Here are some stupid things about the 47LW5600, a 2011 LG "Smart TV":
- In SmartShare (USB and DLNA mode) only a short bit of the file name is initially visible. When episode file names start with the show name (like Plex recommends), I only see the show name. My photo folders start with the date, and there I only see the date. To see more, it's necessary to highlight one item and wait for text to slowly scroll.
- When switching between photos in SmartShare, the screen abruptly goes black and stays black until the next photo appears. Loading of 4MP photos takes over a second. That's ridiculously slow! They could have made it instant by pre-loading the next photo. It's a lot better in LG Media Link. There, only very large photos display a loading animation, and the slide show has fades.
- High bitrate spikes will cause playback interruptions when streaming over the network via SmartShare or LG Media Link. The TV can peak at around 86% network utilization, but it can't sustain that and there is very little buffer space to accommodate peaks. Sustained H.264 bandwidth exceeding 50 MBps is sufficient to cause video interruptions. These problems don't happen when playing from USB.
- The lack of DTS support is stupid because the format is popular. It can be transcoded while streaming, but that doesn't work correctly. When using Serviio, seeking becomes impossible. This seems to be because the TV can only seek based on file offsets, but those are not known while transcoding. When using Plex Media Server, video gets transcoded. Even when that is fixed, there are pauses, apparently due to excessive CPU usage and inefficient multithreading in the server. The only good solution is transcoding audio beforehand. When using MKV files, that's easy to do via MKV2AC3. It kind of makes sense because AC3 offers almost the same quality at less than half the bitrate, but I don't like transcoding from one lossless format to another. The best solution is encoding the DTS-HD lossless track to AC3 when ripping, but I'm not sure how to do that.
- The TV mysteriously rejects some AVI files. Fortunately, that's easy to fix by converting to MKV using mkvmerge. As a bonus, that decreases file size a bit without losing anything.
- When playing files, it's not possible to switch audio tracks or use MKV chapters. Subtitles embedded in MKV files are only supported when playing from USB. When a file of sufficient length is played from USB, the red remote button can be used to switch chapters, but those are just the file divided into 10 equal sized parts; they have nothing to do with MKV chapters.
- No idx/sub subtitle support. (The "*.sub (MicroDVD, SubViewer 1.0/2.0)" mentioned in the manual is not the same thing.) You must use OCR to convert graphical subtitles to text-based subtitles such as .srt.
- The web browser is slow and it lacks Flash support. You can't stream any video using it, and so you're forced to rely on what's available via apps and LG Media Link. If you just want to look up some basic information, it's certainly usable. However, getting up, waking a computer from standby and looking it up on the computer is faster.
- The YouTube app does not show much information about videos, so it's hard to choose which video to play. Again, LG Media Link does it better. There is one good thing about the built-in YouTube app: it will play YouTube 3D content in 3D.
- SmartShare seems to occasionally drop frames even when playing 30fps SD content and not experiencing any buffering issues. It's not a big deal; I just think it ought to be perfect. I wonder if it's just an AVI issue. It's possible to play 640x480 H.264 at 60 fields per second interlaced in an AVI in both SmartShare and LG Media Link, but both result in horrible frame dropping. If I simply remux it to MKV, it's super smooth. (The TV also seems to deinterlace really well. The image is so good that I'm very happy with my decision to encode NTSC video to interlaced H.264.)
- Some settings are not remembered properly. Audio can become un-muted when switching between modes. In LG Media Link, all files start playing stretched to the whole screen, requiring a few clicks to get the proper aspect ratio.
- The interface is inconsistent. Different modes have different looks and different ways of changing settings. Most notably, SmartShare and LG Media Link have two different video playback screens (overlays). That's understandable because they're two different applications. However, they're built in applications in the same product. The user interface should be consistent. (I'm not complaining about how the file browsing screens are different. That's part of the fundamental nature of the applications.)
- There is no support for common Bluetooth or USB devices like headphones or keyboards. The TV does have Bluetooth for the Magic Motion Remote. It would be nice to be able to use Bluetooth headphones or wireless keyboards. That would be truly smart.
- It's not possible to zoom 4:3 content while preserving the aspect ratio. This means if you encounter 16:9 content that has been letterboxed to 4:3, you can't expand the content to fill the screen. (No, it's not really a Smart TV issue, but it is definitely a software issue.)
The only really impressive part that deserves to be called smart is LG Media Link and Plex Media Server. It can present beautiful indexes of content, with covers, other artwork, and various information. Plex also provides a gateway to many sources of online streaming video. Even in Canada, many full TV shows can be streamed from TV channels via Plex. However, there are various bugs and issues. Also, Plex isn't very nice when it can't find online data about a show, making SmartShare better in those cases.
I like the picture quality. The higher black level of the IPS panel can seem a bit disappointing in bars around the image, but the image is vivid and not washed out. It's so good it can feel like actually being there.
The LG passive 3D is great too. The glasses feel like cheap crap that would deserve a bad review on DealExtreme, but they're light and very comfortable. If they break, they would be inexpensive to replace. As long as you're within the very limited vertical viewing angle, there is no crosstalk. The horizontal viewing angle is wide.
Overall, it's a nice TV, except for the "Smart" features. They feel more like an alpha or maybe beta, and definitely not like a final release. While they are usable, they can't fully replace the direct connection of a computer to the TV. The hardware is certainly capable of much more, but I don't think any TV manufacturer is going to spend much effort on improving firmware once a model isn't sold anymore.
