Things to Look for in a New TV, Beyond the Usual Ones

At some point I'll have to upgrade my TV. My current one is "non-smart", and works fine but is getting old. Since you can't practically get a dump TV any more, I'll have to accept that will come with the package.

Other than the usual specs like screen size, resolution, refresh rate, colour reproduction, there are a few things I want to look at when buying any new TV:

• Turn on time from cold start. The time it takes some TVs to turn on these days is really annoying.
• Channel change time. Likewise, changing channels for some reason can take a ridiculous length of time.
• Input lag. Good to know in case the TV is ever used for gaming.
• What firmware is the "smart" bit based on? Is it an open source or community supported firmware, so that when the manufacturer gets bored of supporting that model you can still get updates? If I don't want to agree to the T&Cs of an update, will it stop playing any specific media formats? Can I be held hostage to the manufacturer in order to play content?
• 4K refresh rate. Does the 4K refresh rate match the advertised rate, or it that a sneaky "only at lower resolutions" thing?
• HDCP. Given I run my own HTPC, this is a really important one. Will the TV's HDCP implementation work via the HDMI connection on a laptop? Will it work with a desktop GPU connection? I'll take a laptop when looking at TVs to test this.

HTPC Linux Setup with DigitalNow TinyTwin

I put together a HTPC earlier in 2013, and got a Leadtek DTV2000DS Plus TV tuner (for budgetary reasons, mainly).

Had nothing but trouble with it, and ended up getting it going sort of okay in the end, but was never really happy with its performance. The firmware would only compile with a specific kernel (3.2.0.51 as the max), so no updates could ever go in. Overall it was a nightmarish experience.

Bye-bye DTV2000DS Plus...

Yesterday I blasted away the Leadtek and the previous install, and installed a DigitalNow TinyTwin USB tuner. From a fresh install to having a running MythTV was a couple of hours, compared to months of on-and-off tinkering previously. Obviously having the experience from last time helped, but this setup was relatively painless in comparison.

Brief overview of the steps, in case anyone else is using this tuner:

• Installed fresh Mint 16 (for no particular reason, other than had it on a flash drive already).
• After plugging in the TinyTwin, it was detected as a USB device, but didn't pick up firmware automatically. lsusb gave its ID as 048d:9006.
• dmesg | grep dvb said something along the lines of "dvb-usb-it9135-01.fw missing". So I downloaded the firmware from https://github.com/OpenELEC/dvb-firmware (there is a link for the entire zip, or you could just clone the repo).
• After unzipping the zip, cd into dvb-firmware-master/it9135 and then copy firmware file:
sudo cp -p dvb-usb-it9135-01.fw /lib/firmware
• Followed up with a cold boot (not sure if needed, but some places suggested this can be different to a warm boot).
• dmesg | grep dvb now showed "successfully initialized and connected", and ls /dev/dvb showed adapter0 and adapter1. Success!
• Installed MythTV 0.27 (as per here).

After that, configuring MythTV all went by the book. Using the default over the air grabber worked as well (last time I'd tried setting up Shepherd, which I never got going properly).