196: HDMI Kablammo

00:00SPEAKERwindow of opportunity has opened. Yes. I've got, as of this recording, I've got

00:06SPEAKERseven hours and 29 minutes left. That's the length of this window of opportunity.

00:10SPEAKERUnlike talking about domain names that I might want to buy on a podcast and then

00:15SPEAKERnot acting on them immediately, I've learned my lesson. Wait, wait, are you in

00:18SPEAKERline for Taylor Swift tickets? No, even better.

00:23SPEAKERBeyonce tickets? A life-changing opportunity here and again this auction

00:28SPEAKERwill have closed long before this podcast goes up. RARE, R-A-R-E, capital RARE,

00:34SPEAKERAperture Brown Diner Mug. It's on eBay? There is a single one of these

00:40SPEAKERAperture Science 70s Princess Belle mug brown gold. You're not drinking out of

00:47SPEAKERyours right now, I see. We didn't quite synergize that well. I'm afraid to use

00:51SPEAKERmine now. It's in pretty good shape. There's one little nick on the paint on

00:55SPEAKERthe backside which, whatever. You can fix that. $26 starting bid, buy it now price

01:00SPEAKER$51. How bad do I want this? I'm not sure. Wow, I mean, I'm not sure. 51 bucks, it's a

01:07SPEAKERpretty good mug but I can... You could probably intuit by the fact that this

01:11SPEAKERauction is still up that I have not, I have not wanted it buy it now bad. Yeah,

01:15SPEAKERbut have you made it, have you wanted it 26 bucks bad or you just try to swoop in

01:18SPEAKERwith the last, this could be the last one in the world, you know. So that's, yeah, you

01:21SPEAKERnever know. It could be the very last one. I mean, I know I have one but mine is precious

01:25SPEAKERfamily heirloom. It pats down to my child and I expect her to pass it down to her

01:28SPEAKERchildren. Of course, of course. That'll pay for somebody's college education

01:31SPEAKERsomeday. I don't think that's true but maybe, maybe if the Liberals have their

01:34SPEAKERway, Brad. Maybe. When was the last time you bid on something on eBay is my

01:38SPEAKERquestion. Umm, 2007. That's weirdly specific but okay. I bought an Xbox on

01:47SPEAKEReBay. Oh wow, okay. Well that's not reason enough then to maybe looking for

01:52SPEAKERinformation on how the process may have changed. Are there, are there do's and

01:55SPEAKERdon'ts? If nobody noticed this, if like, if this has flown entirely under the

01:59SPEAKERradar, can I just swoop in with a bid at the last minute and get it or is there

02:02SPEAKERmore, is it more complicated now? God, no. There's a whole sort of, there's a whole

02:05SPEAKERservice ecosystem around, around getting that last minute swoop in. So expressing

02:12SPEAKERinterest early, almost always a mistake because you're just gonna drive up your

02:15SPEAKERfuture price. Yes, it has zero bids. I was at least fat smart. Yeah, the umm, beyond

02:21SPEAKERthat I don't really know. I know, I do know that somebody listed, umm, somebody in the

02:27SPEAKERDiscord listed their Pokemon Emerald game the other day and then immediately

02:32SPEAKERit was banned from eBay irrevocably. So, you know, maybe don't sell Pokemon

02:39SPEAKEREmerald on eBay but probably you're fine buying a mug would be my guess. Was it a

02:43SPEAKERrepro? Was it a counterfeit? No, I think that, I think that the assumption is that

02:47SPEAKERthere is a large counterfeit problem where people make a bootleg copy of the

02:51SPEAKERgame with all the Pokemons unlocked in it so that then you don't have to play

02:55SPEAKERthe game, which actually, as somebody who has no real, like, I got no beef with

02:59SPEAKERPokemon, like, I'm the wrong age to have engaged with Pokemon, okay? I know where this is

03:03SPEAKERgoing, yes. Yeah, that sounds like a great way to engage with that game to me. Yes, it sounds pretty good.

03:07SPEAKERYeah. Well now, speaking of re-pros, can't you kind of just get

03:12SPEAKERanything you want printed on any mug these days? I don't think you can get it.

03:16SPEAKERThe problem, well, maybe, maybe you could. The brown is the problem, I think, on that

03:21SPEAKERone. What do you mean? On the brown mug. What's the, why is the brown the problem?

03:26SPEAKERYou can get it. It's a specific brown. Well, there are plenty of brown, like,

03:31SPEAKERprincess brown mugs that look good enough, close enough. Oh, see, but the

03:37SPEAKERkind of richness and texture of that glaze that they did. Oh, I see. It's got a, you know, I

03:43SPEAKERassume that artisans at Valve were in the kilns applying the glazes.

03:49SPEAKERThey're probably toxic because, you know, that seems like a very, you know, portal

03:54SPEAKERthing to do is to make the glazes really dangerous for the workers who made them.

03:58SPEAKERAnd, you know, it adds a lot to my appreciation of the coffee. If you, if you

04:04SPEAKERactually came to me and said Valve has a working kiln, I would believe you. I mean,

04:10SPEAKERis that, look, have you looked at the Twitter auction? No. Do you know, so the

04:16SPEAKERman, the bad man in charge of Twitter now is unloading a bunch of the old shit from

04:20SPEAKERthe Twitter offices on an auction site. It starts on September, I think. I think

04:25SPEAKERsomebody on one of my many discords sent me a link to some nice coffee

04:28SPEAKERmachine that their office is auctioning off and I looked at that and I was like,

04:31SPEAKERI wouldn't touch anything that was in that office with a 10-foot pole. Well, okay,

04:35SPEAKERso I looked at the coffee machine because it's a, it's a ten thousand

04:38SPEAKERdollar Lamazoko espresso machine is the one that I was looking at, but it

04:42SPEAKERrequires 240 volt power. So it's like, I'd have to put a dryer vent in, in my

04:47SPEAKERcoffee station in the, in the kitchen, which a dryer plug, which seems a bit

04:51SPEAKERexcessive. You also need like filtered water and the whole thing for the, for

04:55SPEAKERthe deal. So anyway, you can buy everything from like chairs and tables

05:01SPEAKERand desks and stuff like that all the way up to, yo, you could buy the sign

05:07SPEAKERthat was attached to the side of the building before the Yahoo started prying

05:10SPEAKERit off a few months ago. That's that actually that I had no idea what that

05:14SPEAKERwould cost. That's actually the one thing funny enough to maybe be worth

05:17SPEAKERdoing. Well, so everything starts at 25 bucks. Yeah. We're not doing chairs. I

05:23SPEAKERthink they must've done chairs through a normal office furniture liquidator, but

05:26SPEAKERthe desks in the conference you get, if you want an 85 inch commercial TV from

05:31SPEAKERone of the conference rooms, that's the service they can provide. It starts at

05:34SPEAKER25 bucks. Okay. The longer this cold open goes, the worse auction decisions are

05:38SPEAKERbeing made. Let's start the show. You should just get the mug and be done.

06:04SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. And I had a

06:15SPEAKERfollow-up to the cold open. I forgot what it was. You've confided that you

06:20SPEAKERslept like three hours right before we started this last night. And I was just

06:24SPEAKERlike, I'm just going to let him, I'm just going to wait and see what he's got in

06:27SPEAKERthe chamber. Okay. I got it back. I pulled it back. I pulled it back. All right.

06:30SPEAKERLet's hear it. Did you, did you know, did you hear about control, but which the

06:35SPEAKERvideo game? No, no. Well, I mean, okay. It's a good video game, but no, not,

06:39SPEAKERdid you hear what happens when you open task manager in windows 10 or windows 11

06:44SPEAKERhold down the control key? No. When you write, when you open task manager and

06:49SPEAKERyou saw your processes by usage, you know, like CPU memory usage, whatever, you

06:55SPEAKERknow how they bounce around. It's hard to find the one that you're looking for.

06:58SPEAKERThat's like something hangs, it's locked up. You need to find out what's eating

07:02SPEAKERall your CPU cycles, but they bounce around. So then you have to, you look for

07:06SPEAKERthe one that's eating it and then you resort them by name and you scroll down

07:11SPEAKERuntil you find the one that you saw popping around at the top of the list a

07:14SPEAKERminute ago. You don't have to do that. You can just hold down control and it

07:17SPEAKERfreezes them in place. Oh, oh, but still alphabetical, not sorted by usage, like

07:22SPEAKERstill no, no, no. It sorts by you sort, but you can sort by usage and it freezes

07:26SPEAKERit in time when you press the control key. So you can control, control your

07:33SPEAKERprocess list. That's something everyone should aspire to do. I'll be here all

07:39SPEAKERweek. I'm not in, I'm not in front of a windows machine right now, so I can not

07:43SPEAKERverify what you're telling me. You are significantly less excited about this

07:47SPEAKERthan I expected. Look, I spend a lot of time looking at a lot of usages is, is in

07:52SPEAKERdifferent operating systems these days. I know, look, HTOP has the exact same

07:55SPEAKERproblem. Yeah. Those things, they never sit still, but you can control. That's

08:00SPEAKERtrue. Control your HTOP control. I don't know if you control your HTOP actually,

08:07SPEAKERbut you can control your process list. Okay. I'm done now. You know what I would

08:11SPEAKERlove for them to integrate and maybe they would have to work with Google on

08:14SPEAKERthis, or maybe they would never do this because it's a third party, although they

08:18SPEAKERcould do it for edge. Anyway, you know how it'll, it'll essentially list every

08:21SPEAKERprocess that Chrome is using. I assume each one of those is a separate tab. I

08:24SPEAKERdon't know for sure. Have you like, have you ever, I don't even know if you use

08:27SPEAKERChrome anymore, but maybe Firefox is the same way. Have you ever expanded your

08:31SPEAKERbrowser in task manager? Oh yeah. And there's a bazillion, a bazillion threads

08:35SPEAKERin there. Yeah. Yeah. So occasionally you'll open a webpage that's got some

08:39SPEAKERawful, probably some ad unit or something that sends your PC fans flying at a

08:43SPEAKERmillion million miles an hour. Right. Cause they're, I would, I would love to,

08:46SPEAKERand people, I may, I'm bracing for people to be like, Hey, you can totally do this.

08:50SPEAKERAnd I just haven't noticed it, but I would love to be able to kill that one tab

08:53SPEAKERfrom task manager because you can see which process is driving your fans

08:58SPEAKERcrazy, but, but, but you have no way to pair that with the actual tab that is

09:03SPEAKERcausing the bad behavior. Brad, I have good news for you. Yes. Hit command and

09:08SPEAKERescape in your browser. Okay. I'm on a Mac. Nothing's happening. Maybe control

09:12SPEAKERand escape then it's difficult to say which one it is. Also nothing happening.

09:16SPEAKEROkay. Well then open the three dot menu and go down to more tools and then go to

09:21SPEAKERtask manager. Oh, it's shifted escape on, on Chrome. It's controlled escape on

09:25SPEAKERFirefox. Well, look at that. Yeah. It's a little task manager. Oh no. It's

09:30SPEAKERshifted escape on Firefox too. Okay. Well that was a bad bet. I look three hours

09:34SPEAKERsleep. Nope. It's fine. Staying in. That's Hey, good to know. Okay. Well maybe

09:39SPEAKERI've gotten my wish. Yeah. So you can, you can, that gives you the thing that

09:43SPEAKERlets you see how much CPU and memory each tab on your browser is using. I only

09:47SPEAKERever have one tab on Chrome. Cause I only use it for I only use it for our

09:53SPEAKERstreaming the, the jitsy call and occasionally like Google meet calls.

09:58SPEAKERWell, la dee dah, I'm thinking about switching maybe Firefox, pretty good

10:02SPEAKERthese days. Just think about giving Vivaldi a try. Maybe I don't like, I

10:07SPEAKERliked the four seasons. Sure. Uh, but I think Vivaldi is the opera people, if

10:12SPEAKERI'm not mistaken. I think it's the new, oh, it's a fork of opera or a successor

10:15SPEAKERto opera or something. It's still, it's still, um, oh my God, why am I blanking

10:19SPEAKERon chromium? The rendering engine of Chrome? It's chromium, right? Yeah,

10:23SPEAKERthat's chromium. Yeah. Like I still, I still like using chromium based

10:26SPEAKERbrowsers just cause it feels like compatibility is probably highest. Like

10:29SPEAKEReverything is tested against Chrome primarily. Right. I mean, I haven't had

10:33SPEAKERcompatibility problems with Firefox in about 10 years at this point. It seems

10:36SPEAKERlike we jitsy occasionally does not work great with it for us, but anyway, it's

10:41SPEAKERfair. I did just literally say I keep Chrome onto my computer to use jitsy

10:45SPEAKERand Google meet. So now that you mentioned it, yeah, like, yeah, yes.

