00:00SPEAKERWell, how many Switches do you think is too many Switches?
00:02SPEAKERThree is the precise number of too many Switches.
00:05SPEAKERThat would answer both immediate and precise in a way that makes it seem like you have experience.
00:09SPEAKEROkay. I like to buy digital games because I don't like having crap around the house.
00:13SPEAKERAnd I have a kid who, admittedly, very good about not losing stuff as a general rule,
00:18SPEAKERbut also having cartridges like it's 2023, man, I don't need cartridges.
00:22SPEAKERYes, I'm with you.
00:23SPEAKERChild, definitely too old to be putting cartridges in mouth, to be clear.
00:27SPEAKERYounger children, maybe not, but yeah.
00:28SPEAKERBut it's small. They're small cartridges. They're easy to lose.
00:32SPEAKERI don't want to have to keep the little boxes around.
00:33SPEAKERI don't want to have some stupid case that I paid too much for from Target or Amazon or something to put them all in.
00:38SPEAKERYou don't want to have to worry about whether you'll be able to play them on the next Switch or not,
00:41SPEAKERbecause that's a hot topic right now, is what the Switch 2's backwards compatibility is going to look like,
00:46SPEAKERand whether it'll even be able to accommodate that type of cartridge or not.
00:49SPEAKERLook, I'm confident that they will sell you the same games again
00:52SPEAKERfor the fifth or sixth time without hesitation.
00:55SPEAKERYou can set your watch by it.
00:57SPEAKERNone of these things are the actual problem I have.
00:59SPEAKERSo I don't know about your house, my house. We've been playing a little bit of Super Mario Wonder.
01:03SPEAKERI tried. I would like to. I tried to download it yesterday. We'll get to that. I was unable to download it.
01:07SPEAKERSo here's the problem.
01:09SPEAKERDuring the Animal Crossing craze of the early 2020s, everybody in our family ended up with a Switch.
01:14SPEAKERSo we could each have our own island and each have our own villagers and have our relationships with our own people.
01:18SPEAKERSo I could have Emmett and Gina could have the octopus and nightmare monster guy,
01:24SPEAKERand the kiddo could have the people, Agnes and her friends,
01:27SPEAKERand we didn't have to split them up between the houses available on our original shared island.
01:31SPEAKEROne island per Switch, possibly the worst decision or policy Nintendo has ever instituted.
01:35SPEAKERBut also, before we move on, pop quiz. Can you name all three of your islands from the top of the head?
01:40SPEAKERSmithville, Corgi Town, and I don't remember what Gina's island is.
01:46SPEAKERAlso, you couldn't visit other people's islands effectively if you were all on the same Switch,
01:50SPEAKERwhich meant going to birthday parties and stuff like that when we weren't leaving our house.
01:55SPEAKERAnd it seemed like $200 was a cheap price to pay for that privilege.
01:59SPEAKERFast forward a few years, we buy a lot of games digitally, and we've done the thing that
02:05SPEAKEReverybody recommended at the time, which is my daughter's Switch is the primary one,
02:08SPEAKERwhich means she can play all of the games that are on my account without being connected to
02:15SPEAKERthe internet. Often, if we're driving someplace, she'll be playing Switch in the back of the car,
02:19SPEAKERand she'll play Mario or something. Perfect. I can play whatever I want on my Switch,
02:23SPEAKERbecause I'm always logged into the internet when I play, unless I'm on a plane. In which case,
02:26SPEAKERI probably took the Steam Deck these days anyway, so it's not really an issue.
02:29SPEAKERMy wife, as the latecomer, is the one who gets really boned. Because if she wants to play games
02:36SPEAKERthat are on my account, she has to log in as me on her Switch, which has some save implications,
02:42SPEAKERespecially for newer games that use the cloud cross save thing. Or, we have to buy a second
02:47SPEAKERcopy of the game, or we have to buy the game on the cartridge, and then only one person can play
02:51SPEAKERat a time instead of maybe two people playing it at a time. So, it's fraught. Just to be clear,
02:57SPEAKERit's a problem because it's a handheld. But also, everybody that's in the Switch family and on the
03:04SPEAKERsame IP address should just be able to play the goddamn games. That's how it works on the Xbox,
03:09SPEAKERthat's how it works on the PS5. If you have one master Xbox that's hooked into the living room,
03:14SPEAKERand all of the others can play as long as the account is there and it's logged in.
03:18SPEAKERTo be clear, you're not arguing all three at the same time? The same game, correct?
03:24SPEAKEROkay. Most of the Switch games that we would want to play all at the same time are probably
03:29SPEAKERmultiplayer games. What I'm saying is that the comp with the other platforms, with Xbox,
03:34SPEAKERwhich is where I play multiplayer stuff mostly, when we have had three Xboxes in the house,
03:40SPEAKERas long as you pay for Xbox Live Gold, give them their blood money, and they're all connected to
03:48SPEAKERthe network. Everyone can play as long as the account that's logged in, as long as they're
03:52SPEAKERan account on the machine that owns the game. On the same machine?
03:57SPEAKEROn the same machine.
03:58SPEAKERThat's fair. Yeah, absolutely.
03:59SPEAKERSo, if my account is on my daughter's Switch and my wife's Switch, they should be able to play the
04:04SPEAKERgame. When my wife tries to play Super Mario Wonder on her Switch with her account, it's like, "Yo,
04:08SPEAKERyou don't own this game. Get fucked." It's a bad system.
04:12SPEAKERAs we all know, that is Nintendo's official policy, get fucked.
04:15SPEAKERYeah, yeah. Anyway, man, I don't know.
04:19SPEAKERAre you saying it's time for iCloud-style family accounts to come to the Switch,
04:23SPEAKERor perhaps to all video game consoles?
04:25SPEAKERThey're already there on the other platforms, is the thing. I had multiple 360s in the house.
04:31SPEAKERI think I only ever had one Xbox One, but we also had multiple PS4s in the house. The PS4,
04:36SPEAKERyou don't have to worry about it. It just worked. Everybody could play their own stuff.
04:41SPEAKERMy daughter never bought a copy of Fall Guys, played hours and hours and hours of
04:45SPEAKERFall Guys on the PS4. I realize that this is a first-worldly problem, but also it is a handheld.
04:54SPEAKERThe thing's been out for a long time, and they sold them cheap enough that everybody has one
04:58SPEAKERat this point, I think, that ever wanted one. I don't know.
05:04SPEAKERIt's almost a seven-year-old thing.
05:05SPEAKERIt is almost a seven-year-old thing.
05:07SPEAKERSeven years. Well, hey, there's a new platform coming out next year. It's a whole new opportunity
05:10SPEAKERfor them to get this right.
05:12SPEAKERI'm sure it's going to be worse in some new and novel way.
05:15SPEAKEROr, as Doug Bowser is so fond of reminding the public and investors recently,
05:19SPEAKERthey are actually bringing the exact same account system over to the new platform.
05:23SPEAKERGod, I forgot they put some guy named Bowser in charge of Nintendo.
05:26SPEAKERThat for the first time, they are keeping an account system across two consoles,
05:29SPEAKERso maybe absolutely nothing will change.
05:33SPEAKERI guess that's better than it getting worse. I'm sure they'll mess it up somehow.
05:38SPEAKERThere's always room for regressions. Well, let me tell you...
05:42SPEAKERWhat's going on with you? How are you in wonder? Are you finding it good?
05:44SPEAKERYou want to talk about having fun with a Nintendo Switch.
05:47SPEAKERHave you ever had an SD card die in one of those things?
05:50SPEAKERNot in a Switch.
05:51SPEAKERSD cards are of the devil. Am I wrong in this? The SD cards are the storage medium of Satan?
05:59SPEAKERI'm going to disagree with you on this one, Brad. I find SD cards to be fairly reliable and robust,
06:04SPEAKERand I've only ever had one fail when I poured a coffee on it.
06:07SPEAKERI feel like you are lying.
06:09SPEAKERNo.
06:09SPEAKERI feel like you were trolling me.
06:12SPEAKERI'm not. This isn't a bit. Are micro SD cards too small? Probably. Like, physically.
06:22SPEAKERIs the medium generally pretty real? I can count the number of failures I've had with
06:26SPEAKERSD cards on one hand, and literally it was because I put it on a table and then poured
06:30SPEAKERcoffee on it by accident.
06:32SPEAKERSure. I also have not had that many. I've had like two or three of them fail probably ever.
06:37SPEAKERBut I mean, you know, like I run log to RAM on all of my Raspberry Pis, so that helps for sure.
06:41SPEAKERBut anyway, I have a 400 gig, like a decent SanDisk. It's like a U1 class SanDisk. I've
06:48SPEAKERhad it for like four years.
06:49SPEAKERIs it a U1 app class? Is that the one that's platooned for rights?
06:52SPEAKERDude, I probably still got the browser tab open. I spent way too long on Kingston's site
06:57SPEAKERtoday looking at different types of SD card classes because I'm buying a new SD card for my Switch.
07:01SPEAKERI bought the one with Luigi on it.
07:03SPEAKERThat's the bit. You know what? That's how you know that it's quality.
07:05SPEAKERYeah.
07:06SPEAKEROf course, Luigi is who they put on the best SD card. Anyway, SD cards fail. Actually, I could
07:13SPEAKEReven walk that back a tier and say storage failing is maybe one of the worst ways for
07:18SPEAKERhardware to fail or one of the worst types of hardware to fail.
07:20SPEAKERYeah, I'll agree with that 100%.
07:21SPEAKERBecause the ways that things act when storage is going bad are so baffling and terrifying.
07:27SPEAKERI thought my Switch was dying rapidly on Friday when Mario Wonder came out and I went to try
07:32SPEAKERto download it. But everything I tried to do on it was taking like 30 minutes long,
07:37SPEAKERincluding like a system updates and a reboot. And at one point it tried to load the home screen in
07:44SPEAKERand all it loaded in was the gray background, the button prompts at the bottom and a little
07:47SPEAKERthrobber in the middle. And sat like that for 15 or 20 minutes, no games loading in, no nothing.
07:53SPEAKERIt finally loaded in empty tiles for all the games, but it still could never load all the art in.
07:58SPEAKERAnd that was just because the SD card was cocky.
08:01SPEAKERAfter like an hour of trying to troubleshoot stuff. And again, that was like, like I said,
08:04SPEAKERthere was a system update that took like 30 minutes. I almost hard powered it off in the
08:08SPEAKERmiddle of that system update because for the five people who don't have Switches out there,
08:12SPEAKERsystem updates on the Switch literally take like 15 seconds.
08:15SPEAKERIt's faster than rebooting sometimes it feels like.
08:18SPEAKERLike, so as soon as a system update on the Switch takes longer than like a minute, you're like,
08:21SPEAKERokay, something's bad wrong here. And once it got to about 15 or 20 minutes, I was like,
08:26SPEAKERI guess I have to either let the battery die or just hard power this thing off. But it's probably
08:31SPEAKERa good thing I did not hard shut it off in the middle of the update.
08:32SPEAKERHard shutting it off would have been bad, I think.
08:34SPEAKERI might actually have bricked it in that case, but I left it for about 45 minutes.
08:38SPEAKERAnd when I came back, it had finally finished updating.
08:41SPEAKEROkay. So important questions first. Where are your save games stored, Brad?
08:46SPEAKERSave games. So I've done a crash course in Nintendo data management facts in the last
08:51SPEAKERtwo days. Save games can only ever be stored on the system storage. So that's good.
08:57SPEAKERThat's smart.
08:57SPEAKERSo that's good. And screenshots and videos can either be stored on one or the other.
09:01SPEAKERYeah, but that's fine.
09:02SPEAKERBut those were on system memory too. Nothing but game installs on the SD card. So I didn't
09:06SPEAKERlose anything.
09:07SPEAKERLosing like a Breath of the Wild save game would be a bummer.
09:09SPEAKERYes. Well, all that is backed up in the cloud, except for the like three games that don't
09:13SPEAKERsupport that, such as Animal Crossing and Dark Souls.
09:16SPEAKERAnimal Crossing, you can back up your, if you, if you pay for the, the Nintendo online,
09:21SPEAKERit will save, it saves a backup in the cloud, but you can't share it between devices.
