Given I wasn't the only person confused, I suspect this web page could be improved by just coming out and saying "sometimes I want audio to come from the TV, but want the screen to be blank." The tiny screenshot was too hard for me to read, so I skipped over it, and was a bit confused about the purpose of this project.
But it does directly say that. You just need to read for 30 seconds instead of 5. The 1st paragraph tells you the features of the app and paragraphs 3-6 tell you the motivation behind the app and the primary use case. That is a pretty good structure for this type of web page.
> A big ass screen in the living room makes this hard to achieve. If you want to listen to music or a podcast before going to bed, it’s impossible to avoid a bright now playing screen or animated screen saver.
I found that super confusing - why are you using the TV to listen to music or a podcast? Can't you use a different device? It still wasn't clear why you needed the TV on but blank after reading that. Why not grab headphones or use a bluetooth speaker? Why use the TV, which probably has terrible built-in speakers?
Given the explanations that some people want to use their Smart TV specifically for music/podcasts, it does make sense. But I would lead with that - not beat around the bush.
The page clearly outlines the need for the app, listening to audio in the dark. The app isn't the only way to satisfy that need. If you have some alternative way to address that need which you think is better, then maybe the app isn't for you.
We're not discussing whether the app is for me. We're discussing whether the information was presented in a good way for determining whether the app was good for me, and my opinion is that it was not. Even if the app was for me, I could've determined that much more readily if the author led with the problem "wanting audio from a smart TV with the screen off." Paragraph 6 is not the optimal location for a description of the problem being solved.
>why are you using the TV to listen to music or a podcast? Can't you use a different device? It still wasn't clear why you needed the TV on but blank after reading that. Why not grab headphones or use a bluetooth speaker? Why use the TV, which probably has terrible built-in speakers?
That was from your original comment. You seem to be wanting to discuss the effectiveness of the app rather than the information presented.
As I said in the other reply, people with this need will immediately understand the use case. The people here being confused about why anyone would want this app are confused because they aren't familiar with this need in which case they aren't the audience for this app anyway.
I think you are being unreasonable with the OP. The reason why this is confusing is not because some people want to listen to podcasts on their TV. The Apple TV comes with the podcast app preinstalled. The reason this is confusing is having a second audio input connected to the same audio system that needs the Apple TV on. The solution solves a very real world problem that has nothing to do with user preferences. The app is actually terrible at listening to podcasts in the dark because the podcast player is on a completely separate device. That's the confusing part.
I don't think they are and OP is demonstrating something I'm seeing more and more on the internet that's getting to be really prevalent and annoying.
presents product
oblivious_user: I don't get this? Why don't you do xyz? This provides me no value? What am I supposed to do with this?
happy_user: If you're in situation abc and don't wish to do xyz this app can help. If you don't see the value in this product you're probably not the target market.
oblivious_user: but why would anyone use this!? Just use xyz for crying out loud! I looked at this page for 5 seconds and I can't figure out what is does! This product sucks and they're not doing a good job convincing me I need it so nobody should need it!
happy_user: I literally told you the use case in my previous comment.
oblivious_user: It's still a stupid idea with a poor presentation. Use xyz and your life will be better!
It's really really annoying. Everything doesn't have to be made for everyone. If you don't have a use case for a product and you don't understand why anyone else would use a product then the product isn't for you.
It's so exhausting seeing Internet commenters confused over the popularity of a product that they have no use for because they don't understand it or they prefer xyz to abc when the product IS abc...
This reminds me of the following all-to-common StackOverflow interaction:
dev: <tries to figure out how to do abc. Due to various limitations, dev comes to the conclusion that the best way to do abc is using def. Explaining everything involved in abc is a lot of work, and dev just wants to ask about def> How can I do def?
stackoverflow: Don't do def, it's bad. Have you considered xyz?
dev: xyz isn't what I want. I really just want to do def.
stackoverflow: Don't do def, do lmnop.
dev: lmnop won't solve my problem. I just want to do def.
Yes, however there are times when you are enough of an expert in the domain to know why Y is the solution you need and you just want someone to help you with that part. You might know X better than anyone else, and explaining X won't get you far. You just want help with Y.
It is also true that there are many people who ask for help with Y and are wrong in thinking it is the correct way to solve X. I am describing the former situation and not the latter.
You need to reach the point where you have the appropriately shared context with the other person so that you are both able to work in the same direction.
That often involves explaining the situation sufficiently so that it is clear that the thing you are looking for doing it in such a way is the way that it needs to be done.
The vast majority of the time, when such questions are posted they are in the form of a work order and people who have gone through "maybe I should do XY" in the past have encountered some problems and are trying to warn you off of that path for the incomplete context that has been provided.
In such cases, it is necessary for the person with the question to sufficiently explain the problem, the context, and the constraints so that is is clear that XY, despite its known issues remains the clear and correct course of action.
