I went through a phase of testing out Topaz AI upscale tools on videos. Ultimately I didn’t like the results, as impressive as they are you always end up with some hallucinations ruining details.

The exception is cartoons. They upscale really well.

Personally I use RAID5, with regular backups for documents and projects. Not too worried if my movies and tv library get lost…that takes up most of the space though.

Use Infuse as your playback client. It will direct play AV1. However there is no hardware decoding support for it. But the processor is fast enough to do it in software for 24fps 4K. But not 60fps.

Current gen iPhone chips do AV1 hardware decoding. And the AppleTV uses the same processor, just a few generations behind. The next AppleTV hardware refresh may add AV1 hardware support. But that’s just a guess.

Just buy an LG and use an external media device. LG TVs work perfectly fine with no network connection and you can set them to power on and go straight to the last used HDMI input.

I never see the built-in OS on my LG OLED.

My understanding is that Apple have implemented RCS, which funnily enough, does not even support encryption yet. Google had to roll their own proprietary add-on.

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/09/18/end-to-end-encryption-rcs-messages/

Scrolling is smooth, but does anyone else feel like the comment collapsing/expanding animation runs at a lower frame rate something?

AppleTV is the media box to use if you hate ads and value your privacy. Its Home Screen is just a grid of apps. No ads. None. It’s also way faster (CPU speed) compared to the competition.

Replacing a smart TV OS with a device made by Google or Amazon defeats the purpose. You’re still going to get ads plastered all over your Home Screen. And they still lag and stutter unless you pay a premium price for an 5 year old Nvidia shield. Either use an AppleTV or build your own HTPC.

I haven seen my LG OLED’s smart OS for years.

My LG OLED TV can be configured to load directly into a HDMI input. I keep it disconnected from wifi at all times. I never see the smartTV OS. It’s probably the best option because OLED panels are the best current display technology.

I use an AppleTV as an external media box for all my needs. But the same would apply for an Android box or HTPC setup etc.

They are: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-additional-states-join-justice-departments-suit-against-apple-monopolizing-smartphone

I’ve been in similar situations while renting. I ran ethernet cables along skirting boards and around doorframes and hid them inside adhesive cable raceways.

Apple lay out some details here: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

They control the cloud hardware. Information used for cloud requests is deleted as soon as the request is done. Everything end-to-end encrypted. Server builds are publicly available to inspect. And all of this is only used unless the on-device processing can’t handle a request.

If somebody wanted to actually create a private AI system, this is probably how they’d do it.

You can disagree with this or claim somehow that they are actually accessing and selling people’s data, but Apple are going out of their way to show (and cryptographically prove) how they’re not. It would also be incredible fraudulent and illegal for them to make these claims and not follow through.

I have a 50 terabyte NAS for storing my movies and TV shows. And access it from any of the TVs in my house.

For music…I have a music streaming subscription for convenience, but also have some vinyl records for the small-ish number of albums I want to keep forever.

My high end PC from 3 years ago won’t run Windows 11 because of TPM bullshit.

What made me lose interest was bad writing. “Andor” is a great Star Wars TV series, and I’m looking forward to its second season, because it has…let’s see…good fucking writing!

It’s the tech business model. Slowly building up a sustainable business has been replaced with coasting on investment money while attempting to capture an entire global market. Because these products can scale so easily. Now they’re entering the “oh shit we need to make money now” phase of the business model.

It’s not evil capitalists. It’s people acting rationally. The incentive structure leads to this behaviour. Eventually these services will consolidate into 2 or 3 major ones, like they do in every global tech market. Everyone will complain about it. But they’ll keep paying for it, because what other (legal) choice is there?

Better support for Dolby Vision. I also prefer the Infuse UI.

Sideloading and customisation is a downside. Like other Apple devices, the App Store is the way they want you to install things.

There are ways to sideload things like Kodi through pre signed certificates but I don’t know much about it.

Dont need another Apple device.

No need for other Apple devices. It can act as a standalone box. It may want an AppleID account during setup. I’m unsure about that part.

I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but…AppleTV with the Infuse app.

I tried a bunch of different media boxes and HTPC options over the year. But this is by far the best setup in my experience.