09:25SPEAKEROh, you just can't move the island to a new device. That's what it is.
09:27SPEAKERWell, you can, but you have to move the entire, it happens when you copy your account to the
09:32SPEAKERnew device. Not when you, yeah, it's stupid.
09:36SPEAKERAnyway, long story short, after an hour of thinking the switch was dying, I finally thought
09:40SPEAKERto shut it off, pull the card out and reboot it and totally fine. Like, acted completely
09:44SPEAKERnormal without that card in. Tried to format the card. That took about 30 minutes.
09:48SPEAKERWow. You think you just hit the right, the right limit on the card or something?
09:52SPEAKERIf it's only doing the saves, it's, I mean, if it's only doing the games, it's probably
09:56SPEAKERnot that much writing to the card. The entirety of the card has basically only
09:59SPEAKERever been written to once because I've basically kind of filled the delete with, with like,
10:03SPEAKERmaybe a feel like I might've deleted a few games here and there to install other stuff,
10:07SPEAKERbut it's not like I'm constantly. And then even after 30 minutes of formatting the card,
10:10SPEAKERI went to download Mario wonder and it said like, it was going to take like 23 hours and
10:14SPEAKERthe time is going up, rebooted again, downloaded to the system storage. It took 12 minutes.
10:20SPEAKERAnd then I was able to play the game. So anyway, moral of the story, if your
10:23SPEAKERswitch acts like it's possessed, you probably need a new SD card.
10:27SPEAKEROr it is, it could be possessed.
10:28SPEAKERI mean, it is Halloween.
10:50SPEAKER[Music]
10:59SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and Will made a tech pod. I'm Will.
11:01SPEAKERI'm Brad. Hello.
11:02SPEAKERI have two, two other things on the, on the switch front. One is that my wife got an
11:08SPEAKEROLED switch and it has the ethernet port in the dock. So when I needed to download a game,
11:11SPEAKERI just dropped my switch into her dock.
11:14SPEAKEROh, wait. Oh, I, I, I am sure I knew that at one point,
11:17SPEAKERbut they put the ethernet port right in the dock?
11:18SPEAKERRight in the dock.
11:19SPEAKERThat's awesome. And it is so fast compared to the normal wifi downloads.
11:23SPEAKERYes. I have a, I have a, like a $12 ethernet to USB adapter that I use with mine. So I
11:28SPEAKERalso have that, but yes, that's yes. Like about 12 minutes to download Mario wonder.
11:33SPEAKERThe downloads are so much faster. Having the ethernet port to play like Tetris 99,
11:37SPEAKERit turns out real nice. Can't beat a hard line.
11:40SPEAKERThe other thing is that they did the stupid, we're not going to let you do your save management
11:44SPEAKERwith, with Super Mario wonder too. So like you can't have multiple save profiles on the same
11:48SPEAKERaccount for wonder. I saw Patrick was complaining about this on Twitter or blue sky or something
11:54SPEAKERthe other day. All games should have multiple save slots.
11:57SPEAKERI mean, she's good God, man. Just let us have multiple saves, please. That's all I want.
12:02SPEAKERYes. Yes. Yeah. I will say, you know, on the one hand, I was very annoyed at the prospect of
12:08SPEAKERhaving to buy a new switch like a year or less before a switch too. On the other hand, I started
12:12SPEAKERlooking at those OLEDs and I was like, you know, maybe it wouldn't have to be the worst thing.
12:15SPEAKERI mean, I'm going to say, I, so having used her OLED, I played most of Tears of the Kingdom or
12:20SPEAKERmost of what I played of Tears of the Kingdom on her, on her OLED. It's real nice if you play
12:24SPEAKERin handheld mode. If not, you can probably just buy the dock, the ethernet dock for your,
12:29SPEAKERfor your old switch and get the same effect. A lot of those adapters actually,
12:33SPEAKERit was like 50 bucks for an ethernet adapter. Yeah. The other, the other thing is like,
12:38SPEAKERI think the switch has reached the place for me where it has enough games of note that I'm going
12:42SPEAKERto want to go back to that I probably want to keep one that works. Like I kept a Wii that works.
12:48SPEAKERI have an Xbox 360 or two that work. I think I'm going to want to keep a switch probably long-term.
12:53SPEAKERSo hell man, I hooked my Wii U back up recently. I get it.
12:57SPEAKERLook, I still think that the Super Mario world version of Super Mario world on the Wii U is
13:02SPEAKERbetter than the Switch one. The one that doesn't have browser's fury, but like it runs better.
13:10SPEAKERYeah. Mario 3D world. You're saying the Wii U version is better than the Wii U version.
13:14SPEAKERThe Wii U version, the, the, the new one always felt like that some sort of weird
13:18SPEAKERinput lag or something to me. It's a little, little chunky compared to the Wii U one.
13:22SPEAKERWell, I have both versions, so I'm set. Yeah. You're good.
13:25SPEAKERHowever, the red light on the front of that thing. It's so bright is so annoying. I might actually
13:31SPEAKERpull the power on it again because I'm tired of looking at it right underneath my brand new
13:35SPEAKERtelevision. You could just, Ooh, good segue. I guess was a segue. You could put a piece of
13:40SPEAKERblack electrical tape on that red light and you're fine. I'm becoming acquainted with light dims.
13:46SPEAKERYeah. I might have made myself a sheet of light dims.
13:49SPEAKERYou could also literally just take, cut a little tiny square of black electrical tape off.
13:53SPEAKERYou know what? I still like to be able to know when the light is on or if it changes color or
13:56SPEAKERjust not so close. You don't need it. You're fine.
13:59SPEAKERWell, let's say there might also be some lights on this new TV that also
14:02SPEAKERare in desperate need of being town. Yeah. Well, so, okay. So you teased
14:05SPEAKERthat you bought a new TV kind of out of like, I honestly, I was expecting this to be a multi-year
14:10SPEAKERendeavor of you going out and finding the perfect TV and waiting for like specs and micro LEDs and
14:15SPEAKERall that stuff. And then you like, you would just casually like dropped a, you know, I bought a new
14:20SPEAKERTV and I'm not going to talk about it bomb like a month ago in a podcast. So today, today we're
14:26SPEAKERdoing followups. We're going to talk about Brad's new TV. And we're also going to talk about some
14:31SPEAKERcoffee stuff, a followup from the coffee episode of last month. So this actually started because
14:36SPEAKERwe were both extolling the virtues of 40 Hertz gaming to each other. We were like,
14:41SPEAKERwe should talk about that. Cause that's a very cool, interesting new phenomenon.
14:46SPEAKERYeah. Who would have ever thought that 10 more frames a second would matter, but it turns out,
14:50SPEAKERbut that might not be a whole episode. So it seems like a good chance to also discuss this
14:54SPEAKERset. People still call them sets. I got to do that. I got a new set.
15:00SPEAKERDo you remember, do you remember console TVs, Brad? Did you, did your grandparents ever
15:04SPEAKERconsole TV? Like when my, my parent, I have, I grew up with a con you mean like the set on the
15:09SPEAKERfloor. You're talking about a CRT television inside of a giant wood or faux wood cabinet.
15:15SPEAKERI think what faux wood is probably where they almost all worry. Yeah.
15:18SPEAKERThat's it's on the apps. Yes. I grew up with, that is what I grew up with.
15:21SPEAKERMy grandparents had one that was on a lazy Susan,
15:24SPEAKERwhich I wish I could get the bearing for that thing. Cause I bet like it had to weigh 400 pounds
15:29SPEAKERand you could rotate it. So you could just, no matter where you were in the room,
15:33SPEAKERyou could look square on. I need to ask my parents if we have any pictures of that TV.
15:37SPEAKERIt was gigantic. And it sat on the floor because that's the only place that no table had ever been
15:43SPEAKERbuilt that could hold that thing. Oh yeah. And if you had to move it, good luck. Three, three adults.
15:48SPEAKERYes. They don't make them like that anymore. I think I think ours was 26 inch. Also I was
15:55SPEAKERunder no circumstances allowed to hook video games up to it.
15:58SPEAKEROh really? Yeah.
16:00SPEAKEROh, we, my grandfather, when I came over would hook up the, this was Ness era probably maybe
16:06SPEAKEReven SNES era, but he would hook up the old 2,650. I think it was a 5,200 or whatever the
16:11SPEAKERupgrade one was. And we would play Atari games that he had bought at the flea market.
16:17SPEAKERThat sounds fun. It was up and down.
16:20SPEAKERYeah. My, my designated playing games TV was an old 19 inch from the seventies downstairs.
16:25SPEAKEROh, at our house, my designated playing games TV was a, was a 12 inch from that was like a portable
16:31SPEAKERwith a handle on it. And I did a lot of TI 99 for a basic coding and playing NES and later SNES on
16:39SPEAKERthat thing. Coding on a TV. We had that console TV in the living room through at least 95, because
16:44SPEAKERwhen I got my first PlayStation, I brought it home and immediately went to what was still the
16:49SPEAKERbiggest TV in the house, which was the console TV, hooked it up and played Toushinden on it and got
16:52SPEAKERyelled at a lot. And it was worth it. Okay. So I assume when you brought this new TV home,
17:00SPEAKERyou plugged it in and hooked the console up to, and you didn't get yelled at at all.
17:03SPEAKERYes. First thing I did was play battle arena Toushinden on this brand new 4k television.
17:07SPEAKERReally? How was it? Still as good as it was back then?
17:10SPEAKERChunky. Yeah. Let's say I bet those were some dirty pixels. I could have done that. You know,
17:14SPEAKERI could have done that with the mister because the mister has a fully functional PlayStation core.
17:18SPEAKERNow I actually could have played, I still could play Toushinden on the TV. And as I say that out
17:23SPEAKERloud, I realized there are implications for the mister in this, in having a 4k HDR TV that we can
17:28SPEAKERtalk about. There's a lot. Can I make a, I would I can I make a content request? Sure. I don't have
17:34SPEAKERany personal experience really with the PlayStation generation, except for going to a friend's house
17:40SPEAKERand playing, I think, tomb Raider. And like that mister core is an opportunity for me to experience
17:48SPEAKERthis, this magical age of gaming for the first time really. And I would love like, I need,
17:55SPEAKERI need, there's too many games. Like I look at the list of games. They're also kind of big,
18:00SPEAKERso I don't want to fill up my nest with them or whatever, but I need like a, I need like the
18:04SPEAKERultimate hit list of like the things I should play that aren't probably final fantasy seven.
18:10SPEAKERCause you know, that's going to second part of that's going to come out and I already know that
18:13SPEAKERyou already spoiled the thing about what's her name. So yes. Sorry. Sorry. The PlayStation hit
18:20SPEAKERthat level of market penetration where they put out thousands. I think there's literally like a
18:25SPEAKERwell over 2000 games. It is like a super Nintendo or Wii size catalog. It feels like, yeah, I think
18:31SPEAKERI want to say a full set of PlayStation games is like multiple terabytes. If I'm not mistaken,
18:36SPEAKERif you get all the mahjong and the porn games, it's like 4.3 terabytes, I think. Yeah. Well,
18:41SPEAKERespecially if you're the kind of loon, no offense to these loons who, who want every version of,
18:46SPEAKERfrom every territory of every game. Yeah. Yeah. And also all the 0.1s and 0.2s and 0.3s as they
18:51SPEAKERrevved them. Yeah. I don't, I don't need every revision of Metal Gear Solid. Yeah. But like,
18:56SPEAKERI want to know the things I don't know about that. Anyway, I didn't mean to get fall down this
19:00SPEAKERtangent, but I, I just don't, I don't know anything. I don't, I know nothing about it.
19:04SPEAKERI'm curious. I'm PlayStation curious. I'm kind of in the same boat with the Saturn because the
19:08SPEAKERSaturn core, I believe just got added to main. Oh, really? Yes. So the Saturn core is like,
19:14SPEAKERnot done, done, but like it's done enough that. Do you still need two sticks of Ram?
19:20SPEAKERYeah, I believe that one is another case. Like the PlayStation where it's like slightly better.
19:25SPEAKEROkay. I think, I think this one is more better with two sticks. The PlayStation core,
19:30SPEAKERit's pointless. Like I, I, I have two sticks. I bought a second one just to have it in case.
