Smarter than a Smart TV! (Raspberry Pi Inside)
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- Опубліковано 9 лип 2024
- This thing isn't a TV; it's a display! It costs more than a smart TV, but it also doesn't spy on you, so that's nice.
Thanks to Sharp NEC Display Solutions of America for sending the display, speakers, stand, and Compute Module kit used in this video.
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#RaspberryPi
Mentioned in this video:
- NEC UHD Professional Display M551: www.sharpnecdisplays.us/produ...
- MPI4E Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 addon: www.sharpnecdisplays.us/produ...
- Intel Smart Display Module: www.intel.com/content/www/us/...
- Crab Rave: • Noisestorm - Crab Rave...
- What Does the Fox Say? • Ylvis - The Fox (What ...
- Lincoln-Binns Compute Module 4 Enclosures: lincolnbinns.com/shop/interne...
Contents:
00:00 - Not a TV
01:22 - Everywhere but GameStop
02:20 - Raspberry Pi Inside
03:11 - MediaPlayer on the Pi
05:04 - RetroPie
05:32 - LibreELEC / Kodi
06:03 - Native Linux on a TV?
06:23 - Why so expensive?
07:27 - Gaming?
08:22 - Alternatives - Наука та технологія
The best feature of a display like this is that it doesn't come with all the malware that TVs ship with these days.
You can build your own! :-)
Malware & spyware
I'd highly recommend installing pi-hole. I installed it like 3 weeks ago.
Never seen a single Ad on the Tv. But the amount of requests that get blocked is just nuts.
What allot of people dont realize is that consumer TVs are actually subsidized to include this.
@@sagichdirdochnicht4653 how install this on a smart tv?
The lengths you go to buy a Raspberry Pi these days. Shucking TV's for RPi's may become a thing :).
Haha I was thinking of saying that, but there are a few cheaper ways-not by much, but still... I'll talk about those next week ;)
HAHAHAHAAA!!!!! - At least you have a cool display to tinker with after you get that CM4 you've been looking for :D
wonder if it'd work with other CM4 compatible boards like Banana Pi's new compute module
But can the display play back 4K Dolby Vision video, with True HD, or DTS-HD-MA audio?
My TV can, from my (RPI4) Plex server, in direct playback mode. Or from Disney Plus etc.
Probably not.
@@JeffGeerling Good to hear! Because Pis are now 2-3x MSRP :(
It would be great if TV operating systems were more open along with the hardware, this has such modular setup potential. Imagine if you could wipe away 5-10 year old samsung/lg/whatever OS on older TVs and install a fresh lightweight linux option, would give them a lot more life and usefulness (or even just swap out the SoC). With big TVs like this there are lots of options for modular hardware, something like the bigger Intel NUC compute element could easily slot into one of these and be a powerhouse home theater option, hell the TV itself could be the home plex server...
Samsung OS is actually one of the best. The problem with smart tv is they use garbage SoCs
@@mod4rchive not the new Samsung OS’s, it’s filled with ads and a very clunky ui
@@mod4rchive As someone who has a circa 2009 Samsung TV, if they're one of the best, then all the rest must be the worst garbage in town. Even when it was brand new it was slow and hyper annoying. Especially when bad signal caused it to lockup, sometimes until you pull the power cord.
Of of the manufacturers--I want to say TCL--was very up-front about the fact that it actually costs more these days to sell a "dumb" TV than a Smart TV, because the latter will be subsidized by the expected user data collection revenue.
That is to say, these is zero incentive for anyone to make an open OS TV, as it would be even more expensive to cater to the (sadly) extremely niche audience of folks who want smart devices but care about privacy or moddability.
They will not allow it because you will keep using it and won't buy new TVs.
When we were up for our last TV purchase I was blown away that there are no "dumb" TVs available anymore. It's almost like these companies are selling our usage data and greed is making their decisions for them. /s
Thanks for the intro to this concept. I think this is pretty cool stuff and I like the concept of knowing what code is running on equipment that I own.
