top was a nice bonus.
I wish I had gotten some other bonus. Viewing angle is atrocious and it is impossible to get rid of the input lag (no there isn’t a gaming mode or similar) so no games with precise timing can be played.
So now we have a big living room TV that is too good to replace with something better but bad enough to be a little bit annoying.
Why not sell it?
I usually just assume that free shit given away as part of some other sale is going to be bad or shit quality. They probably bought a big batch of them for real cheap because they weren’t selling so great in stores and eventually someone decided to just get rid of that inventory maybe at a loss.
Give it to your parents or some other older people who would use it just as a TV and buy yourself a decent TV.
It really doesn’t sound too good to replace? It sounds like you got free junk, and haven’t actually bought a TV yet?
Don’t have the budget anyways. And it’s good enough for the wife and kids, they don’t see any issues. And by now I’m disabled and can’t get into the living room anyways.
Trade in for something slightly “worse” then?
First rule of smart TVs: if you really have to buy a smart TV, then never connect it to the internet!
I lobotomized our TV after making the mistake of connecting it to the internet when we first got it.
The ads slowed down the menu to switch sources so much it actually angered me. No more internet for you, you get to be a dumb tv forever now.
I’ve read at some other post that some smart TVs won’t work at all if you don’t connect it to the internet.
Read with caution, I haven’t verified this.
I’ve also heard people say that they’ll automatically connect to any open wifi networks. People make up a lot of stuff. Just don’t tell your display device how to send any 1s or 0s to any server outside your home, and you’ll be fine
Imagine if they came with default ads prebundled in the firmware.
Amazon fire TV requires an Amazon account to use basic features and they intentionally tell you they lock “certain” features
That should be illegal…
Indeed, I remember people complaining about Roku for that.
My TLC hasn’t done so up until now.
Back to the store it goes then
Like those single player games…
Some of them use wifi for the remote too.
bro if my tv had ads I’d insta refund
computer monitor + sound bar?
Or a beamer if you want a big screen.
I don’t like sound bars, you can take my old 5.1 Yamaha system out from my cold hands!
I still use the 5.1 system I got with my first computer in '04.
This really seems to be the right answer. At least while computer monitors stay dumb.
Get one of those tiny PCs that you can just leave behind the TV, get a wireless mouse and keyboard too.
Nothing on TV isn’t available online anyway. Paying the cable company for anything more than an Internet connection seems like setting money on fire to me. Maybe sports would be difficult, but that can literally be found if you know what you’re doing. Even games you wouldn’t be able to with TV.
Cable TV just seems to me like a boomer’s version of the Internet. It has no place in a world with the Internet, change my mind. The ads on TV are worse than what you find on any popular website/app.
But as usual, capitalism is messing everything up with the marketing. In a world where hi speed Internet is widely available, “TV” just has no use. None. And worse, the commercials are now leaking through your literal screen.
I’m not saying that ads aren’t a problem, but there’s a hell of a lot more you can do about them.
In a perfect world, there would be a place you could go whenever you wanted something and find products and solutions for that thing, and there wouldn’t be ads in anything else at all.
But until there’s an actual argument to say TV technology isn’t totally worthless, my stance is simply “no TVs are necessary or useful”.
You can get little combined keyboard/track pads for $20-30. They’re the same size as a remote, usually rechargeable, and kind of a pain to type on… But perfect for typing in the name of what you’re searching for
Yeah I leave it at my brother’s house for our weekly movie and TV day, and he had them already so I didn’t spend more than like 15 minutes looking at those.
But it’s on the back burner for a QoL update like that.
Can you link what you’re talking about?
There’s a lot of variations, most of them are kinda crappy and they might last a few months or for years, you never really know. This one looks very similar to the one that has lasted the longest for me