19:35SPEAKERAnd it's like audio timing is just slightly better on a few games and a few things you'll
19:39SPEAKERnever notice. I believe there are more profound compatibility concerns with the Saturn one and
19:46SPEAKERtwo Ram, I think. Okay. I think there's more utility. The bigger thing is there actually,
19:51SPEAKERnow there are some arcade, like the Mortal Kombat is going to absolutely require two sticks.
19:55SPEAKERWow. Really? And come at one? Yes. And all the midway stuff, people are working on
20:02SPEAKERthe Jaguar core, which may or may not ever actually get finished. But if it does,
20:06SPEAKERthat is also going to absolutely require two sticks. So there are reasons to have it.
20:10SPEAKERProbably the Jaguar course, nobody has the right controller for that thing.
20:13SPEAKERYeah. You can just hook an old phone receiver up to it.
20:16SPEAKERProbably good. Yeah. But anyways, I like your TV. Yes. Sorry. We're rambling here.
20:22SPEAKERYeah. But what'd you end up getting? A lot of high sense U8K 65 inch.
20:28SPEAKERWhy, why that model in particular, Brad? When I was helping my parents pick out a
20:32SPEAKERnew TV a couple, three months ago, we got it down to basically that one and the LG C2 and,
20:37SPEAKERand the current Samsung OLED we were kind of looking at. And I think we've talked about
20:43SPEAKERthis part already before, but eventually it was, it was put to my dad. Do you want,
20:48SPEAKERdo you want the good enough or the best? And he said the best. So they got the OLED.
20:52SPEAKERThere you go. But I, then I had researched the high sense quite a bit and our tings,
20:58SPEAKERthat's what we're saying, right? Our tings. Sure. We should change it every episode,
21:02SPEAKERI think, but they, they, they have since slid the U8K into their best mid range TV slot.
21:08SPEAKERSo basically kind of seeing their review come out, having them bless the TV, push you over
21:14SPEAKERwas the final, like, okay, I just want something. I just want something because after spending two
21:21SPEAKERweeks looking at an OLED and then coming back home to this 1080P plasma, they're like, it's dark and
21:27SPEAKERit was scary. It was not happening anymore. I'm sorry. So it's a bigger than your old,
21:33SPEAKERcause your old TV was a 45 or 55, 55, 55, 55 at about 10 feet, which is a little bit too small.
21:40SPEAKERSo I knew I wanted to go 65. I mean, you could have gone bigger, but it's an apartment.
21:44SPEAKERYeah. I mean, I mean, come on. The stairs are become a problem at some point or another.
21:49SPEAKERYes. What do you, do you, okay. So question in previous days, previous long, many, many,
21:57SPEAKERmany months ago, we talked about your long S HDMI cable that was like 30 feet long and kind of
22:02SPEAKERsnaked around your apartment to get from the office where the computer is plugged in.
22:06SPEAKERYeah. I mean, I would say the gauge was heavy enough that it could only do so much snaking.
22:11SPEAKEROkay. So it was a big thick, thick, thickie, a pretty, pretty big, thick HDMI cable.
22:15SPEAKERIt's just like a six pound cable. It's like a trunk of a tree.
22:19SPEAKEROkay. Did, do you still have the long S HDMI cable?
22:22SPEAKERI do have it just cause I haven't gotten rid of it. And who knows when you might need a
22:25SPEAKER30 foot HDMI cable. I don't think you need that era of HDMI cable 30 feet probably.
22:31SPEAKERIt's hanging on a hook on the back of the door in this room. So it's not like I can see it or
22:35SPEAKERknow it's there. It's not like it's laying in the floor at all time. Okay. But I bought a newer long
22:41SPEAKERHDMI cable. Ooh. It's fiber optic. Oh, that sounds exciting. Expensive.
22:47SPEAKERIt was 50 bucks. 50 feet for 50 bucks. It was $1 per foot of fiber optics.
22:54SPEAKERWow. That's that's awesome. Actually. Plus a free transceiver in one of the ends of the cable,
22:58SPEAKERapparently, because I'm sure you have to have something to convert electricity into light.
23:02SPEAKERProbably in both. Right. Right. Yeah, actually. So that's one of the really interesting things
23:07SPEAKERabout what we're talking about is this has been a thing for a while. Like you convert, convert like,
23:12SPEAKERlike video signals, I guess, internet to fiber USB. USB is another one. Yeah. Basically like
23:18SPEAKERelectricity can only go so far over cable before it needs to be electrically repeated.
23:23SPEAKERYeah. So you have to put something that plugs into the wall and puts electricity into the signal,
23:27SPEAKERinto the cable or yeah. Or you can use light through fiber optics, which goes way, way,
23:33SPEAKERway farther. So it's funny. I've thought about doing this with the Stream PC and just running
23:38SPEAKERHDMI to fiber into my garage so that that is out, like not in the, in the room that I sit in all
23:45SPEAKERday. But it turns out it just, I started thinking about the mechanics of it and I don't want to
23:49SPEAKERspend that much time crawling under the house and drilling holes in the concrete, concrete
23:53SPEAKERfoundation of the house. I get it. This is just getting uncoiled down the hallway when I need to
23:58SPEAKERuse it. Yeah. Yeah. Have you, have you tried it yet? So I've, I've, I've messed around with it. I
24:04SPEAKERbought it wanting to play cyberpunk with the path tracing in 4k and everything. Spent two evenings
24:10SPEAKERdicking around with windows settings instead, trying to make things work right. I basically
24:17SPEAKERwasted enough time. I wasted enough valuable video game time on trying to make HDR and VRR and all
24:22SPEAKERthat stuff work in windows, but I haven't actually gotten to play cyberpunk yet. And then other games
24:26SPEAKERcame out. You're on windows 11, windows 10, 10. I think that's, I think, I think your windows 11
24:32SPEAKERexperience there would have been a little bit better. Yeah. I think I was asking too much of
24:35SPEAKERthe whole setup though, because I was going, I was going out of the HDMI on the, on this graphics
24:40SPEAKERcard to the TV, but I still had my monitors on. So I've got two 20, 25 or 1440p, I should say.
24:47SPEAKERThat should work. 244 Hertz 1440p monitors in here at the same time that I was asking it to do 120
24:54SPEAKERHertz out with VRR. That should be fine. I don't, well, but when you throw both free, so I was doing
24:59SPEAKERFreeSync to these monitors and VRR on the TV. And I'm guessing when you. You might've had to turn
25:05SPEAKERVsync or FreeSync off on the monitor. I guess. And again, I got just got distracted playing
25:10SPEAKERactual video games and not fighting with that thing. My guess is that throwing two different
25:14SPEAKERadaptive sync standards into the mix at the same time was causing issues. My plan, if and when I
25:21SPEAKERget back to it, probably after I play Alan Wake, I'll get back to trying to play Cyberpunk. I think
25:26SPEAKERthe plan is I'll just turn these monitors off, like just make it so that the PC can only see
25:31SPEAKERthe TV as a display. And then I think it'll probably be fine. Cause everything else worked
25:36SPEAKERfine. Like 120 Hertz worked fine. HDR worked fine to the extent that it works fine in Windows 10,
25:41SPEAKERgenerally, which is iffy, but did work, you know, that's very game dependent as well. But the point
25:46SPEAKERis like everything except the adaptive refresh seemed to be working fine over that cable. Well,
25:51SPEAKERI was going to say when we were talking about the, there being a transceiver in the cable,
25:55SPEAKERsure enough, that's a unit directional cable. You can always, you have to plug it. Wow. The
26:00SPEAKERends of the HDMI cable say like source and screen or something known to that effect. And you have to
26:05SPEAKERmake sure you have to make sure the source end is plugged into the outputting device and the
26:09SPEAKERscreen end is plugged into the TV. That's a trip. I didn't know that. Cause I mean, you know,
26:13SPEAKERI'm sure it just saves cost, right? Is my guess, you know, you only put the transceiver in one end
26:18SPEAKERof the cable or, or, you know, you don't want to duplicate functionality on both ends just so that
26:22SPEAKERyou can reverse the cable. Yeah. That's that's interesting. It's transmitter and receiver
26:28SPEAKERprobably cause HDMI is bi-directional though, right? Does it do arc back? Yes. What's that?
26:32SPEAKERWill it do arc back? I doubt it. I doubt it. Probably not. I have not tried.
26:39SPEAKERThat's interesting though. I was, I was, I was kind of floored. I was kind of shocked when I
26:42SPEAKERwent on Amazon and saw they were that cheap. Cause last time I had thought about trying to send video
26:47SPEAKERover fiber, it was like, you need some multi hundreds of dollars converter box and stuff like
26:53SPEAKERthat. Or, you know, there's, there's also been, there's also been HDMI over ethernet, like not
26:58SPEAKERfiber, but actual like standard, like twist pair or copper or whatever, ethernet cable.
27:03SPEAKERYou can do HDMI and I think USB over, over 10 base thousand base T.
27:09SPEAKERI think it isn't HD base T is the name of the standard for HDMI over ethernet, I believe.
27:13SPEAKERI think so, but I'm not, I'm not a hundred percent. Anyway, long story short, that stuff has
27:17SPEAKERbeen very expensive and fiddly in the past and needed like, like I said, converter boxes and all
27:20SPEAKERthis other shit. Well, it usually lagged HDMI standards a few, a little bit for a while.
27:25SPEAKERSo this, this is a fully HDMI 2.1 compliance fiber cable all contained in the cable. No box,
27:31SPEAKERno nothing, 50 bucks. Like it, it just worked. I was like shocked.
27:35SPEAKERThat sounds pretty, I mean, you think about it, you have a projector or something in the ceiling,
27:38SPEAKERyou need that, that, that cable is important, right? Totally. Like this, I mean, I, I would,
27:43SPEAKERthis was a lower cost brand. Like if I were doing this, if I were doing a run inside the walls,
27:49SPEAKERlike something that you want to last for years, I probably would have gotten a nicer version of this
27:55SPEAKERor something, but for something that I'm just going to use off and on, like I was, it seems
27:59SPEAKERtotally fine. Honestly, if you're doing the fiber in the walls, you probably buy something that the
28:03SPEAKERtransceiver and the, and the receiver are separate on. Right. So that you, so you don't have to pull
28:08SPEAKERthe cable every time the standard upgrades actually. Yes. Cause the fiber, it turns out will
28:12SPEAKERbe good for a really long time. Fiber fibers, especially if you've got the right capacity,
28:17SPEAKERit'll just go like you can get fiber that does a hundred gigabit for like not that much money
28:24SPEAKERthese days. Well, so Brad, what is the TV has the full range of, is it fully, is it fully functional?
28:31SPEAKERYou got the HDR 10, you got the Dolby vision. You got the, it was kind of, kind of what drew
28:36SPEAKERme to this TV was, I mean, I live for the bang for the buck thing, you know, the, the seller on
28:40SPEAKER300 a of televisions basically. That's kind of, it's kind of what this is honestly right now is
28:46SPEAKERI don't think there's anything else out there that does all the formats at this price level. So I
28:50SPEAKERpaid nine 99 for the 65 inch. Oh wow. It's gone back up a little bit by like a hundred bucks or
28:57SPEAKERsomething. But I believe short of the recent LG OLEDs, it is the first TV out there that will do
29:04SPEAKER4k 120 Hertz and Dolby vision all the same time. So like, well, you don't have a 4k TV yet,
29:14SPEAKERbut have you seen, I'm sure you've seen the Xbox screen. That's just like the big series of either
29:18SPEAKERgreen checks or like, yeah, I saw that when I plugged in the series S into the, into the yeah.