Selfishly, I actually kinda like it. The prices are heavily subsidized by companies like Netflix and Amazon who pay the manufacturers for including dedicated buttons on the remotes and selling them usage data, so I get it much cheaper and then I just connect it to my HTPC and never use any of that crap (hell, I don't even connect the TV to the Internet).
Just have to make sure the TV doesn't also have an always-on microphone or camera!
@@JeffGeerling 1984 was a manual for some of these TVs
@@hellterminator I thought a similar approach would work well for us until the built-in "smart" software started crashing regularly. It's frustrating to have a TV that works fine as a display but keeps being kneecapped by the computer inside it. The dedicated buttons on the remote are annoying as any accidental press will exit the input it was on. It also doesn't help that those dedicated buttons take up a majority of the remote faceplate, increasing odds they will be accidentally pressed. Almost like it is intentional...
Own nothing and like it? No thanks, not for me.
@@gannas42 Well, that sucks. My TV doesn't crash. And I don't even use the remote - the only thing I need the TV to do is turn on and off and my HTPC handles that through CEC.
2:20 made me lol
"Not all of these displays run on a Pi" and shows BSOD. Well played.
Just FYI: the Pi 4 can definitely play back 4K videos, but they have to be encoded in h.265/HEVC for it to work.
huh, but h.265 is more cpu intensive than h.264
@@arjix8738 I believe the Pi 4 has better hardware support for decoding h265
@@arjix8738Not with hardware decoding it isn't.
@@Pocket-Calculator well duh, hardware decoding means that the GPU is doing the decoding
@@arjix8738 The Raspberry Pi usually have specific components to decode video. That allows it to decode high resolution video and also use less power than it would it it was decoding via CPU.
We had these at my previous job, and they didn’t actually last longer than off the shelf standard consumer TVs. They basically lasted a bit past their 3 year warranty and started having backlight issues. They were run 24/7 as signage displays and had plenty of airflow around them. Meanwhile, there are several consumer model TVs that preexisted my employment there (more than 5 years ago) that are run 24/7 for the same purpose (meeting room listings, and digital signage) that are still running today
What did you work as? Sounds like an interesting job, these TV's fascinate me, so installing/troubleshooting them sounds meaningful
We started building our own totems from cheap LCDs, cheaper, easy to replace the monitor and the computer could be bespoke
5:41 about the remote working, as it's showing in the top right of the screen it's using cec or consumer electronics control, this is a protocol to have the display communicate with the connected device (the pi) over HDMI. LibreELEC also supports this when using other PIs connected via HDMI to a TV. (or at least the pi zero I have does)
One of the departure boards in stanstead airport had a big raspberry pi logo on it a couple months ago, that was funny
The reason that you can use your remote is its using a CEC module to talk to the Pi. is a communications protocol built into the HDMI standard allowing CEC-enabled HDMI devices to exchange information and send/receive control messages.
I didn't know that, it's handy to know going forward.
I wish we could still buy "dumb" TVs, with no smart features, which could just have all their settings controlled by whatever media player box we're using.
I have 2. This video might be over my head and I just don't get it. I have a 50 inch dumb tv with a windows 7 PC and pi 3b hooked up. In my kitchen I have a 32 inch ( I am using it right now) with Nvidia Shield box. Both use keyboard and mouse, gamepads. So I just do not understand the hype for this monitor he is showing. Ok mine are not built in, but Velcro or build a bracket behind tv a connect with HDMI. What's the difference?
Both TV's are sceptre TV's. Both remotes work on eather tv
You could accomplish the same thing by simply not connecting your tv to the internet....
@@davefarley4318 a lot of money
@@davefarley4318 thats the catch lol, the only dumb tv nowadays are mediocre displays compared to the rest of the market (its a walmart brand afterall) and dont expect 99% of the actual good displays will come with smart functionality
I had never imagined the TV of my dreams would also come with an RS-232 port! Time to break out the null modem cable!
2:07 I was tempted to buy one of these for like £50 from an e-waste recycler before. I would love to setup a giant touchscreen like that with Home Assistant in my home.
If you do this pls record uplod it to youtube
I would love to get ahold of one for my d&d group table.
Yeah I've seen the older ones go for 30€ here as well.
