Continuing on regarding collecting data from your car …
Obviously one seriously unwelcome development in recent years is the arrival of a Google operating system for TVs, and the standardisation around that operating system by some manufacturers.
The upside is that if you have no interest in streaming then you can generally block all traffic between the TV and the internet - or just don’t connect / configure with the internet (which is better than a car). That of course means that firmware updates are then not happening on the TV, which may or may not be a problem.
I can’t speak for your country but most (all?) CRT TVs here are analog only - and there is no analog TV signal here any more. So the TV by itself is useless as a TV (which I guess is quite secure and private ).
So if you have a CRT TV, you may be using it with a set-top box - which receives a digital TV signal, decodes it, and outputs the signal as analog. But that just pushes the problem from the TV to the set-top box.
I have a Sony KV-13FS100 that has nothing connected to it at the moment, along with a matching RM-Y173 remote:
It mostly gets used for video game tournaments within my local area. I eventually plan on acquiring a suitable A/V cart (probably from Luxor) along with sixth-generation video game consoles for it once I have the resources to do so, but for now, it remains on the floor.
An interesting tidbit is that algos seem to be doing the content analysis in device, probably to save on storage, possibly to transmit it intermittently (when online).
Smart CRT would be possible, if someone used a chromecast or similar pluggen into it. Another alternative for displaying that isn’t that doesn’t usually include “smart”: projectors.
Or computer monitors. The top-end models may suggest using proprietary software to calibrate the display to a specified colour space, but that is about it.
If you have an old analog TV and an old VCR, you can still put up a vertically polarized, UHF yagi antenna and point it at the nearest UHF Amateur Radio television repeater. Plug that antenna in to the VCR. Tune the VCR to Cable TV channel 57 (not UHF channel 57) and watch amateur radio operators taking turns going on the air via a 6 MHz wide, old style analog television signal. You just need to find out when their club nets are. Try tracking that Google.
US here. I have a CRT TV that is not analog only. [ It’s a 27" CRT that claims 1080i “HDTV” resolution and has one input HDMI port and does receive/decode DTV signals from the antenna. No wifi or networking of any kind. ]
That exact model has not been submitted in the CRT Database yet, but there are others who have them on the CRT Gaming subreddit:
Otherwise, the closest entry match is the Samsung SlimFit TX-2793H, which was what I had originally mentioned in an earlier post, but edited it because this has two HDMI inputs instead of one:
If you don’t mind my asking, when did you buy that?
I would think there would be a narrow window of time to buy such a TV but, again, it is going to differ between countries.
However the really important point is:
With a car, collected data can be leaked on each periodic service. That business model doesn’t really work with a TV. So even if your TV is collecting data, the data is not likely going anywhere.
Fun option though: More recent HDMI standards (≥1.4, which is not actually very recent by now) contain an ethernet channel. So a malicious TV could exfiltrate that way - with a range of assumptions. Did you check for that?
IIRC it was December of 2005. There is a sticker that indicates it was manufactured October 2005.
I believe the HDMI port is an HDMI 1.0 port. The TV was manufactured in Oct 2005 and HDMI 1.4 didn’t come out until 2009, so I think I’m safe.
My son mentioned that gamers might be interested in it since the older CRT TV’s had very little lag video. I looked into it and, from what I could tell, it is constructed in such a way that even the analog ports do a analog-to-digital conversion … which is what causes the lag.
Maybe those gamers were (pro) retro gamers who may have other reason liking CRTs too. I believe old NES etc. gamers use CRT’s in competitions due to rules and because the speeds that they are capable of are dependent on of screen refresh rate, to make records official, or something. After all, those games were designed for CRT flickering.
My understanding, which was based on a quick conversation with my son, was that gamers used CRT’s with analog-only inputs because these devices have very little display lag, whereas the digital devices have video buffering which, even on 120Hz refresh screens, apparently causes noticeable lag. Display lag - Wikipedia
Display lag is a phenomenon associated with most types of liquid crystal displays (LCDs) like smartphones and computers and nearly all types of high-definition televisions (HDTVs). It refers to latency, or lag between when the signal is sent to the display and when the display starts to show that signal. This lag time has been measured as high as 68 ms,[1] or the equivalent of 3-4 frames on a 60 Hz display.
…
For older analog cathode ray tube (CRT) technology, display lag is nearly zero, due to the nature of the technology, which does not have the ability to store image data before display.
Wow, started to check some vague memory and that took me to a rabbithole of nostalgia and internet links. Seems like there are several schools of thought, of which lag and responsiveness is the other main one. Other being image quality related (some even prefer the scanlines apparently - so much that modern emulators have that as a feature). And if you’re old enough, some may get shivers from PAL / NTSC confusion. Someone also apparently hacked their gaming console inside a CRT because there’s extra room. And one enthusiast showed how to make a modern version of an old display, all the way by adding weighs to the flatscreen for that authentic feel!
A well spent half an hour back at memory lane…
One of the sites mentioned different ways signals get processed and boxes that can be used to convert various modes to different cables. If HDMI really feels dubious channel leaking information (or, in other ways), those boxes could be used to separate the visual information and convert it back a gain - kind of a filter. May cause some lag for those pro gamers, though.
That is more or less the reason. For further resources, there is the CRT Gaming subreddit wiki:
Here is the official user manual from Samsung for your CRT:
The weight specifications on page 79 claims to be 120.1 lbs. There is also an upgrade port on the rear, but it is not clear how it is used to service the CRT.
On the subject of lag in digital video, the lag generally becomes noticable only when a lot is happening on the sceeen. I am sure this is why the gamers are specifically affected more than others.
One example I read about explained it this way. Analog video signals send sixty new frames of images per second, even when still Images are being sent. The bandwidth requirements never change and are unrelated to the properties of the video imaging. Digital signals send sixty frames of images each second, by sending only the changes in information from one frame to the next. If a still image is being sent, then until the images start to change from one frame to the next, very little to no information will be sent from one frame to the next frame. This method serves to compress moving images down in to much smaller data streams and thus, brodcast TV started televising several digital TV channels where there used to be only one analog TV channel before brodcast TV went digital. In between the two extremes of between still images and high-action video such as gaming, are all degrees of action and in-action. So with digital video images the bandwidth requirements typically change from one moment to the next. The algorithms that are set up to efficiently decompress most TV shows may not work well for extremely active video games as buffers stay full of incoming and outgoing information without as many natural lags as the typical TV shows would have from one frame to the next. So with constantly full buffers, additional information then gets lost when there is no buffering space left, causing freezing video and pixilation. This might be fixable if you can find a better codec and possibly with less compression involved. Even with a perfect codec, you still need adequate bandwidth and fast enough processing power to keep up in real time with the processing and reconstruction of the compressed images. The processing lag found in digital video may never get as low as with analog video performance. At best, it might become unnoticable.
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