29:26SPEAKERSo it was, it was pretty gratifying setting everything up and doing that Xbox config and
29:29SPEAKERjust seeing nothing but green checks all the way down of like, this thing does everything. And I
29:33SPEAKERwas, you know, like, like I said, that was one of the big selling points of this was for the price,
29:37SPEAKERthe amount of features it supports is pretty good. What does it do anything like, I mean, okay, so
29:45SPEAKERticks all the boxes. Does it do anything in particular? Did you upgrade the receiver too,
29:48SPEAKERor you keep the same receiver? Same receiver. I'm just running devices straight into the TV now that
29:52SPEAKERneed it. Okay. So I can still put like the switch and the Wii U are going through the old receiver
29:57SPEAKERbecause it doesn't do 4k much of anything. And you, and you have arc coming back to pipe audio
30:03SPEAKERout of the receiver from the, from the connector that goes from the receiver to the. Do an optical
30:09SPEAKERoptical out of the back of the receiver to get audio out that way. The CV only has two HDMI 2.1
30:15SPEAKERports. Oh, I should, I should point out. So, you know, there's an Xbox one Xbox series rather.
30:22SPEAKERYeah. And one of those gets pulled if I run that PC one. So, so there are, you know, there are
30:26SPEAKERa lot of the higher end TVs will have four of those. So there are some, some trade-offs, but.
30:32SPEAKERYeah. That's one of the things like if I it's funny because over the last decade,
30:36SPEAKERthe number of things that are plugged into my TV has gone down a lot. Well, because it used to be
30:40SPEAKERthat there were a lot of, there used to be three consoles and did like multiple streaming boxes.
30:48SPEAKERCause remember in the old days of streaming stuff, you could get one service on one platform and some
30:53SPEAKERservices were only on Roku and some were only on Apple TV and some weren't on Apple TV and yeah,
30:59SPEAKERit was a mess. Now everything's everywhere. So that's less. So it's like I have an Apple TV and
31:03SPEAKERa switch basically plugged in and a steam. I do have a steam deck doc on my living room,
31:07SPEAKERbut it doesn't get used all that often. So. Fair. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm the kind of
31:14SPEAKERlunatic who is like, what if I hooked up every game console I have from the last 15 years?
31:19SPEAKERYeah. I was going to say, can you do component and stuff on it? Does it have analog inputs at all?
31:23SPEAKERI do not know. Not, not out of the box. Definitely not, but there might be some kind of breakout
31:27SPEAKERsomething or other that I could get. I've seen some talk.
31:30SPEAKERAre you in like a retro tank category there?
31:33SPEAKERYou're probably better off. You're probably better off just getting a retro tank and,
31:37SPEAKERand, and upscaling that way at that point. I don't, I don't know that this model actually
31:42SPEAKERdoes any kind of component breakout now that I'm looking around. I should probably say it is,
31:46SPEAKERit is an LCD TV just in case people are wondering. It's not an OLED. It's, it's,
31:51SPEAKERit's LCD with mini led backlight, which we've talked about numerous times. It's the
31:55SPEAKERkind of somewhat higher resolution LED backlight that condemn zones off and on to help achieve like
32:02SPEAKERbetter darker blacks and better contrast levels. Yeah. How does, how does it handle stuff like,
32:07SPEAKERlike titles titles at the end of the movie? Like remarkably well, like I, you know,
32:12SPEAKERnot everybody cares about the level of product assessment that I do, but like,
32:16SPEAKERif you go to our things, if you do care about that stuff, like they are so granular and so
32:20SPEAKERstandard with their tests on everything they do about like, we're using the exact same frame
32:25SPEAKERof this movie with the same subtitles on every TV to judge like haloing around the text, which is
32:30SPEAKERwhere you get some like whitish glow around white text on black background, for example.
32:36SPEAKERLike many LEDs are notorious for having haloing around that exact, exactly that, right? Like
32:41SPEAKERvery bright or white stuff on dark backgrounds. Yeah. The TV in our bedroom has variable backlight
32:46SPEAKERand I actually just turned it off because it was, it was really annoying. Anytime the screen was
32:51SPEAKERdark, then it would just be invisible. And then when it would be like the room would be, it was
32:56SPEAKERlight. It was dark. It was light. It was dark, which wasn't what you wanted. So I rolled the
33:00SPEAKERdice on that. Cause I, you know, I knew that would bug me too, if it was bad, but I was like,
33:03SPEAKERwhatever. I just want a TV. Let's see how it goes. And like, I am shocked. I am absolutely shocked
33:08SPEAKERat how not noticeable that stuff is. Like, I don't, I don't see the dimming zones going off
33:14SPEAKERand on at all. Like it's kind of insane to me how well it works. That's the benefit of having,
33:20SPEAKERcause the, the resolution of those lighting zones is really high now. Yeah. That's what you see in
33:27SPEAKERthe reviews for a lot of the mini led TVs is you see like the like, like HDTV test is a great
33:32SPEAKERYouTube channel. Like he literally counts zones. He counts dimming zones the way that the digital
33:37SPEAKERfounder guys count pixels. When they're assessing stuff, you know, they're literally just using
33:42SPEAKERtheir eyeballs to determine like how many, how many zones does this thing have? Cause I don't
33:46SPEAKERthink they necessarily always publish that information or at least not that specifically.
33:52SPEAKERYeah. I think, I think these things are just getting way better. I think it's just that the
33:56SPEAKERresolution of the dimming zones is going up year over year. And it's finally getting to the point
34:00SPEAKERwhere it is fine-grained enough that you're not going to notice it much. Well, and the software
34:03SPEAKERand the image processors are also more capable now too. So they know how to handle stuff like
34:07SPEAKERvertical scroll, like verticals. When you think about it. Yeah. Of course the early models that
34:12SPEAKERsupported the variable dimming should have been able to handle white text on a black background,
34:17SPEAKERmoving vertically because it's like, it happens at the end of literally every movie made in the
34:22SPEAKERlast hundred years, but I guess they didn't do that. So that, that all sounds, it sounds really
34:29SPEAKERgood. What, what's the app stitch with it. It's a Google TV. It's a Google TV.
34:36SPEAKERSo, okay. Does that mean you have like a little robot that pops up when you turn the TV on or?
34:41SPEAKERI have not actually seen the Android logo anywhere, but this thing definitely runs Android.
34:47SPEAKEROkay. Like you can dig in there and find all the build information. It is absolutely running
34:52SPEAKERAndroid. How like, well, I don't, I, so Google, there've been three different iterations of Google
34:57SPEAKERTVs in the time I've been doing this stuff, starting with the the, the bad, the bad thing
35:03SPEAKERthat Sony released with the huge ridiculous controller that we've laughed at before.
35:07SPEAKERThen, then the Chromecast stuff kind of came out, which was never really called
35:10SPEAKERthen they had Android TV. Then they had Google TV, which is like a Chromecast with apps.
35:15SPEAKERIt seems like, I think that, I think that's what this is. This is my first experience with
35:18SPEAKERanything called Google TV. So, but what you're describing the last bit, which is a Chrome,
35:23SPEAKERChromecast with an app store is basically what this feels like. Okay. Where is it like, does it
35:29SPEAKERhave, so on Apple, the TV OS, the Apple TV apps are all custom made for the platform and tie into
35:38SPEAKERTVOS features and like, you can't just run phone or tablet apps or whatever on, on the TV. Like
35:45SPEAKERthe developers have to do some work and choose to be on that platform. Is the Google thing the same
35:50SPEAKERway? I assume that's the case here because everything I've installed, I haven't installed
35:54SPEAKERanything that comes up in like a phone size to aspect ratio. Okay. For example, I assume everything
36:00SPEAKERis at least getting attention to be like TV enabled, but at least check the box that says,
36:04SPEAKERyo, put this on the TV. Yes. But I mean, like some of the stuff I'm installing, like I'm pretty sure
36:09SPEAKERthe VLC I installed was called VLC for Android, if I'm not mistaken, but it looks like it should
36:14SPEAKERfit on the TV screen. Well, Android handles the resolution, different resolutions better
36:18SPEAKERthan iOS used to at least. Maybe these are getting, getting less conversion to TV than I thought. I
36:23SPEAKERdon't know. Yeah. But it has the apps you want basically. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean,
36:29SPEAKERall the commercial services, absolutely. But like, like VLC Jellyfin, Steam Link among, among things
36:35SPEAKERthat are like not so mainstream. Okay. Those have all been there. I didn't think to look for Moonlight
36:39SPEAKERyet. Moonlight's on there. I looked for that before we did the episode. I'm sure it is. Moonlight
36:44SPEAKERis the game stream, Nvidia game stream compatible client that now, now the game stream is not part
36:50SPEAKERof the Nvidia tool anymore. You can use a thing called Sunlight to stream from which is Sunshine.
36:56SPEAKERSorry. Which is quite good. I will say I tried Steam Link for the first time this afternoon,
37:01SPEAKERnot a great experience. Steam Link is up and down right now. Steam Link is, Steam Link was great for
37:06SPEAKERlike the first year and change that I had the Steam Deck. And then they broke something where
37:11SPEAKERthe audio is breaks up after like five minutes. That was the worst problem I was having was the
37:16SPEAKERaudio was like, yeah, it's usually flawless. And then that started this summer. My, my,
37:23SPEAKERthe thing that I've heard is that there's a new major revision coming to it and that they haven't
37:28SPEAKERfixed it because of that, because it's been imminent for a while, but it's also for this,
37:34SPEAKERfor the way the Steam streaming stuff works to make it better and more reliable. But, but like,
37:40SPEAKERit is just fucking broken. And it has been for like six months at this point, almost,
37:43SPEAKERit seems like five, four months, at least. Interesting. I also had pretty bad input lag,
37:48SPEAKERwhich I don't know if that may actually be the TV's fault, not the app. If I had to guess,
37:52SPEAKERalthough it was very novel to just pair a DualShock 4 with my television directly.
37:56SPEAKERSo I will say there's a, there's a, I think it's Cloudy Gamer is the subreddit where they
38:01SPEAKERtalk about input lag on different Bluetooth devices and controllers. And there's a mate,
38:08SPEAKERof course there is, there's a matrix of things that work best. The thing I have found is that
38:14SPEAKERlike Apple used to have really bad input lag with all their controllers. They've changed the
38:17SPEAKERBluetooth stack and the new version of tvOS, which is supposedly supposed to make it better.
38:21SPEAKERI haven't actually tested it yet. The Steam Link, Steam Link slash Moonlight to the Steam Deck has
38:28SPEAKERbeen much better than anything else I've ever used pretty consistently. So it's my guess is it's
38:35SPEAKERprobably a bad Bluetooth stack in the TV and you probably want to either use a wired controller
38:39SPEAKERor get a box. That'll do it better than what you have. Yeah. I don't, I don't think I'm actually
38:44SPEAKERgoing to rely on this in any way. I also could not figure out how to get games to output at 4k.
38:49SPEAKERMy monitors are 1440, like I said, Oh, Steam Link games. And then so all the Steam games I ran,
38:54SPEAKEReven on this 4k TV running the Steam Link app topped out it, topped out at 1440 for resolutions.
38:59SPEAKERSo you need to put a piece of software on there that makes a fake 4k monitor that it can mirror
39:03SPEAKERtoo. But that, that also is a pain in the ass. That's a hassle. And I'm not sure that HDR would
39:08SPEAKEReven work over, even if, even if every, all other things were equal, I'm not sure that.
39:12SPEAKERSo on Windows 10, it probably won't. On Windows, getting HDR to work over the streaming is one of
39:17SPEAKERthe things that I believe is the update that's coming for the Steam Link. Moonlight, but what
39:23SPEAKERI will say is the Moonlight stuff generally works better. It's a little bit more of a pain in the
39:28SPEAKERass to set up, but you can also set it up so that it just makes a shortcut directly into the game
39:32SPEAKERfor each game that you want to do. So, and because of that, you can play games that are not in Steam.
39:38SPEAKERSteam Link works best with games that are on Steam and you have to jump through some
39:40SPEAKERannoying hoops to get like Epic store games or origin games or you play games or whatever. And
39:46SPEAKERI mean, all of this is why I just bought that cable. Honestly, get the long ass cable. If
39:50SPEAKERyou're long, if you're close enough to Bluetooth will work from the PC. Like there's no reason not
39:55SPEAKERto just use the long ass cable. I quite literally bought that cable to play Cyberpunk. I was like,
39:59SPEAKERall right, this is, this is a like very big budget AAA game. It is the, it is by far the most lavish
40:05SPEAKERproduction out there that is using path tracing. Although apparently Alan Wake 2 is going to have
40:08SPEAKERit, which I'd say was not known until they put out the specs this week, which is a whole other
40:13SPEAKERconversation. But I think, I think Alan Wake 2 is also going to have path tracing, but anyway.