10:50SPEAKERAnyway, we're not here to talk about web browsers or are we, we are here to

10:54SPEAKERtalk about massive compatibility issues though. Yeah, that's always fun. That's

10:57SPEAKERlike enormous, enormous. Hey, remember, remember, remember when you got a

11:03SPEAKERtelevision and the Xbox three 60 like version one came out and they were like,

11:08SPEAKERlook, we're going to put this new, there's this new port, it's called HDMI.

11:11SPEAKERYou're going to love it. It's just, it's one plug. You just plug it in. It's

11:15SPEAKERcompletely idiot proof. You don't have to like, like you don't have to match

11:18SPEAKERyour reds and your blues and your greens and your whites and your yellows and

11:22SPEAKERyour, and your other whites. No, none of that. It's just going to, you're just

11:25SPEAKERgoing to click, click that thing, snap it in there. And it's going to carry

11:29SPEAKERyour sound and your video all on one cable, both ways. It's amazing. It's a

11:35SPEAKERmagical piece of technology. And you're never going to have to think about this

11:39SPEAKERagain. Guess what, Brad? Yes. You have to think about it again. They had to

11:44SPEAKERthink about it again. Yeah. Well, I remember actually the first, the first

11:48SPEAKERthree 60 didn't even have HDMI. Speaking of incompatibilities, remember you had

11:51SPEAKERto buy the second model to get that. You know, it's always compatible with

11:54SPEAKEReverything analog. Could you use the HD DVD player with the, with the non HDMI

11:59SPEAKERXbox three 60s? Oh gosh. I don't know. That's a good question. How did that

12:04SPEAKERthing connect to the Xbox? Was it over US? Yeah, it's USB. Cause I, we have one

12:08SPEAKERin the office, somebody, somebody in a mailbag sent us like way after the

12:12SPEAKERformat died, somebody sent us their HD DVD drive and all of their movies.

12:17SPEAKERI bought one on eBay for about 50 bucks and ripped all my HD DVDs. For whatever

12:24SPEAKERreason, at some point at future, a bunch of people brought HD DVDs and just

12:29SPEAKERthrew them on the free table by the elevator. And I got almost a full set.

12:35SPEAKERThey're all dead now. You need to copy King Kong. We got you covered. Yeah.

12:39SPEAKERYes. Yes. That format, but boy, that's a whole other topic. That's a different

12:43SPEAKERday. The HD DVD format did not last. Those discs were very prone to dying,

12:48SPEAKERbut you and I both are notable 10 ADP holdouts at home. Mainly, I think I, and

12:56SPEAKERjust to be clear, I don't think I would still be a tape holdout if it weren't

12:59SPEAKERfor the Panasonic plasma and the fact that my wife really likes that TV a lot

13:03SPEAKERand is oddly attached to it. Like we, I think are in the same boat for the same

13:08SPEAKERreason. The Panasonic plasma that we bought, we have slightly different

13:11SPEAKERmodels, but from around the same era, the thing had just has punched above its

13:15SPEAKERweight for so long. It was like cheap when I got it because plasma was on its

13:18SPEAKERway out. Oh, mine was not cheap when I got it. Cause plasma was hot shit. When I

13:21SPEAKERbought mine, I bought mine in 2012, which was the second to last year of the

13:25SPEAKERPanasonic even made plasmas. And by then it was, it was both cheaper and better

13:29SPEAKERlooking than all the LCD TVs on the market at the time. I was like, man, why

13:32SPEAKERis nobody buying these? Anyway, it's held up extremely well. If it, if I was, if I

13:38SPEAKERwas still on a crappy 2010-ish era LCD TV with a cold cathode, cold cathode,

13:46SPEAKERwhy is that so hard to say cold cathode backlight? Yeah. That's a note for me,

13:50SPEAKERdog. I would have dumped that long ago, but the plasma has held up quite well.

13:54SPEAKERThe other thing is like, as long as I am perpetually pondering my living

13:59SPEAKERsituation and might end up going somewhere at some point, I don't want to

14:01SPEAKERremove TV. Yeah. And so it's very easy to just shed your old TV when it's old.

14:07SPEAKERWell, and like, it's just to be clear, this has required a fair amount of

14:11SPEAKERintestinal fortitude at this point, because like you look at like, like,

14:15SPEAKERlike a 75 inch TCL mini led backlit TV at this point, fairly nice, fairly

14:23SPEAKERinexpensive, like, like often you see them on sale for 500 bucks. Everything

14:28SPEAKERlooks better than what we have now. Like the, the other strategy I've had to

14:31SPEAKERemploy is that I'm better off not knowing what I don't know. So I just

14:35SPEAKERavoid looking at other TVs and then it's fine.

14:38SPEAKERWell, I was going to say, so we went to Palm desert last month and they have a

14:41SPEAKERnice TCL, like it's a Roku TV with the, with the all the Dolby vision and the,

14:48SPEAKERand your 15 different HDR formats and all that stuff. And it's an enormous

14:53SPEAKERpain in the ass. Like Plex doesn't Plex getting Plex working always takes me

14:57SPEAKERabout a week to figure out what I need to do to make Plex look right. And like

15:01SPEAKERthe consoles you plug in and you have to change to the bazillion settings. And

15:05SPEAKERthen like, it's, it's all, it's, it's look, it's a path that's fraught with

15:09SPEAKERperil, which is why we're here. Cause you, you, your folks you're at, you're

15:14SPEAKERin North Carolina this week.

15:15SPEAKERYes. That's died. I've helped them with a TV upgrade this week because they

15:20SPEAKERwere on exactly the situation I just described, which is a what CCFL is that

15:28SPEAKERthe, the, the term cold cathode, cold cathodes are just fluorescent tubes that

15:33SPEAKERare a specific frequency and like non-flickery usually I think is the thing.

15:38SPEAKERYes. They, they were on an LCD from 2010 to think of it as ground effects for

15:42SPEAKERyour eyeballs. Yes. Yes. They're, they're on a very, a very old TV that like was

15:46SPEAKERstill going, but it didn't look amazing and just decided it was time.

15:51SPEAKERWhat did they do with the old TV when it, when it was sitting in the floor?

15:56SPEAKERThat's okay. Classic. What's good. What's the eventual disposition of it going to

16:00SPEAKERbe probably donated. I think is the plan unless, unless they there there's a work

16:06SPEAKERarea in the back of the basement that doesn't really get used much anymore, but

16:09SPEAKERthe, you know, there, there could be, there's a much older TV back there

16:13SPEAKERcurrently. So got it. Okay. TV could become the workshop TV, the shit runs

16:17SPEAKERdownhill method and that old TV, which is from like 2006, I think might get

16:23SPEAKERdonated. Okay. So, so, okay. So what did they end up? What did you, what did you,

16:28SPEAKERdid you, were you part of the, the purchasing choice or my mom, my mom is

16:33SPEAKERalso quite technically inclined and did a ton of reading herself as well. She,

16:37SPEAKERshe worked with a lot of technology in her career. Did they hit you with a

16:40SPEAKERbudget? Like here's what we want to spend or was it just like no, not really.

16:45SPEAKERAnd I, I started out looking at a lower end, like the lower end, like mini led

16:49SPEAKERTVs are getting like surprisingly cheap and good.

16:52SPEAKERYeah. That's what the one that we, that's in the Palm desert places. And it's

16:55SPEAKERlike, I, I, it is not as good as like an LGO led. But it is, it is, it is very

17:02SPEAKERgood. And the brightness is intense. Even when it's setting outside, you can watch

17:06SPEAKERit during the daytime easily.

17:07SPEAKERYeah. I think, I think we've talked about many, many led before it's, it's, it's

17:11SPEAKERgot a ton of LEDs in the backlight and it can turn them on and off in a very

17:13SPEAKERgranular fashion to try to match the brightness of the image to, to keep the,

17:18SPEAKERthe contrast high and et cetera, et cetera.

17:20SPEAKERSo that on dark areas of the picture, they're not the LCD screen, you know,

17:26SPEAKERthe screen of, of grids, isn't trying to block out the light at the lights, just

17:29SPEAKERoff behind it, which makes a big difference. It's not perfect, but it's

17:32SPEAKERpretty good.

17:33SPEAKERSo their old TV was a 55 inch decided that a 65 would be a good upgrade for the

17:37SPEAKERspace. You know, they're getting older and the size is, it's, it's helpful, you

17:41SPEAKERknow, they could put the font bigger, you know, they don't have to put their

17:43SPEAKERreading glasses on to watch the TV, having a bigger screen. I mean, even I can

17:47SPEAKERattest eventually, eventually having a bigger screen is good as your eyes start

17:53SPEAKERto failure. Okay. So let me ask a theoretical question for you. If Twitter

17:58SPEAKERis selling, say a hundred inch video wall,

18:05SPEAKERwhich is like an eight K bunch of big screens that are seamless between them

18:10SPEAKERand you need like a dedicated command and control set up and the auction starts

18:15SPEAKERat $25. And it has a thing that says, yo,

18:19SPEAKERyou need to get a licensed professional to come in and disassemble this and then

18:23SPEAKERset it back up where you're going. That's a dumb thing to buy. Right.

18:29SPEAKERLook, I'm not here to tell you how to live your life. You've got $25 probably.

18:33SPEAKERIt's true. Uh, that thing's not going to sell for 25 nothing's going to sell for,

18:38SPEAKERactually, I don't know. Actually, I don't know. Like I want to say like, Oh,

18:41SPEAKERthat'll end up getting bid up to thousands of dollars, but maybe it won't.

18:45SPEAKERWell, cause they, you have to pick it up in San Francisco. They're not shipping.

18:47SPEAKERYes. Yes. True. Yeah. So it's a limit anyway. Okay. So there's,

18:50SPEAKERthere's a lot of people with a lot of money in San Francisco.

18:52SPEAKERThat's true. So, okay. So I should get the video while probably, probably not the,

18:57SPEAKERthe, um, what, what did they end up getting?

19:01SPEAKERShould I just cut to the chase? They, they have, they have an LG C2 now.

19:05SPEAKEROoh, nice. Which is not where I expected things to go. I started out looking at,

19:09SPEAKERI started out looking at last year's mini led models like Hisense is a,

19:12SPEAKERso there's like the stratification and TVs is pretty interesting lately.

19:16SPEAKERLike obviously OLEDs are kind of top of the heap right now.

19:18SPEAKERAnd LG has been the only game in town there,

19:21SPEAKERbut Samsung and Sony now we're finally in the market with OLEDs as well. Yeah.

19:25SPEAKERYeah. And then there's the, and like all of those companies also make LEDs,

19:30SPEAKERexcuse me, TVs, you know, they,

19:31SPEAKERthey make mini led and regular full array LED TVs as well,

19:36SPEAKERif you want that. But then there's the TCLs and the, I guess Visio started this,

19:40SPEAKERright? Visio was the classic original kind of mid range,

19:44SPEAKERlow cost high value.

19:46SPEAKERYeah. And it's like,

19:48SPEAKERit's always been a little unclear to me how they actually make money.

19:52SPEAKERMy assumption is that they're collecting data because the TVs are all internet

19:55SPEAKERconnected now.

19:56SPEAKERAnd my assumptions is they're collecting and selling data or running ads on

19:58SPEAKERtheir UI, which means that they see some like post post sale

20:04SPEAKERrevenue on the, on the purchase. Yeah. That's always,

20:06SPEAKERthat's been the Roku model, right?

20:08SPEAKERLike you can get the hardware out the door for extremely cheap and then serve a

20:11SPEAKERton of ads on it to make it up. So, so like Visio,

20:15SPEAKERI think kicked that off like 15 plus years ago,

20:18SPEAKERbut like TCL and now Hisense I think are the two big ones that I see mostly in

20:23SPEAKERthat space. Visio is still out there as well, for sure.

20:25SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, how does LG differentiate their lines these days?

20:30SPEAKERIs it still like the high refresh rate and the HDR,

20:34SPEAKERthe Dolby vision stuff is limited to the higher end models or is it in the OLED

20:38SPEAKERspace or in general in the OLED space?