On the other hand, there are times when people in the past have tried WY and decided in that situation Y was a bad idea. But your situation is X and it is quite different from what the answerer is familiar with from their experience with W. In this case you know X well, the answerer doesn't, and you know Y is what you want to do in this situation to solve X. The answerer assumes you're trying to solve W or something similar to W and you have to waste an inordinate amount of time assuring them your situation is sufficiently different from W in order to get a simple answer about how to do Y.
And that is why the onus is upon the person asking the question to explain the problem scope fully enough that anyone looking to help will be on the same page from the start and those who have encountered problems with similar approaches are aware that their experience isn't relevant.
Most often, the request comes in as:
> dev: How can I do def?
to which responses warning them of the problems with that approach and lacking the surrounding context are completely appropriate.
The issue is:
> ... Explaining everything involved in abc is a lot of work, and dev just wants to ask about def ...
Yes, it's a lot of work, but necessary to do either at the start or piecemeal consuming a lot more time overall between multiple people. To be respectful of other peoples' time, explaining abc is the correct thing to do.
> That is a pretty good structure for this type of web page.
Not really. Honestly, it was kind of confusing to me too...
All they had to say was "Apple makes it impossible to avoid playing a screen or animated screen saver during a podcast or listening to music. So, this app lets you listen to a podcast or music over a blank screen. That's it. That's all it is. It's a feature that AppleTV should have, but doesn't, so I made this app for it."
Literally don't have to write anything more than that.
Maybe the context of this appearing on HN is shifting the perception of this page, but this is posted on an individual's blog. If the author had the mindset of "literally don't have to write anything more than that", then they wouldn't have been blogging for seemingly 15 years.
This page is very far from the worst offenders when it comes to this sort of thing. The features are outlined in the first paragraph. You truly can't get better than that. Odds are people who will want this app will immediately identify why those features are useful. For the people who don't immediately see the use, you only have to read a few more short paragraphs.
> Maybe the context of this appearing on HN is shifting the perception of this page, but this is posted on an individual's blog. If the author had the mindset of "literally don't have to write anything more than that", then they wouldn't have been blogging for seemingly 15 years.
100% agree. But the OP is the highest rated comment, so clearly HN thinks this is important.
HN has a long history of being completely wrongheaded and dismissive in the top comment when something like this is shared. It is the old it is trivially easily to replicate Dropbox with FTP and curl situation.
You don't even need to read for 30 seconds, the very first image has text in it that explains what the app does, and the sentence after it, still in the opening section, explains that you should read the text of the image to learn what the app does. Literally, the people complaining about not wanting to read too much must have the attention spans of gnats.
I have wished many times that I could just “mute the picture” but not the audio, especially when I am trying to fall asleep. Wish there was something like this for Roku.
Our Sony TV has a "Screen off" mode under quick-settings menu. Everything goes off related to screen, incl LEDs. We use it a lot while listening to music via Spotify and other services.
The beauty is, volume buttons don't turn the screen back on either, so it truly becomes a connected speaker.
My old one had a remote button for “PIC OFF”! What year roughly was yours made? I’m wondering if my new one has that buried somewhere. Mine is running the “Google TV” OS
Mine is a Sony X900H[0] (or its equivalent in EU), and runs Android, too. The feature is under the (Sony specific) quick settings menu accessed by the gear icon on the remote control.
So I think this is to be used where turning off the TV (the display device, not the Apple TV) would also turn off the audio right? (Built in speakers, or a sound bar that routes thru the TV etc)
Simple solution! I’d lead with the problem though, had to think about why you might want this.
In the author's defense, a primary usecase is listed in the first graphic under the top paragraph (and the sentence just below the image highlights it).
This situation is why I continue to keep a receiver between a TV and the things connected to it, even when the receiver's gonna be hooked up to absolute shitboxen of speakers I picked up at the thrift store for a dollar each. Being able to turn off the TV without disrupting the audio is a godsend. Nowadays receivers have HDMI inputs, too (on top of the gazillion other inputs available on a typical receiver), so it's entirely unnecessary to ever do anything on the TV except turn it on or off and it's absolutely wonderful.
Don't many TVs communicate bidirectionally with receivers now? When I turn off my TV, my receiver turns off as well. Which is usually what I want. If I want to only use the receiver, I can connect my laptop of phone to the receiver directly via bluetooth. No need to involve the TV.
Yep. Should be labeled CEC unless the TV's UI hides that behind "user friendly" naming. I also have mine set to turn on/off the AV receiver with the TV, but it can be disabled. Only drawback is that you then need to remember to turn off the receiver.
Though the device on the other end may not cooperate, like if it's playing something that uses HDCP it might stop playing when there's no display on the other end of the connection to handshake with. No idea if this is a problem with an Apple TV though.