40:17SPEAKERThat seems like a game that can benefit. Well, I mean, Control was an early ray tracing game too,
40:21SPEAKERso that's their remedy, like supporting new tech. Don't quote me, but I'm pretty sure I
40:27SPEAKERsaw a path tracing mentioned on the spec sheet that they put out. But anyway, like I bought
40:30SPEAKERthat cable. I was like, okay, I want to play Cyberpunk in the best possible way. And the
40:35SPEAKERonly way I'm going to do that is with a direct video connection. It's, it's funny because like
40:38SPEAKERfor years I played in the 360 era. I, my, my gaming PC is one wall through is, and my TV is
40:47SPEAKERbasically up against the wall that my gaming PC is on. And I have a hole that goes between the,
40:53SPEAKERthe like where, where the network ports are in the living room and my office.
40:58SPEAKERWhat's the nature of this hole? Is it like around the edges or there's like a plate there?
41:04SPEAKERNo. Yeah. I put, I put a, I put a gang box behind it so that like, it's where the,
41:08SPEAKERit's where the network run comes up into those rooms. And because they face each other,
41:14SPEAKERI was like, Oh, I can just put an H there's like a one inch HDMI cable and two HDMI ports on the
41:19SPEAKERother gang on the, on the port. So I plug the HMR cable in on one side, I plug it on the other side,
41:24SPEAKERand then I have a PC connection. And what's funny is with the Xbox 360 wireless game controller
41:30SPEAKERdongle, you could just, it just worked through the walls. Bluetooth stuff is much less reliable
41:35SPEAKERthrough the walls in my experience. So you've got to have it kind of around a corner or something.
41:39SPEAKERBut anyway, games, games are good on the console. Fantastic. Like again,
41:44SPEAKERI came from an LG C2. Like I, I, I had a, I brought my series S out there with me and that's
41:49SPEAKERactually how I played Starfield for the first time was for about a week on that, on that series S on
41:55SPEAKERtheir LG. So point being, I have, I have a lot of like firsthand experience with the OLED. Like I am
42:01SPEAKERshocked how close this thing is to that. Like I'm sure OLED purists and I'm like, I will grant OLED
42:06SPEAKERis definitely still the best thing out there. And I'm sure some OLED purists might scoff at this,
42:11SPEAKERbut I am shocked how close this TV gets to the OLED experience. Does, does it support variable,
42:16SPEAKERas you said, it would support variable refresh rate. Yeah. HDR looks good. Yes. Yes. And so
42:21SPEAKERthat's actually the biggest advantage of like, like, oh, it does look better. Like, don't get
42:25SPEAKERme wrong. Like, oh, it looks better. There are still, there are still some uniformity kind of
42:30SPEAKERartifacts on this screen that are not there on OLED. What do you mean by uniformity artifacts?
42:34SPEAKERIf I have like a, like a, like a very flat color screen, I'm kind of panning the camera around.
42:40SPEAKERLike if I look up at a blue sky or like playing F-Zero where the track is just this big gray
42:43SPEAKERfield, you can just see some really subtle variations in the screen and the color. It's
42:50SPEAKERvery, it's very subtle. You're not going to see it 99.9% of the time, but you do it's, it's standard
42:55SPEAKERLCD uniformity stuff. It's the thing that your brain will filter out after about three weeks of
42:59SPEAKERhaving the TV and you'll never notice it again, but it's always there. But this is a VA panel.
43:02SPEAKERLike if you're familiar with, you know, the issues with LCD computer monitors, it's the same shit.
43:07SPEAKERLike, and then the funny thing is out of the box, this TV defaults to local dimming off. Local
43:12SPEAKERdimming is the thing that makes all the mini LEDs go on and off as the name implies for whatever
43:18SPEAKERreason, that's off out of the box. And when I turned it on for the first time, like it looked
43:22SPEAKERlike shit because it's got, it's got all the same backlight bleed problems that you were familiar
43:26SPEAKERwith from years of using LCDs. And I was like, oh my God, what this is. But as soon as you turn
43:33SPEAKERthe local dimming on, that fixes the problem. You never see it again. Like you never see it again.
43:37SPEAKERIt's so that's, that's where the like approaching OLED kind of quality comes in is that it's able to,
43:43SPEAKERto, to dim that stuff out. Yeah. Cause the thing that's good about OLED is you, you, when, when
43:48SPEAKERyou're showing black on an OLED, it's literally black. There's no, there's no light being emitted
43:52SPEAKERand then blocked by some sort of white screen. You know what, you know what, this sounds,
43:56SPEAKERthis sounds maybe ridiculous and trivial, but the thing that actually blew my mind the most on their
44:01SPEAKEROLED was I have my switch out there and I played some breath of the wild. Yeah. The loading screens
44:06SPEAKERin breath of the wild because it's nothing but white text and graphics on black, right? Like
44:12SPEAKERthose loading screens are nothing but white and black hard contrast. And it looks absolutely
44:16SPEAKERperfect. No, no haloing, no weird bleed, no nothing like literally from white pixel to black
44:21SPEAKERpixel. It's just like perfect. And that was, that was like after, you know, decades of CRTs and LCDs
44:28SPEAKERand all kinds of stuff, I was just like, this image looks immaculate, you know? I mean,
44:32SPEAKEReven the plasmas are like gray, they're dark, dark gray, but they're still gray. That was exactly it
44:37SPEAKERis like, even, even, even plasma is as good as the contrast was there could not achieve that perfect
44:41SPEAKERblack and that perfect contrasts between those two, those hard cutoffs. And this, this is close
44:47SPEAKERto that. It's still not there. Like it's, but for a say $600 price difference, I'm pretty happy with
44:53SPEAKERit. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, I think that's reasonable, especially since it's,
44:57SPEAKERsince we're kind of in a weird place with 4k stuff now where they're starting to talk
45:01SPEAKERabout higher resolutions and other stuff that I think probably isn't going to matter for a long
45:05SPEAKERtime in terms of content. What, what's, can we talk about refresh rates?
45:11SPEAKERYes. Let me actually, I derailed myself. The thing I was going to say is like the one advantage of
45:15SPEAKERthe mini LEDs and pretty much all LCDs over OLEDs is they get much brighter, like much brighter.
45:20SPEAKERYou were asking about HDR. It is icey, ringly bright, like uncomfortably so, like not in a
45:26SPEAKERgood way. Like I'm not saying like, you won't believe how bright this thing is. I mean like
45:30SPEAKERa hundred brightness for standard, for SDR stuff way too much.
45:36SPEAKERSo like does it leave shadows on the walls when you turn this thing up full blast?
45:40SPEAKERYes. At night. Wow. Absolutely. Like at night in a darkish room, I can't, I can't do more than
45:46SPEAKERabout 40, 50% brightness on SDR. HDR defaults to a hundred percent brightness on everything because
45:52SPEAKERthe whole point is that only parts of it are hitting peak brightness. Right. But like for SDR,
45:58SPEAKERwhere it's much more compressed range of brightness, like I literally, if you push it up
46:02SPEAKERto like a hundred, it like kind of hurts to look at. Does this mean you, you're, you're having to
46:07SPEAKERride the brightness on the moment to moment? No, I leave it at like 50 and it's totally fine. Like
46:12SPEAKERthe only time, the only time, and you will really appreciate this as a plasma owner. And this is
46:16SPEAKERkind of one of the other reasons I lean towards this thing. The only time I ever bumped the
46:20SPEAKERbrightness on SDR up to a hundred is in the middle, like the middle of the afternoon with
46:24SPEAKERsun coming through an open window. And it is still totally watchable. Yeah. See, that's,
46:28SPEAKERthere's times a day that you just don't watch TV in our house in the summer. Yes. Plasmas,
46:32SPEAKERplasmas in particular, like, like we got blackout curtains in the living room because it was the
46:35SPEAKERonly way I could play games in the afternoon. Well, yeah. And, and like also they degrade
46:39SPEAKERover time. Plasma is 10 plus years old at this point. But plasma in its day was known for being
46:45SPEAKERawful in bright sunlight. So having a TV where I can like the sun is literally pointing through
46:50SPEAKERthe open windows at four or five in the afternoon and you still see it and I can still just see it
46:55SPEAKERfine is just like kind of mind blowing. Does it monitor the brightness of the room?
46:59SPEAKERI think it does have that. I think that, I think it does have that, but I turned all that stuff
47:05SPEAKERoff. Okay. Let's talk about frame rate. Cause, cause we, this is what, like you said, this is
47:10SPEAKERwhat kicked off this whole conversation for us is the, the we've both been playing a little bit of
47:15SPEAKERspider man this week. And the thing that insomniac does that you called out and I always really
47:22SPEAKERappreciate it on their games since the PlayStation pro came out is they say, Hey, here's what happens
47:27SPEAKERwhen you change all these settings. Cause most studios just put a bunch of settings there and
47:31SPEAKERthey're like, do you want breed? Do you want fidelity or performance? And they don't tell you
47:35SPEAKERwhat that means. And insomniac gives you like eight settings and tells you what each one does.
47:42SPEAKERAnd it, and it spawned an interesting kind of in between approach that I didn't fully appreciate,
47:46SPEAKERexpect to be talking about on consoles ever really. Yes. And, and it has a 40 Hertz mode,
47:54SPEAKERwhich is the other thing. I mean, that's the takeaway from this, right? Yeah. Me, me saying
47:59SPEAKERlike, Oh my God, you should, you have to see this. This is blowing my mind. You were like, Oh yeah,
48:03SPEAKERI love that on the steam deck. And I had completely forgotten the steam deck had that. So,
48:06SPEAKERso we actually both have got experience with this. Yeah. So, so the, the benefit is on the
48:12SPEAKERsteam deck, obviously the lower frame rate that you run. And like, if you're on a desktop PC,
48:16SPEAKERyou notice this too. Cause like you're running it. You, if I play games at 10 AP on my PC,
48:21SPEAKERcause I have a fast 10 AP monitor. And if I play a game, like a single player game, you know,
48:28SPEAKERyour multiplayer games, your counter strike two, I'm going to crank up to 360 yards and let it run
48:32SPEAKERas hard as it can. And the fans can spin up and it'll be fine. Single player stuff. I often will
48:37SPEAKERlock it at 60 or 120 frames per second. And the, the two, two things happen. One is it generates a
48:42SPEAKERlot less heat. So the fans don't spin up in the computer, which is really nice. Two is the easy
48:52SPEAKERlike that. So that power, that power savings is evident even on desktops, I guess is what I'm
48:56SPEAKERsaying on the steam deck where you're playing off of a battery. A lot of times it's even more
49:00SPEAKERevident because the difference from going to 60, from 60 to 40 frames per second on the steam deck
49:07SPEAKERis usually the difference in like two and a half hours, two hours of battery and four or
49:10SPEAKERfive hours of battery in some cases, depending on the game. And if you're playing like 2d pixel-y
49:16SPEAKERstuff, it's even more, if you're playing like playing miles Morales, which I played on the
49:20SPEAKERflight to to DC or back from DC, that game plays at 40 frames per second, just fine. And I was
49:31SPEAKERshocked at the difference. It felt much 40. I remember being shocked at how much faster the
49:39SPEAKERsteam deck form has been talking about this for a year since the steam deck came out basically.
49:44SPEAKERAnd I was shocked at how much better 40 frames per second felt than 30 frames per second.
49:50SPEAKERLike it doesn't seem like it should be that big difference when, when you're saying,
49:53SPEAKERwhen you're saying 30 is the low cutoff, you don't want to go below that. But 60 is ideal. You know,
49:57SPEAKERwhen you say, Oh, 40 is only a third of the way from 30 to 60 in you, you assume that's how that
50:04SPEAKERworks. So when you see it in motion, you're like, Oh my God, the perception of smoothness is so much
50:10SPEAKERfaster than that gap would imply. Yeah. And, and I don't know. I mean, this is one of those places
50:17SPEAKERwhere, look, people have been arguing about frame rates on the internet since the dawn of the
50:20SPEAKERinternet. This is, we had this conversation at maximum PC in like 2001, whenever he's like, Oh,
50:25SPEAKERthe human eye can't discern more than 24 frames per second. I was like, Oh, that doesn't sound
50:29SPEAKERright. And we talked to some vision scientists and they were like, stop bothering us with this nerd
50:32SPEAKERshit. We don't care. The, but, but it, it, the, the, the current, I want to say the current common
50:40SPEAKERwisdom on the internet is that it has to do with frame times. Is that what you think that's right?