20:41SPEAKERSo I, I only looked at the C range, the C models. Okay.

20:47SPEAKERI, well, so actually I take that back.

20:50SPEAKERI'm kind of getting ahead of myself here a little bit.

20:51SPEAKERLG has an entry level OLED model. Now it's the A series. They've always had like,

20:55SPEAKERit's always been B, C, and G from low to high in terms of features.

20:59SPEAKERI don't understand why they, why A isn't the good one.

21:01SPEAKERI guess it's because they don't give A's in Korea. Maybe, I don't know.

21:04SPEAKERI guarantee that there are companies that use,

21:07SPEAKERthat go in the opposite direction and turn to, to imply quality.

21:11SPEAKERActually parsing everybody's modeling numbers has been a real fun exercise in

21:15SPEAKERthis, you know, like, like LG uses the last digit of the year in their model

21:19SPEAKERnumber to, to make it clear.

21:20SPEAKEROh, so that's a 2022 model.

21:22SPEAKERLike the C2 is the 2022 model. That's last year's, but like Samsung,

21:27SPEAKERand I think also Sony use letters like the S the S 95 B was Samsung's

21:32SPEAKERmodel last year. Now they're on the S 95 C Sony's in the weirdly,

21:36SPEAKERin the middle of the alphabet, they're on like J and K and L for some reason.

21:41SPEAKERIt's weird. It's goofy.

21:42SPEAKERThis seems like they looked at like the German car model naming scheme and was

21:47SPEAKERlike, you know what? This is a, this is a great idea.

21:49SPEAKERWe should just knock this off and make it somehow slightly more confusing.

21:52SPEAKERYeah. Yeah. Anyway, like you asked about budget and stuff.

21:56SPEAKERLike I was just looking as cheap as possible. I was like, all right, they,

21:59SPEAKERthey are not as discerning as giant nerds like me and you will

22:03SPEAKERprobably be fine with anything. I would actually come by it honest though.

22:07SPEAKERYes. I was looking at like last year's high sense models which were in the seven

22:11SPEAKERto 800 range now. But should we talk about art?

22:17SPEAKEROkay.

22:17SPEAKERNow I'm going to embarrass myself because I have never decided on how to

22:20SPEAKERpronounce the very popular TV review websites. You know,

22:24SPEAKERthe one our tings. Okay. Thank you. That's what I was going to say.

22:28SPEAKERYeah. Isn't I always are tings and DP review,

22:32SPEAKERwhich was the digital photography review. Okay.

22:35SPEAKERIs that from like the, is that from like the early HDTV era,

22:39SPEAKERlike DLP and stuff like that? Well, DP review was for like

22:44SPEAKERSLRs, DSLRs. They were, they were the,

22:47SPEAKERthey were the place to go if you wanted to know which SLR or mirrorless camera

22:51SPEAKERto buy. No, they didn't. But to me,

22:56SPEAKERthe, Hey, we're going to put the initials of the things we're testing. Oh, I see.

23:00SPEAKERYeah. Anyway, I see. Like they're in the same category in my,

23:03SPEAKERin my sleep addled brain. Yes. Okay. Got it. Got it. Okay. Our tings.

23:07SPEAKERLet's just go with that in pronunciation. Anyway,

23:09SPEAKERlike they are the defacto TV review resource these days. From what I can tell,

23:14SPEAKERlike that is the thing that comes up in all the Google search results from what I

23:18SPEAKERfound. Okay. They're very comprehensive.

23:21SPEAKERIf you have not been there before our tings.com, I've just,

23:25SPEAKERI've known them as the screen review place for some years now,

23:28SPEAKERthe monitors as well. So screens are all generally pretty good these days,

23:32SPEAKERright? Yes, for sure. For sure.

23:34SPEAKERIt's not like the old days where you're like you're viewing and if you got the

23:37SPEAKERwrong TV, your viewing angle would be bad.

23:39SPEAKERYou'd be sitting at like 30 degrees off the TV and like half the screen would be

23:42SPEAKERblacked out or something weird like that. No, actually viewing angles is totally

23:45SPEAKERa thing. The high sense that I originally,

23:47SPEAKERwe originally thought we were going to get the high sense,

23:48SPEAKERbut their their seating arrangement is such that especially when other family is

23:53SPEAKERover, like the off angle viewing is, is actually an important thing.

23:57SPEAKERAnd the high sense uses a, an LCD VA panel, you know, VA from monitors,

24:02SPEAKERit's like TN, VA and IPS are the big LCD types. It's a technique by which the

24:07SPEAKERpanels are created, right? Yes. They all have ups and downs,

24:10SPEAKERbut the VA panels have pretty bad off, off angle viewing quality.

24:15SPEAKERAnd that was actually a pretty big drawback for the way their seating is

24:18SPEAKERarranged and stuff. So that was a drawback there. Anyway long story short,

24:23SPEAKERI had sent my mom our tings and she got to looking at the like best of lists.

24:28SPEAKERAnd there was a bit of creep from last year's high sense to this year's high

24:33SPEAKERsense to then she'd, I didn't even say the word OLED to her. She came to me,

24:36SPEAKERshe was like, what about these OLEDs? Like they say, these are really good.

24:42SPEAKERBut it's a thing where like, if you, if you keep TV,

24:45SPEAKERlike I don't know if your parents,

24:47SPEAKERI assume your parents are keeping TVs as long as we do because they have a TV

24:51SPEAKERthat's old. Like I, I'm,

24:54SPEAKERI'm kind of of the,

24:55SPEAKERI would rather buy one thing and have it last a really long time than do

24:59SPEAKERsmaller incremental upgrades at a lower cost.

25:02SPEAKERYeah. And, and, you know, take,

25:04SPEAKERtake sales floor sales guy recommendations with a grain of salt, I guess the guy

25:09SPEAKERthat at Best Buy that came up to help us actually did seem quite knowledgeable,

25:12SPEAKERbut we were looking at the high senses there and he was like, Oh, it's like,

25:17SPEAKERfor reliability reasons and stuff, I would stay away there.

25:20SPEAKERI'm sure they're fine for most people,

25:22SPEAKERbut he put a little seed of doubt in there as well about that stuff.

25:25SPEAKERBut like the bigger thing is they kept their last TV for 12, 13 years. Right.

25:29SPEAKERYeah. Like, and like, I, not to be too, too morose,

25:33SPEAKERbut my dad said it himself, you know,

25:34SPEAKERlike this might be the last TV they ever buy. Oh boy. Right.

25:38SPEAKERI think that about myself sometimes though. Yes. So like, like there,

25:41SPEAKERthere was a bit of that of like, Hey, like we're going to keep this,

25:45SPEAKERwe may never buy another TV. Like we should just get a good one.

25:47SPEAKERBut the other thing is it was really the, the prices were not that different.

25:52SPEAKERLike that was actually the thing to push it over the edge because like a brand

25:56SPEAKERnew, this year's model OLED is still extremely expensive,

25:59SPEAKERespecially if you get up into bigger sizes,

26:02SPEAKERbut the discounts on last year's models are pretty significant. Yeah.

26:07SPEAKERLast year's Samsung and LG at 65 inch were both down to 1600,

26:11SPEAKERwhich is not that much more than,

26:13SPEAKERthan the high sense that TCL that they were looking at.

26:16SPEAKERAnd the thing I was going to say, the thing that my understanding is that like,

26:19SPEAKERthe thing that's changing from year to year is like the HTMI spec and even

26:24SPEAKERless so that now since 2.1 is kind of across the board now,

26:28SPEAKERlike there was a period of time in 2020,

26:29SPEAKER2021 when you probably couldn't even buy TVs if I didn't pay attention then,

26:34SPEAKERbut there wasn't the,

26:38SPEAKERin order to get the new HTMI spec and the high refresh rate stuff and the HDR

26:42SPEAKERstuff and all of the different bits and pieces you needed,

26:44SPEAKERyou had to buy the expensive one. And I don't think that's the case anymore.

26:47SPEAKERRight? Yes. Yes. I haven't looked at the B models for the LG OLEDs. I mean,

26:51SPEAKERthat's what I've spent most time looking at and I can't speak to the others as

26:53SPEAKERmuch. I know, I know that new A model entry-level LG OLED does not have

26:58SPEAKERHTMI 2.1, which is a pretty big, you're just going to watch TV on it.

27:02SPEAKERThat's fine. If you're only going to watch TV and movies,

27:04SPEAKERthat's not a problem. That's specifically for games though.

27:07SPEAKERNot having that is a pretty big drawback because you're not going to get high

27:10SPEAKERrefresh and variable refresh and stuff like that.

27:13SPEAKERYeah. The variable refresh rate is I think more important than the high refresh

27:16SPEAKERrate. Even for most games, probably. Yes. The, the A2 last year's A2 is like,

27:20SPEAKERcheaper than a lot of the LCD TVs at this point. It's 1200.

27:23SPEAKERIt's like 1200 bucks now for last year's entry-level LG OLED.

27:27SPEAKERAnd at like a 50, 60 inch size.

27:29SPEAKERSo that's for 65. Wow. Yeah. Like, like,

27:32SPEAKERlike it seems like this happens a lot.

27:34SPEAKERLike the high senses and TCL TCLs have crept up in price as they've established

27:39SPEAKERthemselves in the market. Of course,

27:40SPEAKERI guess they want to broaden their product range. Right. I mean,

27:42SPEAKERit makes sense. So like that's the same price as the TCL that they were looking

27:47SPEAKERat, you know? So. Okay. Okay. So, um,

27:52SPEAKERyou ended up going with the OLED. Yes. The LG. It's a whole thing.

27:56SPEAKERI don't know how much you want to get into it. Samsung is new in OLEDs.

27:59SPEAKERThe last year's model we were looking at it because it was cheaper,

28:02SPEAKERturned out to be their first generation OLED,

28:05SPEAKERwhich seemed like really asking for trouble for something you want to last for

28:09SPEAKERlike a decade plus. And are they, um, are they,

28:13SPEAKERare they making their own OLEDs? Are they buying from somebody else?

28:17SPEAKERYes. That's, that's actually the big thing is that as far as I know,

28:20SPEAKERLG has been the only OLED panel manufacturer to date until Samsung entered the

28:24SPEAKERmarket. Well, at scale they were selling to Sony,

28:26SPEAKERlike Sony's been selling OLEDs for a long time,

28:28SPEAKERbut they were just buying LG OLEDs and slapping them in Sony boxes. Yes. So,

28:32SPEAKERso Sony has, has,

28:33SPEAKERhas switched or they may just have a stratified product line,

28:37SPEAKERbut their high end OLED is now a Samsung panel, not a, uh,

28:41SPEAKERnot an LG panel. There are differences there. I can't get too deep into like,

28:45SPEAKERLG's OLEDs are white OLED. Samsung's OLEDs are blue OLED.

28:49SPEAKERI believe that's the term for the type of panel it is. Um,

28:53SPEAKERwhich I think just has to do with the way it produces color. Um,

28:57SPEAKERa lot of FUD out there about the early Samsung OLEDs, like firmware issues,

29:01SPEAKERreliability stuff,

29:02SPEAKERlike some long-term testing has shown that they seem very prone to burn in.

29:06SPEAKERYeah. LG had problems with that 10 years ago in their,

29:09SPEAKERwhen their things were new and it seems to be a solid problem. Yes. They, they,

29:12SPEAKERthey seem to mostly have ironed out burn in issues. So that,

29:14SPEAKERthat was another thing. It was just, you know,

29:16SPEAKERthis is too big of a roll of the dice to take a chance on a pretty new product

29:21SPEAKERwhere LG has been making these things for like what, seven, eight years now.

29:24SPEAKERWell, and it wasn't that much more expensive either, which exact same price.

29:27SPEAKERThey were the same thing and LG were, were the same price. I just, I mean,

29:33SPEAKERdifferent people have different budgets of course,

29:34SPEAKERbut like it is hard for me to envision buying the new model of these TVs.

29:38SPEAKERLike the price is so much more. Well, I mean, we're talking,

29:42SPEAKERI don't know, 60 to 80% more in some cases.

29:48SPEAKERFor me,

29:49SPEAKERI've gone down the process and just not pulled the trigger a couple of times on

29:52SPEAKERthis and where I always end up is buying the nice one from the year before is

29:55SPEAKERbetter option than buying the cheap one from this year.

