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Advice on TV and media storage
I'm finally moving out of my student flat and into an apartment with an actual proper living room. Most things are starting to get sorted, but we have no idea about TVs. Neither of us has owned one before, and our parents' ones were obtained before the advent of smart TVs, so this is completely unfamiliar territory to us. I'm basically asking for some recommendations for things to look at, not necessarily specific models but just... what brands to avoid, what featured to look out for, that sort of thing. Here are some things we want:
- No ads in the menus or as screensavers.
- The TV should work as an actual TV, access to channels is included in our internet subscription. That comes with some sort of box, but we don't have it yet so no idea how that actually connects.
- Able to plug in consoles, hopefully that's a non-issue but want it noted.
- We don't really use streaming services all that much, but we do use YouTube and Spotify, and both of those I'd like to be able to use on the TV. I pay for premium on both of those and that better work ad free on the TV too. Apart from that the only other streaming service I pay for is Dropout, and it would be nice to be able to access that somehow as well but I'm not sure how that would work (browser??)
- I have a lot of downloaded and manually sorted media. Movies, series, a lot of anime especially. I would like to be able to access these on the TV. At the moment this lives in a dropbox and gets watched from my laptop, but that's not a good solution (I'm constantly afraid they will eventually just nuke my account, plus it's kinda expensive). I believe what I need is a simple NAS system? Advice on that specifically might be a separate topic but for the time being, I (a) want to be able to stream stuff from my laptop to the TV, ideally without a cable, and (b) it should be future-proof for when I get a NAS.
What to look out for? Can we just grab any TV we like the look of or are we limited to a handful of options?
The problem with most of not all TVs now is that they’re all “smart”. I’d say steer clear of Samsung and LG as they’re the worst in terms of build quality and privacy.
Some TVs you can keep forever offline and they won’t show you ads, but they’ll still be slow to start and operate (remember, they’re “smart” and underpowered).
The Panasonic used to be great but they apparently switched to Amazon or google depending on the model. Maybe Sony hasn’t fucked it up yet?
Otherwise, I’d also considered buying secondhand. LED LCD don’t really go bad.
I had this whole setup where I was running the servarr stack on a home server which would download off Usenet whatever I added to my IMDb list for movies and whatever shows I was watching on servarr (you enter the shows and whenever an episode is aired it gets downloaded). I then had servarr notify libreelec/kodi I had running on a rpi and used that to watch the shows (over the lan, files were streaming from the home server and deleted automatically once watched).
For Spotify, I had a denon receiver that would also have a Spotify client and would show as a “speaker” in Spotify. It worked okay most of the time.
Never used streaming services at home. But when I was away I had a cheap Roku that I used. I got this one second hand and it would do pretty much all of the streaming services.
Any tv with hdmi will do consoles.
If your living room is small or you’re sitting close to the tv, 40” might be enough (rather than the now standard 55”), or even a computer display (no smarts then)
Oh and I would research my purchase beforehand with serious websites like rtings for instance because the overlap between “looks good”, “looks good in the store under neon light and cranked out settings”, and “actually has a nice picture in real conditions” is not as big as you’d think.
For the anecdote, a few years ago go pour neighbours dumped their 2008 Sony LCD tv. I grabbed it because I needed a second tv. It’s surprisingly good! My main is a Panasonic OLED so of course they’re not in the same league but the Sony was mid-to-high range when it was released and it still holds its own. Even has a luminosity sensor to adjust backlight automatically. So don’t discount older second hand units, there are good ones. Typically flagships from years past are still pretty good today especially compared to average or low tier for this year’s lineup.
Edit: autocorrect sucks, it speaks its own language…