I did that, giant touch screen. Used enormous amounts of power, i got rid of it.
@@Away0G nice. How much?
I thought it was going to be a chore to find a non-smart TV to replace the one that just died, but I wasn't expecting that I would be replacing it with a store display. This is fantastic news!
Be prepared to shell out a pretty penny though, they are really expensive...
Just get a smart TV and don't connect to the internet
@@gibbsfreenthalpy There were at least 3-4 options on the sitelink Jeff provided that were 4k resolution under $1000; when you consider that they should last at least 10 years and probably more, it's not that bad -- compared to giving up your freedom and advertising info + your TV is spying on you and using your internet bandwidth
@@kingneutron1 huh, ok, didn't see that, sry. I just roughly know the price we paid, and that was definitely more, even considering that we bought about 50-60 of them...
@@kingneutron1 How's it spying on you if you don't connect it to the internet? This whole concept seems a bit far fetched to me. In terms of value, you're way better off buying a smart TV, leaving it disconnected from the internet, and hooking up a HTPC or Raspberry Pi with internet access.
I scored a used Panasonic commercial display recently for $35 (42") . works great and it's a
tank.
These NECs are also used 24/7 in manufacturing on large production lines, displaying multiple statistics to operators and supervisors, allowing them to see at a glance during their process adjustments spec readings in real time without being tied down to a workstation monitor.
Yep, spent $13k on a display from them for a Hendrick dealership I worked at. Freaking amazing displays. Especially for outdoor use. Humidity didn't bother it, bright enough to display even with direct sunlight!
A "TV" with a serial port, the nostalgia!
Hey Jeff, great video! Really enjoyed seeing RPis in use IRL! Super cool! Also, I wanted to say this video had a really high production value, which was cool! On the other hand I also enjoy the less produced stuff because it comes off as more you (like Red Shirt Jeff :) ). Either way, great video!
Was searching for this topic of video 2 weeks ago. glad i found this. Keen for more!
A lot of these types of display run centralised signage software to control the layout and content.
You can usually define an area of the screen to pick up live video streams from the network, like multicast or RTSP.
Needless to say, there are Linux based, open source, signage projects like Xibo you can use, so if you have a machine with a TV tuner card, you could stream TV across your LAN to your non-TV signage display.
HD Homerun is excellent for this
A pc on a stick running Windows or Linux are plug and play, They work out to be cheaper than the time and hassle of using RPi stuff!
It's almost jarring watching you do videos, and then see so much stuff from where I live. It's so rare to find a 'tuber that's in the area! I need to keep en eye out, maybe I'll bump into you on of these days!
Aging Wheels is near STL for another good channel. Now if only anyone was from KC
Great video, as always, Jeff! Thank you
Thanks Jeff. Fantastic products
This thing is great! Aside these enterprise displays, we need non-smart TVs to make a comeback!
My last TV, I bought it based on the screen specs because I knew it would get outdated pretty fast. Also refurbished, pretty sure someone didn't like the lack of some smart features
Smaller again as well. A high quality picture in a small format is plenty in many cases. Just consider what most people used to watch this video.
Me walking into random stores in the mall:
CAN I LOOK AT YOUR TVS JEFF TOLD ME TO SEE IF THEY HAVE PIES
Haha "Mall traffic was up 7% this month, but nobody bought anything, they were just looking at all our store displays."
I worked on the display Signage at DEN and am still good friends with the team that maintains them! Loved to see them make the Video!
Thanks for creating so many great videos!
Great timing on this! I have a few Pis running as dashboards for processes at work, simply refreshing an internal website every few minutes to get updated data. I'm planning on transitioning to something better where I could mix the page in with company announcements and other dashboards. I'd love to see a video about doing something like this with an open-source software.
The coolest use of displays I've seen in a store (and a mall store at that) was the Microsoft store(rip), where they had displays basically wrapping around the walls.
There was this furniture store we had, (we still have it) and it had a commercial that did really well. They had wraparound displays showing all of their commercials in one of their branches after that.
I picked up an ‘older’ NEC display to use with my streaming box. For being only 1080, it has amazing color accuracy, smooth motion and best of all, none of the clunkiness and unnecessary features of a smart TV.
