I have a smart TV (in fact, the very one recommended in the article), connected to a Sony sound bar, and an Apple TV. I wake the whole assemblage from sleep by prodding the Apple TV remote — and then it takes fully 60 seconds before I can use it, because it seemingly
1. Wakes the TV up in SDR, syncs with the Apple TV;
2. Starts playing audio;
3. Which wakes the soundbar up;
4. Which forces a re-sync as the TV switches to eARC mode;
5. And then the TV notices that the Apple TV is offering to negotiate Dolby Vision, so it does so, and re-syncs again;
6. Which kicks it out of eARC mode, so it needs to re-sync another time to get back into it…
And that’s all just if I left it on the Apple TV’s input when putting it to sleep. If I sleep the TV by sleeping a game console when it’s the only thing awake, and then wake it up later with the Apple TV remote, then there at least two more resyncs involved, and also seemingly ten seconds of complete blackness where it’s doing literally nothing.
Also, this one’s not the TV’s fault, but YouTube for tVOS gets so confused by these repeated mode-switch re-syncs, that if it’s what would be playing on resume from sleep, then instead the audio will play from the YouTube video, with the first frame of the video frozen on the display and the event loop stalled for another ~60s (I.e. my prompting to go into the task manager to kill the app is ignored, and then 60s later it suddenly happens, but at that point the video resumes so I don’t need to do it any more.) Doesn’t happen with any other app waking from sleep.
Oh, and sometimes the TV will just wake to its home menu despite being woken up by the Apple TV remote, and while the system apps will be responsive (once I grab the TV’s remote), it will refuse to open the input switcher, or the device preferences (in order to gracefully reboot it.) when it does this, I have to get up and unplug the damned thing to get it working again.
None of those things have anything to do with the TV being "smart" though, it's all up to the crappiness of modern HDMI.
Removing app support from the TV would not fix it. Actually, it sounds like using the smart features of your TV to watch video instead of an Apple TV would actually reduce the bugginess?
I have a 10 year old non-smart TV. It predates HDR, but just basic ARC and CEC still regularly trips it up. To the point my 5 year old knows how to re-select the sound bar output to fix when the audio breaks.
Ah, but most of the slowdown from this messiness is due to all these mode changes being handled at the application layer in sandboxed userland daemons on a non-real-time OS. Before smart TVs with application processors “fast enough” to (barely, slowly) do these things, the “control-plane logic” for a TV’s DSPs was handled effectively instantly by purpose-designed ASICs.
1. Wakes the TV up in SDR, syncs with the Apple TV;
2. Starts playing audio;
3. Which wakes the soundbar up;
4. Which forces a re-sync as the TV switches to eARC mode;
5. And then the TV notices that the Apple TV is offering to negotiate Dolby Vision, so it does so, and re-syncs again;
6. Which kicks it out of eARC mode, so it needs to re-sync another time to get back into it…
And that’s all just if I left it on the Apple TV’s input when putting it to sleep. If I sleep the TV by sleeping a game console when it’s the only thing awake, and then wake it up later with the Apple TV remote, then there at least two more resyncs involved, and also seemingly ten seconds of complete blackness where it’s doing literally nothing.
Also, this one’s not the TV’s fault, but YouTube for tVOS gets so confused by these repeated mode-switch re-syncs, that if it’s what would be playing on resume from sleep, then instead the audio will play from the YouTube video, with the first frame of the video frozen on the display and the event loop stalled for another ~60s (I.e. my prompting to go into the task manager to kill the app is ignored, and then 60s later it suddenly happens, but at that point the video resumes so I don’t need to do it any more.) Doesn’t happen with any other app waking from sleep.
Oh, and sometimes the TV will just wake to its home menu despite being woken up by the Apple TV remote, and while the system apps will be responsive (once I grab the TV’s remote), it will refuse to open the input switcher, or the device preferences (in order to gracefully reboot it.) when it does this, I have to get up and unplug the damned thing to get it working again.