50:45SPEAKERYes. Frame time has become, I think, a more standard measure among the people who,
50:50SPEAKERpeople who report on this kind of stuff, like seriously professionally, not the people who
50:54SPEAKERyell about it on Twitter. Yeah. Well, so we talked about, I mean, frame time was the,
51:00SPEAKERmy game development journey started with VR, which is what we, we looking for 90 frames a second,
51:06SPEAKERyou're looking at like 6.7 milliseconds per frame or something. And that was, that was always the
51:11SPEAKERwatchword because in VR, if you, if your frame rate sags, people like some, some sizable percentage
51:17SPEAKERof the players will want to barf. Yes. I guess nowhere, nowhere is a consistent frame time more
51:21SPEAKERimportant than in a VR headset. Yeah. It's it turns out super important. So that was the,
51:26SPEAKERthat was my first real exposure to it, but it seems like it's, it's coming out to the rest of
51:30SPEAKERthe population now, which is probably good. I think it's a more reasonable because, because
51:36SPEAKERyour perception of differences in frame time is much more apparent than your perception of
51:42SPEAKERdifferences in frame rate. And, and also like everything else, people's ability to discern
51:49SPEAKERdifferent frame rates is, varies wildly from person to person. Sure. I want to say when we
51:54SPEAKERwere at Future, Greg Wiederman, who was at PC Gamer and doing hardware reviews for them, or when,
52:00SPEAKERwhen I started out there, was able to look at a game running and be like, oh yeah, that's about
52:04SPEAKER38 frames a second. And he, he was within 10% every time. Wow. That's impressive. Yeah. I mean,
52:09SPEAKERyou know, everybody has, everybody has some special skill, I guess. I would love to try
52:14SPEAKERthat. I wish there was some like standard test. You could like somebody, somebody put that together
52:18SPEAKERout there and let me, let me quiz myself. Well, part of it is that we watched the same benchmark
52:23SPEAKERloops hundreds of times. So every time we did video card reviews. Well, you know, I've been,
52:27SPEAKERI've been reviewing games for 25 years almost now in one form or another. So I've also stared at a
52:33SPEAKERlot of this stuff. We should probably, we should probably explain why 40 Hertz is just suddenly
52:37SPEAKERpossible all of a sudden. Yeah, that's important. I've talked to people on various discords and
52:43SPEAKERstuff this week about it as I've been raving about this in Spider-Man. And some people were curious,
52:47SPEAKERlike, why is this a thing now? Why is it not something that's been done before? Your frame
52:52SPEAKERrate always needs to be evenly divisible, I guess is the term, into the screen refresh rate of the
53:00SPEAKERscreen. It doesn't have to be, but it works better if it is. You're right. It doesn't have to be,
53:04SPEAKERbut ideally if you, for best presentation, you absolutely want it to be. You get weird
53:08SPEAKERcomb artifacts and tearing and stuff if you don't. Yes, you get, you get judder or tearing or all
53:12SPEAKERkinds of unpleasant looking things happening if, if, if, if it is not that way. So like on a 60 Hertz
53:18SPEAKERscreen, TVs have been 60 Hertz since the beginning of time. We talked about this in like the fifth
53:22SPEAKERepisode. It's because of, it's because of the speed, the water will spin spun at one of the
53:26SPEAKERfirst generators in North America. Yes. So anyway, going back to the beginning of television,
53:32SPEAKER60 Hertz, 60 re screen ref refreshes per second has been the thing, which meant that to get clean,
53:39SPEAKERsteady output, you either could only do 30 or 60 frames a second. Right. Yeah. Cause then you're
53:45SPEAKEReither at 30, you're every two screen refreshes, you're drawing the same frame twice or 60 to 60.
53:50SPEAKERIt should be pretty obvious. Right. So now that there are 120 Hertz screens out there,
53:55SPEAKERnow we can do 40 because now 40 can be displayed evenly 40 frames per second. Each frame should is
54:02SPEAKERrefresh three times to the screen. Right. Yeah. That's, that's why this is now possible.
54:07SPEAKERYeah. And, and well, and on the steam deck, it's possible because it's a,
54:11SPEAKERyou know, the, the screen that they put in, there's a variable refresh rate screen.
54:14SPEAKEROkay. It just works. Does that screen not go to 120?
54:18SPEAKERThe screen stops at 60, I think. Oh, okay. So I guess I show you, we should say the variable
54:22SPEAKERrefresh is the other way this can work because then the screen can only output as many as, as,
54:27SPEAKERsorry, the screen can only redraw as many times as there are frames being output.
54:31SPEAKERYeah. So, so on this, on the, on the steam deck, they they, they do it as a power saving thing.
54:38SPEAKERCause there's a lot of games. Like if you're playing slay the spire, you don't need to refresh
54:40SPEAKERthe screen every, you know, every 60 times a second necessarily. Yeah. That's been like an
54:45SPEAKERinteresting innovation of recent years. Like for example, when they went to the always on
54:49SPEAKERApple watch screens and I didn't very well, like other smartwatches probably were doing this
54:54SPEAKERbefore Apple, but that's just my reference point. When they went to the always on Apple
54:59SPEAKERwatch screen, when it's not sort of in focus, when you're not holding it up and like, it's,
55:03SPEAKERit doesn't need to be animating in front of your face. It redraws at like one Hertz.
55:06SPEAKERYeah. That's like literally one time per second, the screen is updating and that's how they're
55:10SPEAKERable to make the battery last. Yeah. It's it's it's it's interesting.
55:15SPEAKERThe thing I would say is if you have a TV that can do this, how do you flip it on?
55:19SPEAKERIs this the same as the thing that they did in Ratchet and Clank?
55:22SPEAKERYes. Yes. So the only games I'm aware of on consoles that do this, and there may be more,
55:28SPEAKERit's in Spider-Man 2, Horizon Forbidden West got an update for this and Ratchet and Clank
55:33SPEAKERon the PS5. And I don't know, it might, it's possible that maybe Returnal has it as well.
55:38SPEAKERIt seems like something that Sony first party has been pushing pretty hard, which
55:41SPEAKERthey should for good reason. Cause it's amazing. Like the experience is so good.
55:45SPEAKERWell, yeah. Cause the upshot is you get a game that looks like it's a 30 Hertz game,
55:48SPEAKERbut it feels like a 60 Hertz game. That's yes, that's, that's exactly it. And
55:52SPEAKERthat's why I give Insomniac so much credit for making that clear when they, they hit you with
55:56SPEAKERall those graphics options when you start the game. And like, if they did not give such detailed
56:00SPEAKERinfo about what they're doing, which what each setting is doing, I would just be like,
56:04SPEAKERfucking, I don't know, man, performance let's go. But they, they make it very clear and we don't
56:09SPEAKERneed to get into all of it here because you pick fidelity or performance. Then you pick your screen
56:12SPEAKERrefresh rate. Then you decide, do I want the frame rate uncapped or not? Like there's all kinds of
56:17SPEAKERconsiderations there, but, but what you said is exactly it. It's yeah. And they make that clear
56:22SPEAKERat the start when I think about it, but anyway, they make that clear. Like you're getting a higher
56:27SPEAKERframe rate without turning off any of the bells and whistles. Like you're keeping full rate tracing.
56:31SPEAKERYou're basically keeping the high resolution. I mean, it does go up and down a little bit more
56:37SPEAKERto maintain frame rate, but like essentially you're getting like the image quality of the
56:41SPEAKER4k presentation, but at a frame rate that feels pretty close to 60.
56:46SPEAKERYeah. And, and it's funny that carries over even into the, into the into the stream diversion
56:53SPEAKERbecause I've been playing on the Steam decks in the living room and it still feels like a 60 frames
56:57SPEAKERper second game, even though it's running at 40. So I guess that's like, that's a good place to
57:04SPEAKERleave that off if, if you think, right. I think so. Yeah. Like I, I really, I hope
57:08SPEAKERthat, you know, this is maybe not feasible for every indie developer with a small team out there,
57:12SPEAKERbut for like the big studios that are pushing kind of graphical powerhouses,
57:16SPEAKERlike I would love to see this become standard because the experience is so much better.
57:20SPEAKERThe only reason not to make it standard is that it doesn't work on 60 Hertz TVs.
57:24SPEAKERYeah, of course. But if, you know, I, this is the kind of thing where I assume shared libraries,
57:29SPEAKERshared technology will start to help like this, you know, I'm not going to say it's as easy as
57:34SPEAKERlike, you know, the DLSS plugin is, is literally just a plugin for things like Unreal Engine now.
57:39SPEAKERLike, I don't know if it'll quite get that easy that fast, but I hope that,
57:43SPEAKERI hope that middleware and maturing technology will make this like a relative no brainer.
57:48SPEAKERIt's something that you would hope that I would think the time consuming part would be coming up
57:52SPEAKERwith the performance profiles for each different one. And I would hope that the platform holder
57:57SPEAKERcould help with that when they're doing their certain stuff. Anyway, I don't know.
58:01SPEAKERAnd they should cause consoles is where this matters like on PC, whatever you just brute force
58:04SPEAKERwith more hardware, the things are not standardized in the same way, but in consoles, like that's the
58:10SPEAKERtension now that I see out there on social media is people like really upset at like, for example,
58:14SPEAKERlike the Alan Wake stuff coming out or like every time, every time a big new game is announced to
58:19SPEAKERlike, say not be shipping with a performance mode now, like people got, I said, don't do this three
58:24SPEAKERyears ago. And they did it anyway. People got really used to the performance modes on everything
58:28SPEAKERat the beginning of this generation. We were seeing PS4, PS5 games. Yes. And now that that
58:33SPEAKERstuff is starting to go away, like people are not happy about it. And I get it like frame rate is
58:37SPEAKERgreat and all, but this like they need, they need other options. And this was a great option for
58:42SPEAKERstill being able to push fidelity without totally sacrificing playability. Well, I mean, it's kind
58:46SPEAKERof the, look, it's the same thing that this is a tale as old as time bread, people complaining
58:52SPEAKERabout frame rate on consoles and expecting, you know, comparing a $2,000 PC against a $400 console.
58:59SPEAKERAnd anyway, we don't, we don't need to get, we don't need to really to get that. No, definitely
59:02SPEAKERnot. But this just, this is actually, it was actually a good compromise. I think it's a good
59:06SPEAKERbest of both worlds and, and it even applies on the PC sometimes. So should we talk about coffee
59:13SPEAKERa little bit? Sure. Just trying to see if there's anything else I should say about the TV before we
59:16SPEAKERmove on. I'm sure we'll have questions. The Google TV stuff is weird. Are you going to put an Apple
59:21SPEAKERTV on there? Not now. You might not. So like the apps are basically fine. It's kind of, it's kind
59:28SPEAKERof more of the like ancillary stuff built in around the Google TV stuff that is kind of
59:32SPEAKERannoying in spots. Yeah. Have you tried AirPlay with it? I might've tried it. It definitely,
59:39SPEAKERso I'm pretty sure it supports it. Okay. So does my receiver and the Roku that I've still
59:44SPEAKERgot hooked up that we now don't use. The receiver, surprise supports the old version. That's not like
59:49SPEAKERthe seamless handoff stuff. That's much better now. It's just, it's just the old original.
59:54SPEAKERI think the TV does, but, but you know, there's stuff like there's microphone built into the TV
59:58SPEAKERand there's a hard physical toggle off from the microphone if you don't want to listen to me all
1:00:03SPEAKERthe time. But I, and so I thought this was a Hisense thing and I just found out this afternoon
1:00:07SPEAKERit's actually a Google thing because TCL is also doing Google TV now. Apparently this even exists
1:00:12SPEAKERon like, like what's the Nest, like Nest home hub or something like that. Do you know what I'm
1:00:18SPEAKERtalking about? Yeah. The, the, all the Google home speakers have physical switches. So, so they,
1:00:25SPEAKERwhat they also all have. And so do these TVs is a strip of LEDs at the bottom that are essentially
1:00:30SPEAKERlike an error code display. Oh, and apparently Google signal for, Hey, the microphone is off and
1:00:36SPEAKERneeds to be on because this app can't access. It is for four yellow LEDs to show up at the bottom.