29:57SPEAKERThat seems like exactly the way to go.

29:59SPEAKERAnd the features have matured and also trickled down into the lower models

30:03SPEAKERsomewhat to the point that like, it seems like you're way better off waiting for

30:06SPEAKERthat. It's, it's a pretty specific window from what I can tell,

30:09SPEAKERbecause it's basically from the point,

30:12SPEAKERthe new models are on the market to the point,

30:13SPEAKERthe ones they already made from last year are gone, you know?

30:16SPEAKERYeah. So you got to move pretty quickly to look for the deals,

30:18SPEAKERbut there are definitely deals to be had.

30:20SPEAKERWe're in that window now, I think.

30:24SPEAKERShould we talk about HDR? This led to a crash course in HDR.

30:27SPEAKERWell, yeah. So I was going to say like we were overdue for an HDR episode. It's,

30:31SPEAKERit's both less and more complicated than I expected when we dug into it.

30:35SPEAKERThe, the, so HDR,

30:40SPEAKEReverybody I think conflates HDR and color gamut where

30:45SPEAKERcolor gamut is the sheer number of colors that the display can reproduce.

30:50SPEAKERLike on an old, on an old monitor or computer monitor,

30:52SPEAKERthat's represented by that NTSC curve,

30:55SPEAKERwhich is like 16 million colors,

30:58SPEAKERmostly in the ranges where your eyes have a lot of,

31:02SPEAKERa lot of resolution because of the cone and rod,

31:08SPEAKERbecause of the way the cone, I think it's cones are, are color.

31:10SPEAKERI can't remember are distributed in the back of your eye and which ones do which

31:14SPEAKERcolors and all that. The,

31:18SPEAKERthe HDR in theory only represents the luminance,

31:22SPEAKERthe difference between the dimmest pixels and the brightest pixels on the

31:25SPEAKERscreen. So it's kind of like in the audio metaphor,

31:29SPEAKERis that a color gamut is the bit rate and

31:35SPEAKERluminance. The HDR is the, is the brightness.

31:40SPEAKERI mean, is the loudness rather.

31:42SPEAKERI'm not sure how helpful this analogy is.

31:44SPEAKERYeah. Okay. Okay. Bad analogy.

31:47SPEAKERBut, but the, but, but anyway, in reality,

31:51SPEAKERin the modern era of HDR,

31:54SPEAKERtypically you don't buy an HDR TV if it doesn't also support a wider color

31:58SPEAKERgamut. So you do get both more colors and brighter and darker,

32:02SPEAKERbigger difference between brighter, darker.

32:03SPEAKERNow nothing supports the full range of any of these HDR standards. So like,

32:08SPEAKERlike the number of maximum number of nits that the display supports literally

32:13SPEAKERdoesn't matter because even like commercial mastering displays only go up to

32:17SPEAKER4,000 nits. And I think everything supports at least 10,000 nits, which Jesus,

32:22SPEAKERif you turn 10,000 nits on your living room, you'd have to put sunglasses on.

32:25SPEAKERIt's like, it's like a Dolby cinema display projector in,

32:29SPEAKERin shutter glass in, in 3d mode.

32:32SPEAKERYeah. If I'm not mistaken,

32:33SPEAKERI think home TVs have only like broken a thousand nits in the last handful of

32:37SPEAKERyears. Like it's, it's, it's still, there's still a ton of headroom there.

32:40SPEAKERIt's real quick. I should mention,

32:42SPEAKERthe whole reason we were looking at that Samsung model is it's the first quantum

32:45SPEAKERdot OLED on the market.

32:47SPEAKERProbably I'm sure you've seen like Q LED or QD LED and LCD TV space.

32:52SPEAKERYeah. Those were, those were,

32:53SPEAKERthat was their marketing thing to sound kind of like OLED, but not be OLED,

32:57SPEAKERbut be better than LCD.

32:58SPEAKERYes. But it is a real technology.

33:00SPEAKERIt's an extra layer on the screen that uses these quantum dots,

33:02SPEAKERwhich are like nano nano coding something. Yeah. Like it's a focusing,

33:08SPEAKERit's kind of a focusing agent that the upshot is wider color gamut and brighter

33:13SPEAKERis why it's a big deal. And so like,

33:15SPEAKERso the Samsung is tested,

33:17SPEAKERproven broader color palette and significantly brighter,

33:22SPEAKERwhich is why we even looked at it the first place. But again,

33:24SPEAKERlike all those downsides with reliability concerns.

33:27SPEAKERYeah. And so the other thing, I mean, we talked about OLEDs before,

33:30SPEAKERbut just as to recap,

33:32SPEAKERthe difference between OLEDs and LCDs is LCDs require a backlight and then

33:36SPEAKERfilter that light to produce color OLEDs generate the color natively.

33:40SPEAKERSo they're both the color gen they,

33:41SPEAKERthey generate the light and the color at the same time on the same thing.

33:44SPEAKERSo there's, there's less.

33:49SPEAKERYou're not, you're not making like LCDs are inherently making a thing,

33:52SPEAKERdimmer to make the colors come out.

33:56SPEAKERWhich means that they then have to have a bigger,

33:57SPEAKERbrighter backlight and a bunch of other stuff anyway.

34:01SPEAKERSo HDR there's a bunch of different formats for

34:06SPEAKERHDR. The original one is HLG,

34:09SPEAKERwhich is part of the HSC 3.0 spec,

34:12SPEAKERwhich defines broadcast TV in North America.

34:15SPEAKERIt's also part of the international one,

34:16SPEAKERwhich I didn't write down what that one is because who is, who is ATSC?

34:21SPEAKERAmerican advanced telecom, something or other advanced television systems

34:26SPEAKERcommittee. Yeah. It's the, it's the successor to NTSC. Oh, okay. Of course. Yes.

34:30SPEAKERYeah, of course.

34:32SPEAKERSo ATSC started when they started doing HD broadcasts in the early 2000s.

34:36SPEAKERAnd if you buy an HD tuner card for your computer,

34:40SPEAKERit's going to support one of the ATSC standards.

34:42SPEAKERSo HLG was part of ATSC 3,

34:46SPEAKERwhich rolled out in like mid 2010s, 2016, 2017, something like that.

34:51SPEAKERIt's back compatible with SDR with standard dynamic range stuff. So if you,

34:57SPEAKERbut only on TVs to support the right color container, which is the BT 2021,

35:02SPEAKERwhich means if you bought,

35:03SPEAKERbasically what it means is your old standard deaf TV or standard dynamic range

35:07SPEAKERTV won't work right with it, but newer standard dynamic range TVs that are not,

35:11SPEAKERHDR compatible will display the HDR stuff correctly.

35:16SPEAKERWhich was a problem with like,

35:17SPEAKERthat was the thing that was relevant eight years ago and probably less so now,

35:21SPEAKERbecause I don't think it's probably pretty hard to buy a non HDR TV at this

35:24SPEAKERpoint.

35:26SPEAKERThe other thing about HDR that we haven't said is that because the capabilities

35:30SPEAKERof each display are different, you can like HDR on its own,

35:35SPEAKERdoesn't mean a whole lot. Like you can have an HDR TV that has a really narrow,

35:40SPEAKERgamut and a really narrow luminance band,

35:42SPEAKERand it's going to look a little bit better than a standard deaf TV, but,

35:46SPEAKERbut in reality,

35:48SPEAKERlike watching HDR content on HDR TV is probably more impactful in my

35:52SPEAKERexperience than the jump from H from 1080P to 4k.

35:56SPEAKEROh, absolutely. Just, just perceptually, it is much easier to see. Yeah.

36:02SPEAKERSo, okay. So there's four, four, four main formats.

36:05SPEAKERThere's some others that we're not going to talk about, but HLG is royalty free.

36:08SPEAKERIt's the one that's part of HSC 3.0 HDR 10 is the main one.

36:11SPEAKERI think at this point the most widely supported from what I've gathered. Yeah.

36:16SPEAKER10 and 10 plus are kind of a 10 is a 10 plus is an extension of 10,

36:20SPEAKERbut a 10 is an open format. There's no licensing charges.

36:24SPEAKERIt's not backwards compatible with SCR.

36:26SPEAKERIt's supported by pretty much everything.

36:30SPEAKERDell like computer manufacturers, consoles, CE places,

36:35SPEAKERApple, everybody, everybody supports it.

36:38SPEAKERThe one problem with it is that the display determines how to

36:43SPEAKERhandle information that the hardware is not capable of showing.

36:47SPEAKERSo it knows the display knows what, what,

36:50SPEAKERwhat it's kind of kind of capable of. And it looks at the video stream coming in.

36:53SPEAKERIt's like, well, okay, here we go. We're going to do the best we can.

36:57SPEAKERThe HDR 10 plus spec was added by Samsung as a response to the Dolby

37:02SPEAKERvision stuff that we'll talk about in a sec. And it's a free,

37:07SPEAKERit's a free extension for creators. There's a little bit of a licensing charge,

37:11SPEAKERbut it's like 10 K annually, which isn't very much.

37:13SPEAKERAnd I don't believe it even has it.

37:16SPEAKERMy understanding is that it doesn't have a per device license,

37:20SPEAKERlike the per device licenses capped. So,

37:24SPEAKERso you never pay more than 10 K Oh, Oh, 10 K flat 10.

37:28SPEAKERThe 10 K is the maximum you'll have to pay,

37:31SPEAKERwhich sounds like a lot for like you and me,

37:33SPEAKERnothing when you're talking about like a per per TV sold cost or per phone,

37:37SPEAKERphone costs or whatever for the, for a corporation big enough to be televisions.

37:41SPEAKERI mean, that's literally nothing. Well, they,

37:43SPEAKERthey Samsung realized saw which way the wind was blowing and wanted to get out in

37:46SPEAKERfront of it. I think so. The, the difference, the thing that it adds,

37:50SPEAKERthe main thing that it adds is that it specifies the display limitations and

37:55SPEAKERthe, the videos, the video,

37:58SPEAKERthe video describes basically what should be displayed at any,

38:03SPEAKERon any given frame in that video. So it says, okay, in this frame,

38:07SPEAKERwe want to focus on the dark stuff in this room.

38:08SPEAKERWe want to focus on the light stuff. So the TV doesn't have to make best guesses.

38:12SPEAKERIt's based on what the person who did the mastery the content

38:17SPEAKERmastering wanted. Which, which makes sense. Cause like if you're,

38:21SPEAKERif you're shooting a noir and it's a lot of darks,

38:23SPEAKERyou want to have a lot, a lot more clarity in the dark area.

38:25SPEAKERIf you're shooting outside scenes,

38:27SPEAKERhaving more clarity in the bright area is probably important,

38:28SPEAKERmore important than having it in the, in the dark area.

38:33SPEAKERDolby vision is the other big one. This is the closed proprietary,

38:37SPEAKERfairly expensive spec.

38:40SPEAKERThis, this was the big sticking point I found in looking around at stuff.

38:43SPEAKERAnd so as you've kind of started to allude to here,

38:46SPEAKERSamsung seems to have taken a big stand against Dolby vision and does not

38:49SPEAKERsupport it in any of their stuff,

38:51SPEAKERwhich was seemingly a drawback of that Samsung said,

38:54SPEAKERobviously we decided not to get it for other reasons as well, but, uh,

38:58SPEAKERby not supporting Dolby vision, like you're,

39:01SPEAKERyou're not losing access to a lot of content,

39:03SPEAKERbut you're losing access to what a lot of people think is the best version of

39:06SPEAKERthat content. Because my, my understanding is generally,

39:09SPEAKERgenerally anything that has any content that is encoded in Dolby vision can also

39:13SPEAKERfall back to HDR 10. So you're still going to get some HDR on,

39:17SPEAKERsay a Samsung TV that doesn't support Dolby vision,

39:19SPEAKERbut opinions are so varied out there. There are some people,

39:23SPEAKERsome people quite literally just like, Oh, why would you even use HDR?

39:25SPEAKERIf it's not totally vision, none other people are like, Oh,

39:27SPEAKERI can't tell the difference. Like it's, it's a thorny subject.

39:30SPEAKERWell, and that's, that's probably a reaction.

39:32SPEAKERThat's probably a factor of the TVs having different capabilities, right?

39:35SPEAKERLike if you're buying a higher end TV and it doesn't support Dolby vision,

39:38SPEAKERthat feels like a tactical error to me.

