Post #2310930

I wonder if any category of tech is as abandoned as my box of TV stuff. I have a talking Samsung TV, multiple Apple TVs, the NVIDIA shield (a much faster Android streaming box than Google's option at the time), a Fire Cube, an HDMI splitter, an infrared repeater, and too many cables and remotes. Oh, and I have a digital TV box from Rogers which is still in its original packaging, because trying to figure out how to set it up and use it just seems really daunting. I do have free cable channels in this apartment, so that might be the thing that's most worth keeping, but it's also the only device that doesn't talk. I thought he TV would make a decent media hub and I liked the idea of all the talking boxes for it, but I think at the end of the day I don't have enough reason to use it. Most streaming boxes are built for the major streaming services, and I now pay for none of those, except prime video I suppose. There's so much messy inconsistency in which shows are described where, and being in a country that isn't the US just makes it ten times worse. But the Apple TV isn't designed for loading arbitrary audio files. And if I cut out the TV itself as a dependency and try to use something like an HDMI audio extractor, it works, but I haven't found one that respects the volume signals sent by the Apple TV. Even if I connect the Apple TV to Airpods, the volume controls (either on the remote or the AirPods themselves) have no effect when no TV is connected. All these small papercuts have just caused me to realize that there's nothing wrong with listening to shows on my phone or a dedicated media player, and treating them like any other audio files. As flawed as Bluetooth is, it also works with fewer dependencies than any other wireless audio protocol. So, my TV is now abandoned on the wall in an awkward viewing place with a bunch of abandoned equipment hooked up to it. I wonder if it's worth trying to sell some of this stuff. Even if I keep an Apple TV and an Android TV for testing, that still leaves a lot more unused devices. The root of this problem isn't necessarily straight-forward accessibility. it's a mix of my own stubbornness, the fact I didn't engage with TV very much at all until sometime in the 2020s, and some accessibility and accessibility-adjacent problems, like the availability of audio-described content across streaming services and the ability to add postprocessing to episodes with quiet dialog. I know there are plenty of people who just use Netflix and Disney Plus on their Apple TV through their Sonos speakers. And if I'm honest, I have legitimate practical reasons for using the audio versions instead, but part of it is just a natural inclination against any platform that locks me into its UI. It's the same reason Amazon will never be able to make Kindle accessible enough for me to use it if I have the option of removing the DRM from my kindle books. Is this the mentality of a pirate or is it the mentality of someone who just wants one more thing to remain consistent and controllable? I don't know, but I guess I've concluded I don't have a good enough reason to change it.