1:00:44SPEAKEROh, wow. Stay on until when are you reaching for a Google device? What are we?
1:00:49SPEAKERI just turned the mic off. It's a little yellow light on my top one.
1:00:53SPEAKERIs it, if it's just one yellow light, I think that's maybe for older devices.
1:00:56SPEAKERYeah. It was an older device. Anyway, long story short, it's just some goofy little stuff like
1:00:59SPEAKERthat. And it's like, I thought this was a dumb Hisense thing until I saw like TCL owners
1:01:03SPEAKERcomplaining about the same thing. It's just like, Hey, there are four yellow lights on at the bottom
1:01:06SPEAKERof my TV all the time because I don't want the microphone on. Got to get that black electrical
1:01:10SPEAKERtape, Brad. So I am, that's, that's how I started looking at light dims or you can snip some wires.
1:01:16SPEAKERYeah. Also the TV got stuck in a boot loop once. That's weird. And that sucked. And I had to
1:01:22SPEAKERfrantically try to get into the settings in about the 30 seconds I had between boots to hit the
1:01:30SPEAKERfactory reset. That was not great. How'd you get in a boot loop? I don't know. I have no idea. It
1:01:35SPEAKERwas after an update. Oh, weird. I've seen some people out there saying like Android and Google
1:01:41SPEAKERTV people saying like, you should probably just do a factory reset after each update.
1:01:45SPEAKERI'm increasingly safer. God, no, I don't want to have to reset all that. Like that's a huge,
1:01:50SPEAKERcause then you have to log into all that. That's asinine. Like don't get me wrong. I don't, I don't
1:01:54SPEAKERmean to download and downplay this for about 45 minutes until I resolved this, which again took
1:02:00SPEAKERsetting everything back up on the TV. I was like, am I just going to send this thing back? Cause it
1:02:04SPEAKERwas still in the return window. If this is going to be a regular occurrence, the TV is not for me.
1:02:10SPEAKERThis is increasingly making my feeling that the next TV I buy will be set up and never connected
1:02:16SPEAKERto the internet more than you have to do to do the initial setup. And then yes, looking around
1:02:20SPEAKERand that boot loop thing is not uncommon. I've seen people talking about that too. So like between
1:02:24SPEAKERthat and like this microphone error light thing and stuff like that, I've also seen a good number
1:02:28SPEAKERof people saying like, yes, I don't even do the onboarding. I don't even sign into an account. I
1:02:32SPEAKERdon't hook it up to the internet other than to pull whatever firmware update it needs to and then
1:02:36SPEAKERunplug it again. Like it's just a dumb terminal. I mean, it's just a dumb screen. I use boxes for
1:02:42SPEAKERall the actual apps. It's funny because like that was what's made me switch to home assistant the
1:02:46SPEAKERfirst time is because smart, my smart things broke and Samsung's response was, yeah, you're going to
1:02:52SPEAKERhave to set everything up from scratch. And I was like, if I have to set everything up from scratch,
1:02:55SPEAKERI'm going to be doing it in a way that I never have to deal with you fuckers again.
1:02:58SPEAKERYep. Yep. Honestly though, like for inexpensive, I will say like, you know, it's got issues and
1:03:03SPEAKERannoyances, but for as relatively inexpensive as this thing is for the picture quality that I
1:03:08SPEAKERhave seen and all the features and formats that it supports even buying this TV and an Apple TV
1:03:13SPEAKERtogether still feels super worth it. Yeah. It seems like a prime candidate for that.
1:03:17SPEAKERYeah. But also the apps mostly have been fine other than those little, little issues.
1:03:24SPEAKERShould we talk about coffee for a minute before we blast off?
1:03:26SPEAKERSure. We talked about bypass brew zero bypass brewers when we did the coffee episode a few
1:03:31SPEAKERmonths ago, they're relatively new thing. They kind of trail off of the AeroPress idea where
1:03:36SPEAKERyou can get immersion and filter like an immersion brew that's then filtered and you get kind of the
1:03:40SPEAKERbest of both worlds in terms of clarity and body for, for your brood, for your brood coffee.
1:03:48SPEAKERSounds very appealing as somebody who has taken to doing cold brew in a big Mason jar.
1:03:52SPEAKERYep. Which means I don't have a great way to fully, fully strain all the silt out or even
1:03:58SPEAKERhave a press to really like push the grounds down and make sure I'm getting all the good juice out.
1:04:02SPEAKERSomething. Yeah.
1:04:04SPEAKERSomething like you just described sounds very nice.
1:04:06SPEAKERWell, so the, the, the zero bypass is not a, it's not a force to push through like the like
1:04:12SPEAKERthe AeroPress is there's no plunger, but what you do they're, they're, they're basically designed
1:04:19SPEAKERto be both percolation and immersion. So immersion is like the French press style where the grounds
1:04:23SPEAKERare in the water and they sit there for a while. Percolation is when you run the coffee through
1:04:28SPEAKERthe water over like in a pour over a Mr. coffee or, or whatever. It's a three-part design. So,
1:04:36SPEAKERthis is the second gen one from this next level company, a bunch of other people fellow and,
1:04:41SPEAKERand some other vendors now have, have zero bypass brewers that are available. But this one was,
1:04:47SPEAKERthis one is the second gen one and this guy named Jonathan Gagne, who's a coffee aficionado and also
1:04:54SPEAKERan astrophysicist, looked at their first one and was like, "Hey, I can help you make this better.
1:04:58SPEAKERDo you want me to help?" And then they worked together and took what he understands about
1:05:02SPEAKERfluid dynamics and flow in and flow out and all that stuff and applied it to this,
1:05:08SPEAKERmainly designed for like this, the first one was called the level 10. It's a fairly large brewer,
1:05:13SPEAKERlike for, for cafes or for making multiple cups at a time. This is designed to be smaller for
1:05:18SPEAKERsingle serves or maybe two, two cups. And what it is, is it's a three-part thing. So, you,
1:05:24SPEAKERyou have a base that's like a hard rubber and it has channels under there. You put the filter in
1:05:30SPEAKERthe bottom of the base, and then there's a spout at the bottom that you can turn and open and close.
1:05:35SPEAKERIt's a variable, variable size spout. So, variable flow spout. So, you control the amount of water
1:05:41SPEAKERthat goes out at the bottom of the brew, and you put the coffee on top of that filter. Around the
1:05:46SPEAKERedge of it, you put the filter in, and then you jam this plastic cylinder that looks like an
1:05:50SPEAKERAeropress cylinder into the filter. It fits in really tightly, and it locks the filter in place
1:05:56SPEAKERto make sure that no water can get around the filter. So, there's no way for water to bypass
1:06:03SPEAKERthe coffee on the way out, basically. That's why it's called a zero bypass, I believe.
1:06:07SPEAKERThen, on top of that, for this one, they put a dispersion lid. It just rests on the top,
1:06:14SPEAKERand it's got a series of holes and channels that make a really even rain shower pattern
1:06:21SPEAKERon top of the coffee bed. Muckerman: Looks like an old-school shower head.
1:06:24SPEAKERKlineman: It works exactly like an old-school shower head. You pour the water in it,
1:06:29SPEAKERand the water comes down very evenly across the entire thing.
1:06:36SPEAKERI've used it for a month and a half now. It's really, really neat. I've been doing pour-overs
1:06:43SPEAKERnow for more than 10 years every day. Off and on, I do presses, I do siphons, I do all the other
1:06:49SPEAKERstuff. But the pour-over is the thing I keep coming back to. I think that this is the new
1:06:55SPEAKERmorning coffee going forward for me. Muckerman. You are just pouring over, that's it? You were
1:07:03SPEAKERjust standing there with your little long-neck kettle, as usual, just pouring into the shower
1:07:08SPEAKERthing? Is that the full process for you? Klineman. There's a bunch of different ways
1:07:13SPEAKERto use it. You can use it like a full immersion, like a French press style. You can fill the column
1:07:18SPEAKERup with water, close the valve on the bottom, let it sit for three minutes or four minutes or however
1:07:22SPEAKERlong you want to, twist the knob, and let it drain out. I've been doing the hybrid approach.
1:07:34SPEAKERI think that probably the real answer to your question is, there is not a consensus on what
1:07:37SPEAKERis the best way to use this thing yet. Part of that is that everybody has different goals. Some
1:07:42SPEAKERpeople want a more fuller-bodied immersion brew. Some people want something that's in between. Some
1:07:47SPEAKERpeople don't want something with a lot of clarity. The clarity people are going to leave the valve
1:07:51SPEAKERopen from the beginning. The full body people are going to leave it closed for a really long time,
1:07:57SPEAKERthen drain it all at the end. Next Level has four recipes on their site and a couple more on their
1:08:07SPEAKERblog. Scott Rau, who's a famous barista and has written a couple of the main textbooks on
1:08:15SPEAKERcoffee brewing and espresso and stuff like that over the years, is an authoritative source,
1:08:20SPEAKERhas another recipe that he uses. I'm using the information that Scott provides,
1:08:26SPEAKERplus one of the recommended recipes on the Next Level site. Basically, I use the dry filter recipe,
1:08:31SPEAKERwhich is a high-clarity, sweet outcome, but with a little bit more coffee, because I think the
1:08:41SPEAKER18g brew that they recommend is less coffee than I want to make. You don't need a pour-over kettle
1:08:48SPEAKERfor this. It's one of the big things. You just need a way to boil water and to pour it into the
1:08:51SPEAKERtop. The dispersion grate handles the distribution. You don't have to be able to aim, basically.
1:08:59SPEAKERFrom the looks of it, you do have to pour fairly slowly still, though.
1:09:03SPEAKERIf you have a kettle with a normal spout, though, you could pour as much as you need to into this.
1:09:10SPEAKERThe thing I end up doing is a hybrid, where you basically do a closed valve
1:09:14SPEAKERbloom to let the carbon dioxide escape from the thing. Then you flip the valve open after
1:09:19SPEAKERabout a minute of that, and then start doing the pouring process after that.
1:09:24SPEAKERThe cups that I've gotten out of it are, with the exception of the AeroPress, I've never done
1:09:31SPEAKERanything that has had this wide of variation in cups. On the third or fourth day I had it,
1:09:36SPEAKERafter I was pretty confident in how to use it, I tried four different recipes back to back to back
1:09:41SPEAKERto back. I didn't drink all the coffee, but tasted everything. The same coffee,
1:09:49SPEAKERone of them was super sweet and really, really flavorful, and you could taste all the tasting
1:09:53SPEAKERnotes. One of them was black tar, one of them was really acid-y, and the other one was just
1:09:59SPEAKERkind of meh and tasted muddy. It gives you control over variables that you haven't really
1:10:07SPEAKERhad control over before with a brew method, with a filter method. That's kind of it.
1:10:17SPEAKERThe basic upshot is, you grind your coffee, you put the filter into the base, you close the filter,
1:10:23SPEAKERclose the valve, you wet the filter if you so desire. I always advocate for
1:10:30SPEAKERrinsing paper filters, but whatever. Put your plastic canister, your tube in there,
1:10:36SPEAKERdump the coffee in on top of the filter, and then you do the bloom for about a minute.
1:10:42SPEAKERThen, generally, you open the valve and you run 50 or 100 milliliters of water in at a time.
1:10:49SPEAKERThere's gradations on the side, so you don't even need a scale, really. You can do it without a
1:10:53SPEAKERscale. Obviously, it's easier if you have a scale. That's pretty much it. You just keep pouring water
1:11:03SPEAKERin the top. You don't have to aim, you don't have to worry about agitating your grounds.
1:11:08SPEAKERI kind of shake it to level the grounds when I put them in in the first place. Then, you
1:11:13SPEAKERbasically have coffee in about three or four minutes. Pretty consistently good so far.