Great video and info!
Those things are great. We use them as information displays in our fire and rescue stations, where they show general information such as time, weather, tide and specialized info such as current ressource status or in case of an alarm a data overlay about the new mission, site, action type etc...
They're perfect for that. And maybe the world's most expensive Raspberry Pi magic mirror :D
This TV may be the only reliable source to buy a RPI these days :-)
lol
and... 😭
I don't know haha, but in Malaysia we have a very reliable official store that, i saw, has stocks that are available once a week, 10/20 of them once, but usually comes with package, that sucks, but sometimes i got the pi just with a $10 sd card,
It's name is Cytron Technologies
@@kreinova2747 Cytron's pretty cool - they've contacted me in the past, and they have some decent white-label parts too.
Awesome video. Great work!
awesome video! also, your ansible playbooks have been incredibly helpful over the years - just wanted to call that out lol
its great to see that raspberry pi integrations are now available for commercial use
interesting to see how many of them are already probably at use at stores, i have to keep an eye open next time im in a store so i can maybe spot one of those lol
I’ve been wondering if there’s anyone that makes just the display for awhile. This answers that. Dumb tvs are the future. Pick your own OS
You know what the best part about these is. My school has a lot of these hanging everywhere. I realised it as soon as they crashed. They do that a lot and the school is to lazy to reboot them.
Wow, this combination is really cool!
Sounds like the ultimate display for a Homelab Grafana display.
Great video. I work in the signage industry and love these displays a lot and wish I could work with them more. But getting some small shop to actually buy them at this price, instead of the cheapest TV at Best Buy and then just using a FireTV stick, is very difficult. Signage has a lot of options and most go with the cheapest solution. I'm in SoCal and when I go through McD's drive through around the area, I see that the "TVs" the chose to use are failing big time. So if McD's can't even afford to install these, then Joe's sunglass hut probably won't either :)
Yeah; I have noticed some places cheap out, and within months, the TV is washed out or really, really dim (especially if they place it somewhere exposed to sunlight for part of the day).
And at that point, since they invested in the setup their using, they just go with it (since the dull image isn't as noticeable if you've just seen it every day a tiny bit less) and don't feel like they could switch to a proper display at some point :(
Great video thanks Jeff
thanks for this great video, learning about these things was very interesting
Oh hey, I have an older 1080p model of one of these! Recovered it from a long abandoned business location
It currently runs as my primary monitor on my desktop. This displays surprisingly good for just about damn near anything you could throw at it, I was surprised it even still worked when I found it lmao
how about DRM streaming services, I can't seem to get these to work on my linux desktop due to DRM (widevine L1) not being supported, I'm guessing it will be the same for pi based media centers? Lets say for amazon prime hd, can't get that one to work.
So thankful for this
I'd been curious about this for a while, thanks for scratching the itch!!!!!!!
This video is embedded on Sharp-NEC's SOC page for their signage. Congrats! Oh, and the Pi does have hardware h.265 (hevc) decoding and will do 4K fine, if you encoded it properly. If it doesn't, then Handbrake is your friend.
It's funny you pointed out webOS as the proprietary operating system :) That's based on the open source webOS from Palm and HP years ago. LG still maintains the current repo. webOS OSE.
still got my hp touchpad (at least thats had more updates/life than my now defunct ipad3) with a gazillion updates/improvements on it and a pre3 collecting dust somewhere.
Samsung TVs use Tizen, which is also open source and actually backed by the Linux Foundation.
I enjoyed this video. Thank you.
I used a 55 inch NEC display with an OPS module as my living room TV for a long time. The OPS module was beastly too, 6th Gen i7 and 16gb of RAM
Yeah, those setups are pretty good. I worked with older NEC screens, which were a part of some kiosk system which I had to repurpose in serveral of our offices. It had to be done cheap, so some PI's and a rescheduled screen did the trick. When we went into lockdown in 2020 I left the PI's on, when I returned a few months ago they were still running lol.