39:41SPEAKERWhereas if you're buying the $500 high sense,

39:43SPEAKERyou're probably fine without Dolby vision, I think.

39:46SPEAKERSo you could,

39:47SPEAKERyou could question Samsung strategy there then because they're making very high

39:50SPEAKERend TVs without Dolby vision.

39:51SPEAKERWell, I think, I think if I don't, I, the thing I can't,

39:54SPEAKERI couldn't get a good grasp on and I don't have a good idea of is how widely

39:58SPEAKERsupported HDR 10 is. Cause they're on paper.

40:00SPEAKERThey seem like they're pretty comparable. There's,

40:03SPEAKERthere's audio stuff that comes with the Dolby vision stuff as well that we're

40:06SPEAKERnot going to get into today. Cause it's complicated.

40:09SPEAKERBut the audio formats, whole other atmos and all that stuff,

40:13SPEAKERthat stuff has also continued to grow in complexity.

40:17SPEAKERYeah, I guess. And you're right. Atmos is separate than Dolby vision,

40:20SPEAKERbut like usually those things come together and in the content if you're

40:24SPEAKERwatching stuff streaming,

40:26SPEAKERit kind of matters less because typically the streaming services encode

40:29SPEAKEReverything in all the different formats and everything's just available.

40:33SPEAKERSo your player, when you gray, if you have a,

40:36SPEAKERif you have a good player, an Apple TV or, or the LG stuff as opposed to this,

40:40SPEAKERis pretty good.

40:41SPEAKERIt just grabs what your TV supports and plays the best thing that your TV

40:45SPEAKERsupports. So you're not,

40:47SPEAKERit's not like you're transcoding on the fly or down converting like your Dolby,

40:52SPEAKERyour non Dolby vision supporting TV will grab the HDR version,

40:55SPEAKERnot the HDR 10 version,

40:57SPEAKERnot the Dolby vision and then expect it to fail gracefully.

41:01SPEAKERYes. I think, oh, actually I just found the link.

41:04SPEAKERI didn't think I was going to be able to find it. Although,

41:06SPEAKERcan I read this in real time on this podcast? Probably not. I found,

41:09SPEAKERNetflix has a page up about how they master in HDR for their stuff,

41:14SPEAKERat least, which is quite informative.

41:16SPEAKERBut the upshot that I've gotten from this is they do every,

41:20SPEAKERand this is for all their content. This is not what they're getting.

41:22SPEAKERThis is the specs that they give production teams and masteries to studios

41:27SPEAKERfor stuff that they risk. We have some colorists in the audience.

41:30SPEAKERThis is a place where we should bring them in and do an episode about how this

41:33SPEAKERstuff works. Because from what I gathered from some people in the discord,

41:37SPEAKERstudios are not giving HDR versions at all to Netflix or other streaming

41:42SPEAKERservices. They're keeping,

41:43SPEAKERthey're keeping that for themselves for disc or for their own streaming

41:47SPEAKERservices. Oh, that's interesting. So,

41:49SPEAKERso by and large a lot of the third-party content on Netflix doesn't have HDR at

41:53SPEAKERall. That's, that's what I was told. I didn't, I haven't looked that up. Anyway,

41:56SPEAKERwhat I gathered from this is that Netflix masters everything in Dolby vision.

42:00SPEAKERAnd then they take that data and then I'm not saying they literally hit export to

42:04SPEAKERHDR 10, but it sounds like that's,

42:06SPEAKERthat's the version that gets all the real fine tuning attention.

42:09SPEAKERAnd then they use that to then create the other versions.

42:13SPEAKERThat makes sense. Given that it it's a, it's a high, it's a higher bid depth.

42:18SPEAKERSo Dolby vision supports 12 bit color versus 10 bit color for the others.

42:23SPEAKERSo I can see that the other thing that Dolby vision does that's neat is if you

42:26SPEAKERhave the IQ if you have a Dolby vision IQ TV,

42:30SPEAKERit actually has an ambient light sensor and we'll adjust the brightness of the

42:33SPEAKERTV based on the conditions in the room, which is,

42:36SPEAKERwhich is as somebody who has a giant ass window facing my TV,

42:40SPEAKERthat sounds like an awesome feature that I'm definitely going to get on my next

42:43SPEAKERTV. Yes. I I'll say real quick.

42:46SPEAKERThe biggest downside I saw in on the RTINGS review of the LG was that it was not

42:50SPEAKERas bright as the Samsung. They kind of like rated the brightness generally as,

42:53SPEAKERas middling to. Okay. Yeah. And like the higher TV,

42:58SPEAKERit's going to be like the surface of the surface of the sun or especially the TV

43:01SPEAKERthey had before. But like, even like the,

43:02SPEAKERthe mini led TVs can get brighter than any little led on the market. Like the,

43:06SPEAKERthat's the biggest advantage that the LED TVs have at this point is brightness.

43:10SPEAKERSo like point being the one they got, I'm trying to put this in context context.

43:14SPEAKERThe one they got was considered the worst brightness by far of all the ones that

43:18SPEAKERwe looked at. And they have a lot of natural light in this room.

43:22SPEAKERIt is totally viewable in like middle of the day with sun coming in the room.

43:26SPEAKERLike it is, I was like, I was like, really, this is considered not bright enough.

43:30SPEAKERThis was extremely fun.

43:31SPEAKERWhen a friend got his first OLED like 10 years ago now,

43:36SPEAKERprobably. And I went over to the house to see it and he's a huge window facing

43:40SPEAKERthe TV. You know,

43:42SPEAKERNorm's house has an enormous window facing the TV and like the difference in

43:46SPEAKERbrightness with the windows open was enormous. Right. Also,

43:50SPEAKERit's worth mentioning the cold cathodes degrade and reduce,

43:54SPEAKERproduce less color over time.

43:55SPEAKERSo a 20 year old code cathode is probably going to be pretty,

43:58SPEAKERpretty dim by this point. I hadn't even thought about that. So yeah.

44:02SPEAKERSo that's, it's very, it's very dim. It was very dim. Those are the four standards.

44:06SPEAKERFor the most part, once you buy the TV and a receiver or soundbar,

44:10SPEAKERyou kind of don't have to worry about this,

44:12SPEAKERbut you do want to make sure that like, if you buy a Dolby vision TV,

44:15SPEAKERyou want to buy a Dolby vision soundbar receiver and vice versa.

44:19SPEAKERSo like you don't want to, if you don't,

44:20SPEAKERyou're just spending money on something that you can't use for all intents and

44:23SPEAKERpurposes.

44:24SPEAKERThat kind of,

44:24SPEAKERthat kind of goes for everything that we'll talk about here toward the end of the

44:27SPEAKERepisode. Pretty much every,

44:30SPEAKERevery device in your chain needs to support the given feature for it to work at

44:34SPEAKERall.

44:35SPEAKERI was going to say the bummer about all of this is that I think if you're buying

44:40SPEAKERa new TV and you have other stuff in that chain,

44:43SPEAKERyou kind of have to just bite the bullet and replace everything at the same

44:46SPEAKERtimes. So there was a whole thing. I was, I was much, we'll get to it.

44:51SPEAKERWe'll talk about maybe some of my specific like ups and downs that we've had

44:54SPEAKERwith the setup toward the end, but they ended up having to replace their receiver

44:58SPEAKERtoo,

44:58SPEAKERwhich I was extremely angry about and they didn't seem to mind as much and then

45:02SPEAKERwe bought a cheap one, but we'll get to it. But yes, like, I guess that's,

45:06SPEAKERthat's good advice in general is going into this thinking you can just,

45:09SPEAKERI wanted a drop in TV replacement that would just work with what they had.

45:12SPEAKERAnd on paper, on paper, it should have worked that way,

45:15SPEAKERbut it ended up not working that way. So like, don't,

45:18SPEAKERdon't assume you're just going to be able to use all your old stuff,

45:20SPEAKERunfortunately.

45:21SPEAKERSo, okay. So there's other stuff we should talk about is, is audio.

45:25SPEAKERThere's a thing called eARC, which is a follow on to ARC,

45:29SPEAKERA-R-C which is the audio return channel.

45:33SPEAKERBasically that defines a channel. HDMI cables are a two way connection,

45:38SPEAKERwhich means that you can send control signals back from the TV to the soundbar or

45:42SPEAKERto the receiver and vice versa.

45:46SPEAKERThere's also an audio pipeline on that same connection that goes up to 37

45:51SPEAKERmegabits per second in the eARC modern era with HDMI 2.1.

46:00SPEAKERThey include features like lip sync correction now as mandatory,

46:03SPEAKERbecause that's been a big problem for the 4K TVs is that, that the,

46:08SPEAKERthere's no, there's no synchronization. So you have to be,

46:12SPEAKERyou either have automatic or manual correction for that now, which is nice.

46:17SPEAKERAnd you get good things like, like turning on the TV, turns off the,

46:20SPEAKERturns on the receiver and, and you know, whatever.

46:23SPEAKERSo the upshot is you can plug in your Apple TV or your X or your PlayStation

46:28SPEAKERand turning on the PlayStation will turn on the TV and the receiver and turning

46:32SPEAKERoff the PlayStation will turn off the TV and receiver. It's honestly,

46:36SPEAKERone of my favorite things about even our old 1080p TV with CC on

46:41SPEAKERis that I can turn on,

46:43SPEAKERI the only remote in our living room is the Apple TV remote,

46:46SPEAKERbecause that's the only thing we use remote for.

46:51SPEAKERAnd that,

46:51SPEAKERthat whether it's ARC or eARC determines what support for audio codecs you have

46:57SPEAKERback to the, from the TV to the soundbar as well. So that means,

47:00SPEAKERwhat that means is you can plug something in to the TV ports,

47:03SPEAKERnot just the receiver ports, and still get the good audio back to the receiver.

47:07SPEAKERIn theory, that's always been hinky in my experience.

47:10SPEAKERYeah, you should, you should get everything over the one cable,

47:13SPEAKERwhich is really convenient with the ARC stuff. With refresh rate,

47:17SPEAKERwhich is the other wild card on,

47:19SPEAKERthis was more difficult a couple of years ago before HDMI 2.1 was widespread,

47:23SPEAKERbut with HDMI 2.1, there's enough bandwidth for, for,

47:27SPEAKERfor a while we were in a situation where the HDMI spec didn't provide enough

47:29SPEAKERbandwidth for high dynamic range and good audio and high refresh rate.

47:35SPEAKERI think we're past that now with 2.1 for the most part, it seems like.

47:39SPEAKERShould I mention now I had, I had,

47:40SPEAKERI had saved this for the kind of weird ups and downs of setting this stuff up

47:43SPEAKERpart at the end. But when you talk about, you know,

47:46SPEAKERis HDMI 2.1 like good enough for the future? Do we have enough bandwidth?

47:51SPEAKEREverything in this space is now labeling itself as 8K.

47:54SPEAKERSo that's how you tell it's an HDMI 2.1 cable.

47:56SPEAKERThat's exactly it. And that's, I mean, once you know that it's fine,

47:59SPEAKERit's just kind of ridiculous because there are no 8K screens on the market for

48:03SPEAKERconsumers. Like it doesn't, it's a thing that does basically does not exist.

48:06SPEAKERLike HDMI 2.1 technically can go up to 8K at 60 Hertz,

48:11SPEAKERwhich is why they're saying that because it's a good marketing term,

48:14SPEAKERbut you really have to realize that across the board,

48:17SPEAKERand I don't just mean like on the sides of boxes of things,

48:21SPEAKERlike the issue, my cables we bought are labeled as 8K.

48:24SPEAKERWhen I had to dig into receiver settings to enable HDMI 2.1 stuff,

48:28SPEAKERthey labeled those settings as 8K enhanced.

48:31SPEAKERIt is not clearly communicated in all cases that, Hey,

48:34SPEAKERthis is actually means HDMI 2.1. It's just, it's just a silly marketing thing.

48:38SPEAKERIt's a real testament to how poorly the branding on HDMI 2.2 on

48:43SPEAKERHDMI versions is, is thought out that they have to go to that.

48:47SPEAKERCall it, I don't know, help me out here. Let's run a branding exercise.

48:52SPEAKERLook, just rebranded HDMI 7. And then yeah, even, even numbers,

48:56SPEAKERI feel like I call it, call it HDMI couple ammo, super extreme.

