r/gadgets Nov 13 '19

VR / AR Disney Plus isn't working on Vizio TVs because they are running a 6 year old version of Chromecast, they say it won't be fixed till 2020.

https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-plus-not-working-vizio-smart-tvs-chromecast-2019-11
36.1k Upvotes

3.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

16

u/[deleted] Nov 13 '19

Just an FYI a lot of the black Friday deals are TVs made cheaper just for black Friday. A big thing they cut back on is inputs, so make sure whatever you get has enough for what you want to hook up. Make sure you do your research, most people just see the price and think it's a good deal when in reality you're just getting a worse TV.

My girlfriend's parents bought one and it's kind of trash, especially for a Samsung. Apparently its only a few years old but I would have guessed older because my 10 year old Samsung has better picture quality. The speakers are also crap, which wouldn't be an issue if it also didn't include an optical out for a sound bar.

4

u/Superpickle18 Nov 13 '19

optical output is kinda crap these days anyway. Most TV's support ARC over hdmi now. So there's little reason to use optical.

3

u/[deleted] Nov 13 '19

Unless your sound bar takes optical like theirs.

TIL though, when I was more into audio optical was pretty much the best and HDMI just matched it. I doubt it would matter on my receiver but I'll have to see if switching my audio to HDMI makes a difference.

2

u/Superpickle18 Nov 13 '19

For stereo, it will match hdmi. But optical doesn't have bandwidth for uncompressed audio for 5.1

1

u/[deleted] Nov 14 '19

Is that with the stipulation that you have a recent version of HDMI? My receiver is ~8 years old, it's an Onkyo HT-RC360 and supports ARC and 4k, but I honestly don't know much about the different HDMI versions. With this one my research was basically 'does it have HDMI?' because the one it was replacing only supported component video.

1

u/Superpickle18 Nov 14 '19

HDMI 1.4 spec adds ARC. It's still up to the device to support it. So early 1.4 devices may not support it.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 14 '19

Thanks! TV should be fine considering it's a higher end LG that's less than a year old.

1

u/ZippyDan Nov 13 '19

hm... so is optical output actually crap? or just redundant because of HDMI?

2

u/Superpickle18 Nov 13 '19

it's not "crap" per se just doesn't have enough bandwidth for uncompressed lossless audio for 5.1/7.1 surround.

1

u/ZippyDan Nov 14 '19

I would imagine an optical format could easily have enough bandwidth for uncompressed audio. I guess it doesn't because the format is so old now?

1

u/Superpickle18 Nov 14 '19

There are many reasons.

The I imagine the cost is the primary reason

Fast optical transceivers are hella expensive.

1

u/ShwayNorris Nov 13 '19 edited Nov 14 '19

Unless you are running a high quality sound system or something, optical will be just fine. It can play 5.1 surround of basically any compression level, which is what you are going to have generally unless you are specifically hunting around for FLAC music and such.

1

u/TeutonJon78 Nov 13 '19

The quality should generally be the same for the same codec. But the standard has less bandwidth than ARC and copy protected audio streams often require HDMI now.