Seems like a 4k (UA-cam) capable pi will be ideal. Eagerly waiting for a snapdragon gen 3 type soc, 8 6x2 or 4x4 big.little with a nice adreno 730 or mali g78. Gonna need a passive heatsink but hey, I'll take a price bump to $45 for 4gb at that point. I don't need my big gaming pc all the time, so doing responsive browsing on a pi would be ideal instead of the pi/laptop combo.
Wow how cool is this? Thanks for this cool video Jeff!
I still use a nec p702 from 2008 which ran forever. The quality of the components inside is impressive.
I've said for a long time TV'S should use a standard input interface so the smart part can be upgraded
SCART?
The serial port might seem odd, but RS-232 was the standard way of controlling displays and projectors before CEC came along, and continues to be used in the "pro" market. My projector has a serial port and it has been very useful in automating my home theatre.
This reminds me of my first flat tv was a $4000 commercial Panasonic 50 plasma with a similar blade system that allowed input upgrading I loved that tv!
Cool information!
Funnily enough one of the shops near my place has one, for the last few weeks its bugged out, so its displaying linux error codes, so i wondered if it had a pi inside or some other arm computer
Could also still be Intel, just running a Linux OS instead of Windows.
"Smarter than a Smart TV" oh gods no. What now, don't tell me they taught it to tell when I'm lying so it can interrogate me about brand preferences.
Edit: oh so it's actually just a big display that can make for an actually good TV that won't spy on me.
clever setup 👍🏻
Very informative.
btw: sharps remote worked out of the box because of hdmi cec :)
Ah... that would be obvious from the little message that popped up while I was booting the first time :P
Amazing that you could upgrade this thing in the future without having to toss the whole TV for a new one,I have a fairly modern Quantum Dot TV and while its picture quality is fantastic, I often find its UI to be slow and laggy,Most likely because it has a slow processor :/
Great video, most interesting !
Very informative. I didn't know this about displays.
Jeff, is it possible to recreate this experience by plugging in a Pi4 to the hdmi input as well as having the Pi control some sort of IR-blaster? This way it could control the IR functions of the TV, including power cycling.
Is there a generic remote? It would seem there might be a market for converting smart TVs into smarter TVs.
Be cool to have a standard remote and software suite for doing this.
Of course one would not benefit from the better hardware of a commercial unit. Wonder how big those panels get in 4k?
On our (not smart and old enough to be cold cathode backlit) tv, some simple commands can be sent between the pi and tv over hdmi-cec. This includes changing the input source to the pi when it boots and play/pause on the tv remote playing and pausing when running kodi. This can be a bit hit and miss and doesn't have many features implemented, so an IR solution might be the best way to go (maybe even a relay on the mains supply of the TV a guaranteed way of restarting it or putting it in a known state).
Historically, each major manufacturer has had their own ir protocols and mappings of buttons. The Linux IR drivers have built in learning functionality from a genuine remote, or can use an existing config file someone else has made.
I think this is still in the hobbyist realms for now (unless something has changed and I am not up with the times) as too much talk of interfacing devices together will put off those who just want their tvs to work and will make do with the smart tv's foibles instead. For anything commercial, I would think an off the shelf solution like outlined in the video would probably be selected for reliability, time and having someone to call to fix it for you reasons.
You'd be surprised how many TVs have CEC, even if it's not explicitly stated in the manual. I've found many TVs capable of controlling Kodi distributions through the in-built pulse CEC plugin. Most basic buttons, like arrows, OK/Enter and Back work fine for Kodi.
I do this with libreele on a pi. CEC allows the arrow buttons on some TV models' remote to control Kodi as well as turn off the TV or wake the TV from being off on button press, although I normally use a remote connected to rpi via USB (not all of my tvs support CEC and since they're all older I wasn't expecting them to say I bought remotes for all 3).
The screen image quality is bad, better to just buy a normal tv, then connect a pi via hdmi to it.
It's almost impossible to find non-"smart" TVs on the consumer market these days. The data tracking and advertising increase the profit margin.
@@pseudonym1515 Just leave the TV offline, it cant send data without internet.