49:01SPEAKERThen people will know that it's the good one. Anyway.

49:06SPEAKERSo refresh rate is a weird thing because for a long time,

49:10SPEAKERI think the perception at least for me was that it was for games.

49:14SPEAKERAnd then somebody pointed out that 120 Hertz is the least common multiple of 20

49:18SPEAKERand 30, 24 and 30,

49:20SPEAKER24 being the frame rate that movies are shot at and 30 being the TV

49:25SPEAKERshow frame rate for the most part, which,

49:27SPEAKERwhich means on 120 Hertz TV,

49:30SPEAKERyou can watch movies without requiring three, two pull down,

49:33SPEAKERwhich is where like every third frame gets an extra second on a, on a,

49:38SPEAKERon a 60 Hertz display or an extra draw, draw one extra time.

49:43SPEAKERYeah. You draw, you draw true two frames,

49:46SPEAKERone frame twice and two frames three times or something like, like the upshot is

49:51SPEAKERit's look, this is why motion smoothing exists is because the three,

49:56SPEAKERtwo pull down was bad and they just would start interpolating frames in between.

50:00SPEAKERSo anyway turn off motion smoothing and set your

50:05SPEAKERmovies to play at 120 Hertz,

50:06SPEAKERor if the TV supports it and does variable refresh rate,

50:09SPEAKERyou can just send it to run at 24 Hertz now for a lot of TVs as well,

50:12SPEAKERwhich also is fine. And then the,

50:17SPEAKERthe HDMI 2.1 stuff,

50:18SPEAKERlike I don't think I would buy a non HDMI 2.1 TV that supported HDR and higher

50:23SPEAKERrefresh rates.

50:24SPEAKERYeah. Again, though, like I said, that, that entry-level LG OLED,

50:28SPEAKERif all you were ever going to do is watch TV and movies,

50:30SPEAKERthat's never going to need more than 60 Hertz.

50:32SPEAKERSo you should be fine without it there because the

50:36SPEAKERupscaling the, the up refresh rate happens on the TV side.

50:41SPEAKERRight.

50:42SPEAKERThey take the 60 Hertz signal in and then scale it up on the scale or on the TV

50:45SPEAKERwould be my guess. I don't know.

50:46SPEAKERI should have looked this up. I think HDR works fine over 2.0.

50:51SPEAKERAt 60 Hertz. I believe it does.

50:53SPEAKERAt any rate, if you care about games, you should get a TV with HDMI 2.1.

50:57SPEAKERAbsolutely. Cause that's where, that's where things are going. Actually.

51:00SPEAKERSome of the TVs like this LG does not,

51:02SPEAKERbut the newer Hisense goes up to 144 Hertz actually.

51:05SPEAKERAnd the TV makers seem more conscious of the fact that people are plugging PCs

51:09SPEAKERinto the, into TVs more often now.

51:11SPEAKEROkay. So HDMI 2.0 supports

51:15SPEAKER4k 60, usually over only one HDMI port.

51:20SPEAKERIn order to get HDR and 4k 60,

51:24SPEAKERyou need HDMI 2.0 a,

51:26SPEAKERwhich I would assume that HDMI to LG TV probably supports.

51:30SPEAKERI would assume it's the newest version of 2.0,

51:32SPEAKERwhich to further subdivide the complications here.

51:36SPEAKERYeah. HDMI 2.0 B adds support for the HLG,

51:42SPEAKERHDR format and, and also same,

51:46SPEAKERsame speeds. I believe.

51:48SPEAKERGot it. So should we talk about refresh features in HDMI 2.1?

51:53SPEAKERBecause there are some extra features there that are.

51:55SPEAKERYeah. This is, this is a, these are real quality of life things,

51:58SPEAKERI think for the most part.

51:59SPEAKERYeah. So, so there's high refresh, like you said, it goes up to 120 Hertz by spec.

52:03SPEAKERAlthough, like I mentioned,

52:04SPEAKERsome TVs are now starting to ship with higher refreshes even than that.

52:08SPEAKERI think variable refresh is more important than the high refresh.

52:11SPEAKERYes. So, so within the, within the HDMI 2.1 there is variable refresh rate,

52:16SPEAKERwhich you know, as G-Sync and FreeSync generally on PC monitors,

52:20SPEAKERit's the same basic idea of the display refresh can adjust dynamically along

52:24SPEAKERwith the frame rate that it's getting.

52:26SPEAKERWhich means it just displays a frame when there's a frame basically, right?

52:29SPEAKERRight. Yeah. Right. Which helps with perceptions of smoothness and stuff like

52:32SPEAKERthat. Another,

52:34SPEAKERanother big feature to look for is auto low latency mode, which will the TV will

52:38SPEAKERthrow. My understanding is like the TV, the receiver, everything in the chain,

52:42SPEAKERfrom the console on up will throw itself into its lowest latency possible mode.

52:47SPEAKERIt'll disable, disable all the, like, you know,

52:49SPEAKERcinema mode or things that have post-processing on them that add latency into

52:52SPEAKERlatency. So this is like when you flip on game mode. Yes. It's just kind of,

52:56SPEAKERit's kind of the idea is kind of like everything puts itself into auto game mode

53:00SPEAKERwhen it detects.

53:01SPEAKERDoes it detect the,

53:03SPEAKERcause they can detect the manufacturer of the things that's plugged in.

53:06SPEAKERSo like when you plug an Xbox in, does it just know?

53:09SPEAKERI don't know.

53:10SPEAKERI haven't used the setup enough to be able to speak to a lot of the nuances like

53:13SPEAKERthat yet. I can tell you things like,

53:16SPEAKERlike Dolby vision will activate when I launched, like,

53:19SPEAKERlike I have an Xbox series S here with me.

53:21SPEAKERI like when I launched Ori and will the wisps or something or hitman three or

53:25SPEAKERsomething like it'll, it'll,

53:26SPEAKERit'll black out for just a second and then come back up and a little HDR,

53:29SPEAKERDolby vision icon will pop in the top corner.

53:32SPEAKERSo it definitely can auto detect stuff like HDR and do it. Yeah, that makes sense.

53:36SPEAKERI think some of that is also TV dependent. Like this TV has,

53:39SPEAKERwhat they call a game optimizer on it,

53:41SPEAKERwhere you can tell it to do certain things when it detects, you know,

53:44SPEAKERa LLM VRR and stuff like that. Okay.

53:48SPEAKERThere's a couple other features that I had never heard of until I was researching

53:51SPEAKERall this stuff and seeing mostly what wasn't supported on specs lists.

53:56SPEAKERLike I saw, for example,

53:58SPEAKERquick media switching is another HDMI 2.1 feature that was not supported on the

54:03SPEAKERreceiver. We ended up getting, what that is, is that it can,

54:08SPEAKERit can change the frame rate without blacking out. You know how,

54:10SPEAKERevery time anything ever changes video modes, since the history of video modes,

54:14SPEAKERthe screen will just black out for like three or four seconds reset your

54:17SPEAKERelectron gun. Yes, exactly. Right.

54:20SPEAKERSo this is a feature of the issue.

54:21SPEAKERMy spec now it seems like it from what I read on the site and on the issue,

54:25SPEAKERmy site and the spec, it only works between 24 and 60 Hertz.

54:29SPEAKERThis does not go up into the higher refresh range. That seems right.

54:33SPEAKERBut those are the three common like viewable content frame rates, right?

54:37SPEAKERBefore you get into games, it's 24 frames for movies, 30 and 60 for TV generally.

54:41SPEAKERAnd as long as the resolution doesn't change,

54:44SPEAKERif all of your devices support this quick media switching feature,

54:47SPEAKERit can automatically just change the frame rate to different content without

54:50SPEAKERblacking out. It's just seamless. So that's, that's,

54:54SPEAKERthat's a neat little convenience thing. But again,

54:56SPEAKERthe receiver we got was too low end to support that. So,

55:01SPEAKERthere's also a quick frame transport, which I'm guessing most things support,

55:04SPEAKERwhich just minimizes the amount of timeframes are being transported across the

55:08SPEAKERinterface. Like they, they say flat out in the spec, like, Hey,

55:12SPEAKERwe can't account for any extra latency in individual manufacturers circuitry in

55:16SPEAKERtheir implementations. But as far as we're concerned,

55:20SPEAKERthis is as low latency as we can make it. And, and even,

55:24SPEAKEReven the low end receiver we bought did support that.

55:27SPEAKERSo I'm guessing that's pretty widespread.

55:28SPEAKERAnd do you turn this stuff on per port in the TV?

55:31SPEAKERInterface?

55:32SPEAKERNot like that quick train frame transport. I think that's just on at all times.

55:35SPEAKEROkay. Like I said, I had to go into the we'll get to it or should we just get

55:40SPEAKERinto it? Can we just talk about some of those?

55:41SPEAKERShould we wrap with some of my like basic?

55:44SPEAKERI'm going to turn my chair around backwards and lean up against the headrest.

55:47SPEAKERYes. I showed,

55:50SPEAKERI showed my parents an episode of Star Trek,

55:51SPEAKERthe next generation last night on they were very impressed with the TV.

55:56SPEAKERWhich episodes you show them?

55:58SPEAKERThe one with Scotty. Okay. My dad's a big Scotty fan. So anyway,

56:03SPEAKERspeaking of speaking of the Riker maneuver and afterschool

56:08SPEAKERspecials anyway. Excuse me. Yeah.

56:12SPEAKERLike there have been some weird ups and downs in this,

56:14SPEAKERlike you asked about settings. If you have to go in and manually enable stuff,

56:17SPEAKERI wouldn't have thought that, but as one rant, well, okay.

56:22SPEAKERLet me get, let me get to that in a minute.

56:23SPEAKERLet me talk about the receiver stuff first. Yeah.

56:26SPEAKERAnd why they had to go buy a new receiver, which made me very angry.

56:29SPEAKERSo they have been, they, their TV is like 12, 13 years old.

56:32SPEAKERTheir receiver was about 20 years old. Um, but it's been working fine.

56:36SPEAKERDigital, digital 5.1 receiver era. Is that what we're talking about?

56:41SPEAKERIt did not have video inputs on it. That's how old it is.

56:44SPEAKERLike it was an audio only receiver.

56:47SPEAKERIt makes sense. Cause like if I didn't have to plug in a bunch of consoles and,

56:52SPEAKERand there was a period of time when I had 12 devices plugged into my TV or

56:55SPEAKERsomething ridiculous. Cause we were testing streaming boxes.

56:57SPEAKERI could have made made do with a console and an Apple TV port on my TV for a

57:01SPEAKERreally long time. And just use the ports in the back of the TV.

57:03SPEAKERThat's exactly what they've been doing.

57:05SPEAKERAnd they had been using the optical out on their old TV into their old receiver

57:08SPEAKERand that worked fine to get, to get sound to the nice toss link. Yes, exactly.

57:13SPEAKERSo all TVs still ship with optical ports. And I was like, well, whatever,

57:17SPEAKERlike this new TV will have an optical port. We'll just drop it right in,

57:20SPEAKERplug the optical into the receiver and they'll be fine. Nope. Let me guess.

57:26SPEAKERIs that a, is that a feature that nobody uses?

57:28SPEAKERSo they probably have lightly tested it and it was kind of shitty.

57:31SPEAKERThis is pretty much exactly where it ended up.

57:33SPEAKERI spent two days trying to figure out why the optical and I dragged the old TV

57:37SPEAKERback over to confirm that it was still working. Everything was fine.

57:40SPEAKERIt just did not work on the new TV. Didn't work at all. Not at all. No audio,

57:44SPEAKERno, nothing, absolutely nothing. I'd Googled around a bunch.

57:48SPEAKERApparently LG's optical audio out is absolute garbage.

57:50SPEAKERLike there are people everywhere complaining that especially high end DAX and

57:55SPEAKERhigh end amps. I mean, we're talking, getting into the audio file world,

57:58SPEAKERbut there's tons of people out there saying like it doesn't work at all,

58:01SPEAKERor it drops out constantly.

58:02SPEAKERAnd people have straight up done signal tests on it and basically have just

58:06SPEAKERdetermined that LG's implementation of optical audio out is, is shit.

58:11SPEAKERAnd I was very mad that something that should work on paper because, Hey,

58:15SPEAKERlike these are standard connectors. These are standard processes, right?

58:19SPEAKERLike if you have it, it should work. Right. But it just didn't.