1:11:18SPEAKERSo, you could do it on top of the coffee cup. The feet on the base go all the way from the center
1:11:39SPEAKERhole, which is relatively small, to the edge. Even if you have a narrow Zojirushi or something you
1:11:44SPEAKERcan do it on a vessel that I brew into, and then I pour it into the mug from there. You could do it
1:11:50SPEAKERin whatever. It will literally work with everything. I don't think I'd want to do it on a 16-ounce
1:11:55SPEAKERZojirushi, because it would be a little tipsy with the height. You have to be a little careful,
1:12:01SPEAKERbecause sometimes when the bottom is really hot, the plastic tube gets a little loose. You always
1:12:06SPEAKERhandle it by the bottom. But because it's rubber, it never gets so hot that you can't pick it up.
1:12:13SPEAKERThe valve is really good. You can change the speed at which it drains. If you're doing a pour over
1:12:22SPEAKERand the water's going through the grounds too fast, your only option to change that is to grind
1:12:25SPEAKERthe coffee finer. With this, you can just turn the spout a little bit, and it'll slow the draining
1:12:31SPEAKERdown so the coffee lingers in the bed longer, and you get a fuller body out of that as a result.
1:12:40SPEAKERI understand now why the coffee people that I follow on the socials were so excited about
1:12:45SPEAKERthese things. It's both a pro and a con. You can change a lot of variables. That also means,
1:12:53SPEAKERif you make one cup of coffee a day, you can make some really bad cups of coffee while you're
1:12:58SPEAKERfiguring out what variables are right to change and which ones aren't. I made some really,
1:13:02SPEAKERreally bitter coffee by running the valve too slow. There's also no good way to measure the
1:13:11SPEAKERvalve speed. You have to just buy a ball because there's no detents. There's no marks.
1:13:17SPEAKERI've just got a vibe with it, man. You've got to look at the coffee coming out of the bottom
1:13:22SPEAKERof the thing and be like, "Okay, that's more than drips, less than a gush. Don't make that the title,
1:13:27SPEAKERplease, Brad." Oh, I won't. Wait, actually, hang on. I was just about to plant a title. I was just
1:13:32SPEAKERabout to seed a title. Can you say that again? More than a gush? No, more than drips, less than
1:13:38SPEAKERa gush. Yeah, that's what I said. That's way better than what I had. Oh, no. I was going to
1:13:43SPEAKERsay, though, I'm right here on... We said the name of this thing, right, to be clear? It's the next
1:13:46SPEAKERlevel... This is the next level Pulsar. The next level Pulsar is the name of the product. I'm on
1:13:50SPEAKERtheir site here, straight up got it set against a space background with a big nebula. They are
1:13:55SPEAKERfull on pitching this as coffee from space. The thing that he did, I think, is figured out
1:14:03SPEAKERboth the flow channels underneath the filter to make it run at the right speed. The goal is to
1:14:11SPEAKERget more or less the same speed in and out. The water stays exactly the amount of time you want
1:14:15SPEAKERit there. The holes in the top are set so that that works, but you still get a sprinkly pattern,
1:14:21SPEAKERand then the drain in the bottom works the same way. Sure enough, his blog is called Coffee Ad
1:14:26SPEAKERAstra. Yeah. He's been doing this for 15 years, I think, at this point. He's been talking about
1:14:31SPEAKERcoffee for a long time. Sure. I have one more question. Yes. Why would you rinse your paper
1:14:37SPEAKERfilter? Gets the paper taste out. Some people really like the taste of the paper filter,
1:14:43SPEAKERbut it covers up a lot of coffee stuff, coffee flavor. I guess I've never been able to
1:14:49SPEAKERdistinguish the paper taste from the coffee taste because everything, all the coffee I've ever made,
1:14:53SPEAKERhas been through a paper filter. Try rinsing your paper filter next time you drink your coffee.
1:14:56SPEAKERInteresting. Yeah. Just run a little bit of water through it. Just get it wet and let it sit for a
1:15:01SPEAKERsecond. Let me ask a question since I was talking about trying to filter silt out of my cold brew.
1:15:07SPEAKERYes. I tried using the other day for the first time a paper filter to do that because the last
1:15:12SPEAKERcup out of the big mason jar of cold brew is just... Actually, it's the last two sips of the
1:15:17SPEAKERlast cup, but it's disgusting. You probably want to pour rather... So when your cold brew is done,
1:15:25SPEAKERyou probably want to pour the cold brew through the paper filter at that point rather than wait
1:15:30SPEAKERuntil the very end. Yeah. And it did not work. Did it choke the filter? I guess that's what it
1:15:35SPEAKERwas. I went through like three filters because I was like, okay, maybe there's enough fine grain
1:15:39SPEAKERsilt in there on the first time to kind of choke it out. So I tossed that filter and then tried
1:15:44SPEAKERanother one and the same thing happened. And then I tried another one and it still happened. Some
1:15:48SPEAKERamount will run through and there's enough kind of downward pressure. But even like half of the
1:15:55SPEAKERliquid is still left sitting in the little basket thing. It just sits there, no drip, no nothing,
1:16:00SPEAKERlike it just sits and I could not get all the coffee through. You should grind the coffee
1:16:03SPEAKERway coarser. For cold brew, you're letting it sit for 24 hours, right? Ish, yeah. Sometimes a little
1:16:10SPEAKERless. Yeah. So if it's more than 12 and less than 24, your coffee should be the coarsest you've ever
1:16:16SPEAKERseen. Interesting. So I had been doing very coarse. My grinder goes to 15 is where it tops out. It's
1:16:23SPEAKERlike one to 15 on coarseness with a bunch of gradations in between. And I had been doing like
1:16:28SPEAKER13 and a half or something. That's probably, that seems right. But then I read one coffee blog that
1:16:33SPEAKERsaid like, oh, people just do that to help strain the silt out. I actually go finer. And so I had
1:16:39SPEAKERgone down to like 10 or 10 and a half. Maybe I should bump it back up then. But if you're using
1:16:43SPEAKERa Chemex filter, I'm assuming. No. Using a basket filter? Oh, for the paper filter? Yeah, for the
1:16:50SPEAKERpaper filter. I was just using a standard basket. I've also got a cone for what it's worth, but.
1:16:54SPEAKERThe cone isn't going to do what you want because it requires the silt in there to make the cone
1:16:58SPEAKERwork right. The other thing you could do is get some fine cheesecloth and use that. Yeah. I've
1:17:03SPEAKERtried that. Maybe it's shitty, cheap cheesecloth. Well, you have to do like six layers. You fold it
1:17:10SPEAKERover itself a whole bunch. But the problem with all of that, so the thing you don't want to do is
1:17:17SPEAKERsqueeze the water out of the grounds, the last bit of grounds, because you're going to get really
1:17:22SPEAKERgnarly. All the gnarly stuff that's going to make it really taste bad is in there. That was going
1:17:27SPEAKERto be my other question because I'm just doing kind of free floating grounds in a giant Mason jar.
1:17:31SPEAKERYeah, that part's fine. When I pour all the water out and then basically let it stop dripping,
1:17:36SPEAKERbut then I'm like, "Oh, but there's still a lot of moisture left in those grounds."
1:17:40SPEAKERThe other thing you could do, I don't know if this is a good idea or not, but try and let me know how
1:17:44SPEAKERit goes, is you could pour. If you have a steady hand, you can let the coffee sit and settle and
1:17:51SPEAKERthen pour the top 70% off really carefully in one continuous pour so you don't upend the sediment.
1:17:59SPEAKERThen before you start even seeing the sediment get near the end, you could run the rest of that
1:18:04SPEAKERthrough the filter and then just chuck out whatever stalls. I would try the Chemex filter
1:18:09SPEAKERif you have paper filters for the Chemex though. I do not, but should I get one?
1:18:15SPEAKERDo you have a Chemex, Ryan? I do not have a Chemex.
1:18:18SPEAKEROh, nevermind then. I'll table this one for now. I'll keep experimenting.
1:18:25SPEAKERLet me know how the cheesecloth... The cheesecloth is probably your best bet.
1:18:27SPEAKERI probably should just get some better cheesecloth than what I had.
1:18:31SPEAKERI mean, just keep folding it until it does what you want.
1:18:34SPEAKERSure. Sure.
1:18:35SPEAKERAnd then you have to wash nasty coffee cheesecloth in your laundry, which is not great.
1:18:40SPEAKERWell, this was not even good enough cheesecloth to save and wash.
1:18:43SPEAKERI think all cheesecloth seems bad. I don't know that I'm...
1:18:48SPEAKEROr actually more to the point, I don't think this cheesecloth would have survived a run
1:18:51SPEAKERthrough the washer. But also, I actually doubled it so many times, the liquid would not go through
1:18:56SPEAKERit all once. Oh, well, there you go.
1:18:58SPEAKERApparently that is possible. So one less than that,
1:19:00SPEAKERand let me know how it goes. Are you still doing the cold brew every day?
1:19:05SPEAKERYou mean drinking it every day, or... Are you doing the high concentrate and dilute?
1:19:09SPEAKERYeah, I'm drinking it every day. I've gotten the brewing down to honestly twice a week,
1:19:14SPEAKERsince I was doing a French press literally every night, but cleaning the French press daily just
1:19:20SPEAKERgot really old. I can see that.
1:19:23SPEAKERSo we've got the big... What is the big standard mason jar size? Is that two quarts, one quart?
1:19:29SPEAKERIs it the one that the eggnog comes in, or is it bigger than that?
1:19:32SPEAKERIt's like the double size of that. So that's a two quart then?
1:19:34SPEAKERI think it's two quart jars that we've got. So I'm doing... I actually... I got the ratio
1:19:40SPEAKERexactly as much to... I'm doing seven to one concentrate now. I figured out exactly how
1:19:46SPEAKERmuch grounds to water I could fit into that jar without it overflowing the top, which is about...
1:19:51SPEAKERI think it's about 225 grams of coffee to about 1575 water.
1:19:56SPEAKERI'm doing that twice a week, and that's enough to get me through a week, which is nice.
1:20:01SPEAKERThat sounds really good.
1:20:02SPEAKERYeah, it's working out. It's been a journey. Still working out some kinks.
1:20:09SPEAKERSo yeah, people... Again, the brewer is the next level zero. There's a similar one from Fellow,
1:20:15SPEAKERand I want to say that there's some other stuff coming that I'm not sure if I'm supposed to talk
1:20:19SPEAKERabout or not, but if you have questions, post them in the food channel. I've been talking to
1:20:24SPEAKERpeople about coffee in there off and on since the coffee up.
1:20:28SPEAKERMy TV again is a Hisense UAK, just in case you're wondering.
1:20:32SPEAKERYeah. And this one hasn't, as far as we know, it hasn't started the USB and it hasn't stopped
1:20:39SPEAKERworking after like six months. I was making a Your Motherboard joke from last week's episode. Sorry.
1:20:44SPEAKEROh, yes. That's a whole other thing.
1:20:48SPEAKERThere's a whole world of Your Motherboard jokes that people just don't make.
1:20:54SPEAKERYour Mama Board.
1:20:56SPEAKERYour Mama Board.
1:20:56SPEAKERSo incompatible. We need to work on this a little bit. Brad, we've reached the point
1:21:04SPEAKERof the show where we thank everybody for listening, and we especially thank our patrons.
1:21:07SPEAKERThank you, patrons.
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1:22:10SPEAKERYes, we appreciate you.
1:22:12SPEAKERYeah. As our friend Rob Zagny says at the end of all of his podcasts,
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1:22:20SPEAKERThat helps a podcast, it turns out.
1:22:22SPEAKERWait, even if it's a bad review?
1:22:24SPEAKEROkay. I'm not so crass that I'm going to say, "Don't leave a bad review for a podcast."
1:22:30SPEAKERBut, I assume you didn't get to this point in the show if you don't at least enjoy some part
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1:22:34SPEAKERTo be honest, the reason I asked was, I actually would believe that algorithmically, even one-star
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1:22:42SPEAKERThat's exactly it. There is enough up is down, war is peace going on in internet content these
1:22:49SPEAKERdays. If you told me that even negative reviews were actually beneficial, I would believe you.
1:22:54SPEAKERI will unequivocally say on Steam, negative reviews are not beneficial. If you like a game
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