Thanks Jeff for the videos I really love Pi..😍
I had two of these. Amazing when you understand that these are huge monitors/advertising exhibition displays. They're actually super nice and with heaps of connectors... Just no eArc ;)
Love the video... The only thing I might've missed is the price of this screen...
Check the links in the description-this model is somewhere around $1500 USD, so I didn't want to focus too much on price, since it's not something the average consumer would probably consider.
@@JeffGeerling I replied to another comment, if you go to the sitelink you provided and sort by price, once you get past the "contact us" junk there are at least 3-4 options for 4K resolution displays under $1k :)
4k is over-rated
LCD flat panels are overrated, CRT's with rpi 0w2's running OSMC all the way through!!! =D
This was awesome and has given me some expensive ideas
Woah thanks for this. I always wondered what types of displays those are at stores!
Wow .. i've done video walls before on standard Rpi's but this, this is a dream.
Many thanks for this precious knowlege
NEC displays have been my go to choice for business applications. I always get arguments from people complaining that they are too expensive. They see the prices of TVs at Best Buy and Costco and think, "What's the difference?" I always explain that the commercial displays are built for commercial applications, they are but to last and be on for long periods of time. Furthermore, consumer TV warranties often do not cover the TV when installed outside of someone's house. I don't need or want a SmartTV with a Netflix button on the remote in a conference room. I want a large display, not a large TV. Great video, I'm going to show this to people who challenge me on why I spec a commercial display in the future.
Never would have thought!
Its always cool to compare the redundancy of commercial/ enterprise gear vs consumer products.
amazing video!
Very interesting Ad. 👍
Good video! Some of us really like tech! I used Kodi for years and run Retro on a Pi 3 with a USB NES controller. Works well.
I already found a lot of displays running with Rasperry Pis, but often the Pi just is strapped with some zip ties to the wires that go into the display. Such hacky setups are quite popular.
And cheaper
Love these things. Run loads of them at work for digital signage!
And me connecting the Raspberry to the TV with HDMI like everyone else... and doing the same. XD
This shows how versatile the Pi is. I don’t own one, perhaps I should. I was thinking of getting a Pi 400 as I like the form factor. I currently use an Asus Chromebook and an iPad as my daily driver.
Very cool. Can’t wait to try this when Raspberry Pi’s become available.
Sooo... after next time you're not Jeff Geerling? (TIC). Great video as always man. Love your work. Everytime I get bored and just play games and don't do tech I always get the will to tinker back after watching videos like this one.
Thank you for this video! For a while now I've been had the NEC V754Q on my list of potential TV replacements. I have yet to pull the trigger because there just aren't really good reviews or experience that I can find. This is the first such video, so I appreciate your insights. Ultimately I'll probably still settle for a Sony, but man these NEC displays are very tempting.
Awesome!!
NEC has always had great remote support. At one time I had 4 P462s that Burgerking upgraded. They threw all of them in the dumpster, breaking 2 screens. These things are beast. Windows 7 pc compute modules built in. They are not the greatest I’ve seen on a TV. But daisychaining them together is always a blast.
Love all this, definitely best type of TV. Pi is invented, designed and manufactured in west UK in Southern Wales. Amazing country to visit if you have the time. Beautiful place.
just amazing.
Cool video!
that is so cool. especially that the board is removable so you can add newer ones later!
very cool!
For consumer TV, you can buy demo units. 12 years ago, I bought a demo unit. It has one great feature: a glass panel in front of the screen!
I also suspect a better build, because it's still doing great in all aspect.
I also got it cheaper than the original product, because it was already used.
A friend who bought it with me didn't want in the first place, so I explained him that those TVs are made to be on display every day while the store is open, plus the glass pane that makes it sturdier.
I bought back my part a few years later. A bit expensive, but that TV was expensive and the price was still right.
Small world, I just bought my glasses from he lady at the @1:39 mark! I've been in to Pi's for a while now and just found your channel! See you at the Galleria one day!
The ability to swap out the compute module, and the reliability would make it worth pay its cost, this is amazing.
I have heard they last about 3 years (coincidentally when the warranty ends) and then start having backlight issues, but some of the ones I saw installed in around 2014 are still going strong today,