58:22SPEAKERIt's it's fascinating because I had the exact same experience with my Panasonic

58:25SPEAKERTV 12 years ago that resulted in the exact,

58:28SPEAKERlike I literally trashed my old receiver and I bought a new receiver because I

58:31SPEAKERhad the same exact problem. Then now I should admit,

58:34SPEAKERin addition to being 20 years old,

58:35SPEAKERthe screen on that receiver also stopped working some years ago.

58:40SPEAKERSo you were doing it blind. So we're doing it blind. Oh boy.

58:43SPEAKERBut all they needed to do is drive two speakers, right?

58:46SPEAKERLike they're not using it for anything elaborate, elaborate down here.

58:50SPEAKERYou know, like whatever it should have worked on paper, it should have worked,

58:53SPEAKERbut like, you know, when it was like, okay,

58:56SPEAKERwe probably have to buy a new receiver or take this TV back one or the other.

59:00SPEAKERThey were all first of all,

59:02SPEAKERboxing this TV back up and getting it back over there seemed like such a

59:07SPEAKERnightmare that was not appealing. The other thing, the other thing was like, Hey,

59:10SPEAKERokay, well then we're going to, we'll get a low end receiver.

59:13SPEAKERAt least the screen will work now.

59:15SPEAKERThey tasted the forbidden fruit of the HDR OLED by that point.

59:18SPEAKERAnd they weren't, that thing wasn't going back.

59:20SPEAKERThat absolutely was a factor.

59:22SPEAKERThey had already seen what it looked like at that point.

59:24SPEAKERI mean, so the nice thing is on the new one,

59:26SPEAKERyou can just use the ARC audio return and that was, that was the amusing thing.

59:31SPEAKERWe, so we ended up getting a, a, a Denon. There's a, there's a specific Denon.

59:34SPEAKERIt's the budget pick on wire cutter. If you want to go look it up,

59:37SPEAKERI don't have the model number. And actually I do, if you really want to know,

59:41SPEAKERAVR S five 70 BT it's 300 bucks.

59:44SPEAKERUm, 300 bucks is a low end receiver these days. Yes, unfortunately. So I mean,

59:49SPEAKERI originally, I was like, you know,

59:50SPEAKERall they need is a stereo receiver with optical in,

59:52SPEAKERalthough that probably doesn't even exist because why would you need optical on

59:55SPEAKERa two channel only weirdos point is I started out looking at like, you know,

1:00:00SPEAKERmaybe they just need a little amp with optical on it,

1:00:02SPEAKERlike some kind of little thing,

1:00:03SPEAKERbut like all those boxes I could find for that specific bespoke purpose for like

1:00:08SPEAKERthree times the cost of this receiver and lower,

1:00:11SPEAKERlike lower end receivers really don't exist below like 200 bucks.

1:00:16SPEAKERAnd those didn't have what we needed here.

1:00:19SPEAKERSo like this is about as cheap as it gets in AV receivers these days.

1:00:22SPEAKERThe nice thing though, discovering this is that like, do you do this occasionally?

1:00:27SPEAKERWell, you said you thought about a TV upgrade before,

1:00:29SPEAKERlike occasionally you just kind of get the itch and you go like Google around

1:00:32SPEAKERand research what's out there a little bit and then end up not buying anything,

1:00:34SPEAKERbut at least, you know, what's there.

1:00:36SPEAKERThe, the, the last time that happened,

1:00:37SPEAKERI literally was in the space where I had to spend like $3,000 to get the H enough

1:00:41SPEAKERHDMI ports to plug all my stuff in that were the right spec. And I was like,

1:00:45SPEAKERI'm just going to wait until these are better.

1:00:46SPEAKERThat's exactly what I was going to say.

1:00:47SPEAKERThe last time I Googled HDMI 2.1 receivers was three, four,

1:00:51SPEAKERmaybe five years ago.

1:00:52SPEAKERYeah. You had like one HDMI 2.1 port on your receiver and one on the TV.

1:00:56SPEAKERAnd that was probably, and almost certainly those would have to connect each

1:00:59SPEAKERother. So you were hosed.

1:01:01SPEAKERSo they were much more limited. They were astronomically expensive.

1:01:04SPEAKERThey were like three, four, they were, they were like a thousand dollars.

1:01:07SPEAKERThe early ones had a lot of teething pains,

1:01:09SPEAKERlike Yamaha had to replace the HDMI board in one of their models because it was

1:01:13SPEAKERlike buggy out the door. It was just a mess, you know? So like finding this,

1:01:18SPEAKERthis Denon has four HDMI, fully compliant,

1:01:21SPEAKERHDMI 2.1 ports on it does all the audio stuff you need. Like it's pretty,

1:01:25SPEAKERno frills, but like that's, that's, that's a, as receivers go,

1:01:29SPEAKERthat's a pretty reasonable price. So it's nice.

1:01:32SPEAKERIt's nice to know that stuff has gotten cheaper and better and,

1:01:35SPEAKERand more fully featured. But that whole audio thing, I was just so.

1:01:41SPEAKERSo then the, the, the thing about the audio also is you,

1:01:45SPEAKERyou have to be thoughtful.

1:01:48SPEAKERIf your receiver supports an audio spec, but your TV doesn't,

1:01:52SPEAKERthen the thing that you want to like LG TV is used to not support DTS.

1:01:56SPEAKERSo if you wanted to use DTS signals and your receiver supported DTS,

1:01:59SPEAKERthose devices had to be plugged into the TV and then the receiver would just suck

1:02:03SPEAKERout the audio and pass on the video, which is how they're doing it now here.

1:02:07SPEAKERYeah. But it wouldn't go back over ARC, which was, which has been a,

1:02:10SPEAKERlike that's a problem on Panasonic for years as well.

1:02:13SPEAKERYeah. I forgot to mention that like format wars are totally a thing. You know,

1:02:16SPEAKERwe talked about Samsung doesn't do Dolby, Dolby vision LG until this year's

1:02:21SPEAKERmodel does, but this old model that they bought LG did not support DTS audio

1:02:26SPEAKERuntil this year. So, so there's still,

1:02:29SPEAKERthere are still standards that you're going to find just randomly not supported

1:02:32SPEAKERon different models of things.

1:02:34SPEAKERYeah. It's it's the other thing I found is that

1:02:39SPEAKERlike setting,

1:02:40SPEAKERif you're bringing other devices in then having old settings on them can cause

1:02:45SPEAKERreal problems. Like for example, Plex has a setting that's like, Hey,

1:02:49SPEAKERI don't care about HDR, which makes sense on my TV at home.

1:02:52SPEAKERAnd when I carry my Apple TV down South for the month,

1:02:54SPEAKERcause it's easier to do that than to log everything in and out on somebody else's

1:02:58SPEAKERTV. I just, it was just not,

1:03:02SPEAKERthe TV was thinking it was getting HDR displays cause the Plex was like, yo,

1:03:06SPEAKERthis is an HDR signal.

1:03:07SPEAKERAnd then it was also filtering the HDR signals down to SDR tone

1:03:11SPEAKERmapping on the fly. And it, anyway, it didn't work right.

1:03:16SPEAKERAnd it took me forever to figure out what it was and it was because there was

1:03:19SPEAKERsome weird setting that was stuck someplace. Yeah.

1:03:22SPEAKERYeah. So to answer your question from a few minutes ago about settings,

1:03:26SPEAKERthat was something I had to dig into that receiver and find after we got it home

1:03:29SPEAKERand set it up. This Series S that I have here, the Xbox is very good.

1:03:33SPEAKERI don't know how the, I don't know why the PlayStation five here,

1:03:35SPEAKERso I can't test,

1:03:36SPEAKERbut the Xbox is very good about just this like big summary screen that is

1:03:41SPEAKERjust a bunch of green check marks and red X's that says,

1:03:44SPEAKERhere's what your TV supports right now. Here's what it doesn't.

1:03:46SPEAKERYeah. And it can be in PlayStation both do that. Okay. Okay. That's yeah.

1:03:50SPEAKERAnd I'm not sure if that's standard, but they kept telling me that this,

1:03:53SPEAKERthis setup did not support 4k 120. And I was like, that doesn't make sense.

1:03:58SPEAKERShould you got bad cable in that pipe, Brad needed a 16 K cable. Yes.

1:04:02SPEAKERSo like I mentioned, I actually mentioned this earlier.

1:04:04SPEAKERThat's when I had to go into pretty deep into the Denon settings and find

1:04:08SPEAKERimprobably found a category of setting that was just like input mode or

1:04:12SPEAKERsomething. And again, they were labeled as like 4k, 4k enhanced, 8k enhanced,

1:04:18SPEAKERbut I don't know why they wouldn't just default the port to the

1:04:23SPEAKERbest possible or to what it's getting or whatever. I had to manually go tell it,

1:04:27SPEAKERHey, put this in HTMI 2.1 mode. So this Xbox can do what it does.

1:04:31SPEAKERYeah. That's, that's weird.

1:04:32SPEAKERYou'd think that like part of the whole deal of this is they're supposed to talk

1:04:35SPEAKERto each other and say, okay, here's what I do. Here's what I do.

1:04:37SPEAKERAnd then everybody, everything's cool. Yeah. It was odd.

1:04:42SPEAKERI I'm I'm like having to know about like the,

1:04:46SPEAKERthe bummer about this is it's like,

1:04:49SPEAKERit's like shipping TVs with motion smoothing on, right?

1:04:52SPEAKERLike if you don't know to go look for this stuff,

1:04:54SPEAKERyou're going to plug in your stuff that supports the good thing.

1:04:57SPEAKERAnd you're going to get the less good thing out. It's probably, I mean,

1:05:00SPEAKERin reality for most people,

1:05:02SPEAKERit's probably still better than the TV that they had before and the way it was

1:05:05SPEAKERall hooked up before. But theoretically,

1:05:08SPEAKERwe shouldn't have to think about this shit. Yes. You would think like,

1:05:12SPEAKERI kind of miss the whole let's plug in three RCA cables to get our component

1:05:17SPEAKERanalog video into the thing. Cause that in retrospect seems pretty easy.

1:05:22SPEAKERYes, it sure does. Yeah. Sure enough,

1:05:24SPEAKERthis TV out of the box had all the motion smoothing turned on.

1:05:27SPEAKERIt was defaulted to the picture mode. That's like the super over bright,

1:05:31SPEAKERoversaturated, really garish looking one, you know? Yeah.

1:05:35SPEAKERI just went through the RTINGS recommended settings for this thing and put it,

1:05:38SPEAKERput everything down to like, here's the,

1:05:40SPEAKERhere's the most accurate to the source material settings you can use.

1:05:43SPEAKERYeah. I still looks amazing. I do that every time we get,

1:05:46SPEAKERwe're in somebody's house. So I'm a bad person. Yeah. Well, this is,

1:05:51SPEAKERthis is their family. I feel like, I feel like I can,

1:05:55SPEAKERI can maybe make some recommendations about how the TV should look well with the

1:06:00SPEAKERmotion smoothing stuff. It's one of those things. It's like, if you're,

1:06:04SPEAKERif you're used to it, it gets, it looks good. Your brain thinks it looks good.

1:06:08SPEAKERRight. It's, it's like, if you go back and watch MPEG two video now,

1:06:12SPEAKERyou're like, oh man, that is really blocky and janky. I, I,

1:06:15SPEAKERbut at the time your brain got pretty good at filtering out those blocks.

1:06:19SPEAKERSame way we filter out H two six four compression and eventually we'll filter

1:06:22SPEAKERout AB one compression artifacts and all that stuff. It's, it's, um,

1:06:27SPEAKERyou get used to the motion smoothing and you're like, oh man,

1:06:29SPEAKERI really like everything looking like an Australian soap opera.

1:06:32SPEAKERThat's exactly what I was hoping for. But Brad,

1:06:36SPEAKERI'm glad so every everybody's good. Now you, you got some women's world cup on,

1:06:41SPEAKERwhat do you, what do you want? What was the first thing they fired up on the new

1:06:43SPEAKERTV?

1:06:44SPEAKERThere will be, there will be some NASCAR on this, this TV for sure.

1:06:48SPEAKERThat's like that. Look there,

1:06:49SPEAKERthat could benefit from a better refresh rate and higher dynamic range.

1:06:52SPEAKERThat sounds great.

1:06:53SPEAKERThat's, that's the sporting events of choice here. Okay. Okay. Well,

1:06:58SPEAKERthey watch a ton of movies and TV though. Like they're like, they are big,

1:07:01SPEAKERthey're big Apple TV plus and Netflix fans.

1:07:04SPEAKERAnd they got that foundation going. You're a problem. Not so much. No,

1:07:08SPEAKERthey, they, they had seen like half the stuff on Apple ad. Oh,

1:07:12SPEAKERlike should mention real quick.

1:07:13SPEAKERNetflix still has a surcharge for 4k HDR. Everybody does.

1:07:17SPEAKERI know Apple TV plus does not. Is that, is that the outlier?

1:07:20SPEAKERI actually don't know.

1:07:21SPEAKERI think that they are cause, uh, well,

1:07:23SPEAKERso I get HBO max free with my AT&T cable subscription due to corporate mergers

1:07:28SPEAKERfive years ago. Um, and I don't have to pay extra for 4k for that,

1:07:32SPEAKERbut everything else, as soon as I plugged into the 4k down there for KTV down,

1:07:35SPEAKERthere was like, Hey man, if you want to get the most out of your TV,

1:07:38SPEAKERyou should give us $10 a month more. I was like, I'm probably good. Yes.

1:07:41SPEAKERNetflix definitely did that,

1:07:42SPEAKERbut it was a pleasant surprise to find that they're existing Apple TV plus

1:07:45SPEAKERsubscription. We could just watch all the stuff in the good quality.

1:07:48SPEAKERAnd that was quite good to actually, there have been,

1:07:52SPEAKERthere have been numerous fairly slack jawed comments around here the last couple

1:07:56SPEAKERof three days about what a different experience it is watching this thing than

1:08:00SPEAKERwhat they had before. You got to load up. The planet earth is good. Uh huh.

1:08:05SPEAKERUm, Thor Ragnarok, delightful on the HDR.

1:08:09SPEAKERSure. I could see that. Yeah. I should probably go rent some stuff. I mean that,

1:08:12SPEAKERthat gets into the whole conversation out of scope for this episode about like,

1:08:16SPEAKERwhat are the digital rentals like in terms of things like bit rate, you know,

1:08:19SPEAKERlike is there actually a noticeable difference between say like an iTunes rental

1:08:24SPEAKERof a 4k Dolby vision thing versus the UHD of it? I don't know.

1:08:27SPEAKERSo the last time I looked at this, it was a long time ago. Um,

1:08:31SPEAKERthe Apple TV ones were dramatically better than like Amazon and, uh,

1:08:37SPEAKERyeah, they seem to care.

1:08:41SPEAKERYeah. Yes. There's a couple of movies we're going to rent while I'm here.

1:08:44SPEAKERAnd we're definitely going to, I'm definitely going to get those from Apple.

1:08:47SPEAKERYeah. Um, it's, it's, uh, the whole,

1:08:51SPEAKERthat whole thing is tricky cause like, and of course if you really care about

1:08:54SPEAKERthat stuff,

1:08:54SPEAKERthen the discs are going to be an infinitely higher bit rate than the streams,

1:08:57SPEAKEReven the good streams. So, um, but everything's also AV ones coming in.

1:09:02SPEAKERThat changes the whole thing again. So Hey, just get ready for a whole new,

1:09:06SPEAKERa whole new round of standards. Yep. Let's do it. Uh, yeah. Yeah. It's, it's,

1:09:11SPEAKERit's been a weird experience. There's definitely some ups and downs.

1:09:14SPEAKERTVs may be too smart for their own good these days. I'm not sure. Uh,

1:09:17SPEAKERcurrently currently wrestling with an issue where the C2 just powers itself off

1:09:21SPEAKERrandomly. I have not quite figured out yet.

1:09:26SPEAKERThat's weird. Which is a little unsettling.

1:09:28SPEAKERHave, um, like, is this going to push you to get a new TV?

1:09:31SPEAKERAre you still in the holding pattern? No, I'm still in a holding pattern.

1:09:34SPEAKERIt's going to be very hard to go home though. And the plasma still looks good,

1:09:38SPEAKERbut I mean.

1:09:39SPEAKERYou use the TV to play games and stuff, right? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Um,

1:09:44SPEAKERwhich like whatever I, some people complain, they're like, Oh,

1:09:47SPEAKERwhy is it not playing games on modern TV?

1:09:49SPEAKERBut like I think there's value in seeing how things look on older technology

1:09:53SPEAKERbecause there are tons of people still out there using it.

1:09:55SPEAKERWell, in a lot of what I play, like if I, if I, I play most console games on the,

1:09:59SPEAKERon the, on my monitors in the office these days. So yeah.

1:10:03SPEAKERI'm glad we did it though. Like they, they watch,

1:10:06SPEAKERthey watch a TV show just about every night.

1:10:08SPEAKERI'm actually like shocked when I come out here,

1:10:09SPEAKERhow much they are caught up on like everything. That's, that's fascinating.

1:10:13SPEAKERCause like my parents, like there's no, there's no,

1:10:18SPEAKERthey, they, the TV they watch is fine with whatever they could,

1:10:22SPEAKERthey could watch on their phone if it was big enough. Sure. Sure. But I mean,

1:10:25SPEAKERjust in terms of the amount they're watching, like I'm kind of sure they,

1:10:27SPEAKERthey have streaming services that I've never heard of.

1:10:29SPEAKERThey have something called Brit box, which I'm not. Oh yeah.

1:10:33SPEAKERThat's the place to get it. Yeah. Stuff like that. Um, anyway,

1:10:38SPEAKERpoint is they watch a lot of television in the evenings and, and,

1:10:42SPEAKERand I think they are going to enjoy this quite a bit.

1:10:44SPEAKERThey have seemed extremely pleased with it so far. Oh, that's good. Oh, I know.

1:10:47SPEAKERI had one last question for you. Uh, just out of curiosity,

1:10:50SPEAKERwhen you went back to get the receiver, why did you, why, why does,

1:10:52SPEAKERwhy the new receiver is to the soundbar?

1:10:55SPEAKERIt seems like the market as a whole has gone in the soundbar direction and away

1:10:58SPEAKERfrom the receiver direction way. They already have speakers,

1:11:01SPEAKERlike speakers already here and set up and they're not like,

1:11:05SPEAKERlike offended by the big speakers and all that stuff. No, no, no.

1:11:07SPEAKERThey've had them for ages. They were, they bought them. Actually.

1:11:11SPEAKERThey they're committed to the big speaker lifestyle. I don't know.

1:11:14SPEAKERMaybe we should, I've never used a soundbar personally. Um, my,

1:11:17SPEAKERmy understanding is full-size speakers are still better. I mean,

1:11:20SPEAKERthat kind of makes sense to me when you look at the amount of space that there

1:11:23SPEAKERis for cones in those things. Granted,

1:11:25SPEAKERthey have probably a lot of cones in them now. Well, you're changing,

1:11:28SPEAKERyou're changing raw power for computation and a little bit of power, right?

1:11:32SPEAKERYeah. Yeah.

1:11:33SPEAKERI always assumed that there was some trade off there because they are,

1:11:36SPEAKERthey are smaller and that's part of the advantage, right?

1:11:38SPEAKERIs that they don't take up a bunch of room on your floor. Yeah, that's exactly it.

1:11:42SPEAKERBut, but mainly they already have the speakers in place, you know,

1:11:45SPEAKERso it was easier to just, that makes sense.

1:11:48SPEAKERI mean receiver and continue using the speakers. There you go. Um, well,

1:11:52SPEAKERthank you for the update on your, uh, like this has been a fascinating journey.

1:11:57SPEAKERI'm glad, glad you got to spend some time with it. And of course,

1:12:00SPEAKERthank you also to our patrons. Uh, thank you, patrons. Thank you, patrons. Uh,

1:12:04SPEAKERwithout you all, we wouldn't be here. This is a,

1:12:06SPEAKERof course a 100% listener supported show.

1:12:09SPEAKERSo if you would like to find out how to support Brad and Wilma to tech bod and

1:12:12SPEAKERkeep the show going, you can go to patreon.com/tech bod. Again,

1:12:16SPEAKERthat's patreon.com/tech pod and for five bucks a month to get access to the

1:12:21SPEAKERmonthly patron episode, where we'll take questions. I got a, uh, uh,

1:12:24SPEAKERwe got a good one in today from somebody who had said, Hey, uh,

1:12:27SPEAKERyou guys recommended a board game that I really liked and my family's played a

1:12:30SPEAKERlot of, we would like to know more and I'm, I'm, I'm,

1:12:34SPEAKERwe're going to get into that next to next episode. Uh, but, uh, again,

1:12:38SPEAKERit's patreon.com/tech bod.

1:12:39SPEAKERYou also get access to the fabulous tech pod discord where we've made a big

1:12:43SPEAKERchange this morning. Brad, people are going to know when we recorded this. Now,

1:12:48SPEAKERwe switched over the this week's episode forum channel from a single

1:12:52SPEAKERchannel where all of the conversations about all of the episodes kind of

1:12:56SPEAKERintermingled a great big melange of, of feedback.

1:13:00SPEAKERAnd now we have a forum with individual threads,

1:13:06SPEAKERuh, for each channel.

1:13:07SPEAKERYes. I want to say that was a moderator suggestion. Is that right?

1:13:11SPEAKERI think actually Corvac, no, that was a suggestion. Okay.

1:13:16SPEAKERI was just gonna say, I don't, I don't know why we never thought of that before.

1:13:18SPEAKERThat is quite obviously the way to go. Good call. Good call on that one.

1:13:23SPEAKERI'm always hesitant to try new discord features because sometimes they abandon

1:13:27SPEAKERthem just when you get a, get happy with them. That is, that is a fair concern.

1:13:30SPEAKERBut, uh, but you're right. People, you know, people frequently in there,

1:13:33SPEAKERI see people saying like, Oh, I'm just catching up. This is,

1:13:35SPEAKERthis is, this is five episodes ago, but here's a comment, you know, now,

1:13:38SPEAKERnow they have a more dedicated place to do that. The other thing,

1:13:41SPEAKERnow that I see what is happening in there, I am delighted.

1:13:46SPEAKERPeople are just starting threads for random old episodes. Here's a,

1:13:50SPEAKERhere is a thread for episode 24, the Mad Max threshold.

1:13:54SPEAKERWell, so I think that's up. I think that's up now for, uh,

1:13:57SPEAKERclimate and flooding and yeah. Yeah. But you know,

1:14:01SPEAKERhere's one on the Twitter episode. Here's one, here's episode 40.

1:14:05SPEAKERThat's a, that's a patron app. Okay. Oh, you're right. You're right. So anyway,

1:14:10SPEAKERit's a nice little mishmash of episodes in there. Yeah.

1:14:13SPEAKERAnd if people have requests for specific forums,

1:14:14SPEAKERyou can hit somebody in thread club or one of us up and we'll create them.

1:14:18SPEAKERWe're trying to keep the number of posts in that section low,

1:14:21SPEAKERjust so the signal to noise is pretty good. Um, and I think, I think over like,

1:14:26SPEAKERwe're just going to see how it goes. This is an experiment.

1:14:27SPEAKERI already feel pretty good about it though. People seem to be enjoying it. Uh,

1:14:30SPEAKERso, uh, so that's, that's what's happened on the Patriot on the discord.

1:14:35SPEAKERIt's a patrion.com/tech pod. It's five bucks a month for the, for the,

1:14:39SPEAKERfor the discord and patron episode tier. And, uh,

1:14:42SPEAKERwe really appreciate the support, uh, especially from everybody,

1:14:46SPEAKERbut especially from our executive producer tier patrons,

1:14:48SPEAKERincluding Andrew Slosky, Bunny-Famed, Paddle Creek Games,

1:14:52SPEAKERMakers of Fractured Veil, David Allen, James Kamik, Joel Krauska,

1:14:55SPEAKERJordan Lippett, Just Wedge 3.0, Nick Johnston, Twinkie, Twinkle Twinkie,

1:15:00SPEAKERand Pantheon, Makers of the HS3 High Speed 3D Printer. Thank you all so much.

1:15:04SPEAKERWe appreciate you. Yes, we do. Um,

1:15:07SPEAKERand I guess it's going to do it for us this week. Yeah.

1:15:10SPEAKERWe will be back next week with another edition of Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.

1:15:13SPEAKERThanks for listening. We'll see you all then. Bye.