They can't just totally do it, at least: then the last hop to the actual display would be decrypted, sort of ruining the whole point of HDCP. My understanding is more that a receiver is just a passthrough for the communication between the source and the display. Though I'm surely oversimplifying.
The receiver could always reencrypt (and usually does, IIUC; signaling this is the point of the "repeater bit" in the protocol). If it was just a dumb passthrough, then there wouldn't be much need to advertise HDCP compatibility in the first place.
>If you want to listen to music or a podcast before going to bed, it’s impossible to avoid a bright now playing screen or animated screen saver.
Use something other than a TV?
Isn't the power consumption pretty high compared to devices like a smartphone especially if you only want audio without any video display?
> An additional benefit became apparent after we started using Blank: it significantly lowers the energy consumption of the screen.
> All modern TVs have circuits that detect a blank signal and turn off LEDs to reduce the power required by the device. If you’ve ever felt heat coming off your big screen, Blank makes that go away.
> So besides improving your sleep, you’re also helping out our ever warming planet.
It's still more energy consumption compared to smartphone and if you don't have a modern TV it could even be you consume more energy with blank screen.
I'm genuinely curious if anyone reads things thoroughly or just sees no use for it in their workflows or life and immediately thinks everyone else is just like them and has no use for it either...
Finally! I've been wanting this for years. I have my living room surround sound system hooked up to my Apple TV and it's super annoying to have to leave the screen on when using the Apple TV for music because turning off the TV turns off the surround sound.
There may not be many people who need this app, but it's appreciated by those of us who do.
Quick solution to this is to save a 100% black image in your iCloud Photo Library , and set that image as your Apple TVs screen saver.
I use that in both my Apple TVs and I can listen to music while the screen is completely black. Bonus points is that you get notifications of song changing on top!
It will definitely be appreciated around these parts. I use the sound bar to listen to music whilst pottering about (it's easier than headphones or carrying a speaker around with me) and I never need any visuals.
I noticed a little while ago that A-B repeat is just gone from every media player (soft- and hardware) that I own. I think VLC is the last place it exists.
I understand why; it’s not exactly the most useful feature, but it used to be pretty ubiquitous: iTunes, Winamp, every DVD player, some CD players. We lost all the fun features! I want to hear the last 4 minutes of Freebird on repeat sometimes!
Replying on to thread because I’ve seen multiple people ask this.
If you’ve got Apple TV there’s an easy solution without downloading any apps:
Quick solution to this is to save a 100% black image in your iCloud Photo Library , and set that image as your Apple TVs screen saver. I use that in both my Apple TVs and I can listen to music while the screen is completely black. Bonus points is that you get notifications of song changing on top!
The old dumb TV I had earlier had a simple "Screen Off" button on the remote. It was very helpful, for exactly these usecases. Especially at home-events, where a display could be distracting.
I have listened to random YouTube content and podcasts to fall asleep for years now. When I live alone I simply use a tablet or phone, with screen facing down before YT Premium, now with the screen simply off. If someone is sleeping in the same room or besides me, I put in a single 2nd gen AirPod to the ear facing up, sometime near the morning I find it in the bed and put it to charge. In case I don't fall asleep for long I change the AirPod to let the other one to charge. No wireless earbuds before plain AirPods did it for me, the sealing ones (i.e. pros) are not comfortable to me.
I do exactly the same as you described to fall asleep.
If you ever want to save the money on youtube premium, the Brave browser on iOS lets you listen to YouTube content in the background or with the screen off. Just make sure you enable that feature in it's settings. It also blocks all of the pre/mid/post ads.
I wish there was a button to temporally turn off video & sound, in 30 second increments, without losing the position of where you are (contrast/brightness -100%?), mainly to get around watching ads.
This reminds me of an Arduino project I started but never finished! I bought an IR LED and made a dumb TV remote webapp that could change the volume and channels and mute the TV and had the mute time be 30 configurable. The Arduino just sat on my coffee table pointing at the TV and was connected to my wifi.
I ultimately wanted to detect how loud my TV was and lower the volume automatically when I watched Avengers or something because I was constantly fiddling with the volume when some parts were excessively loud. I wanted to extend this to ads too so that when they came on my TV would mute automatically but I got the microphone and kinda lost passion for the project.
I've always thought that a button to "blur" the video and audio (the latter using a low-pass filter or similar) would be a more effective way of doing this. You can still infer enough detail from the video and audio to know when the ads are over, but you wouldn't subject yourself to the higher-frequency, information-dense content of those ads.
That’s interesting. I have occasionally been annoyed that I don’t have an easy way to play audio from my phone to my home theater audio system without having the TV on. If I turn my TV off it automatically turns my receiver off, and the only way to disable that would also disable turning the TV and receiver on automatically which is a crucial flow.
There might be a way to build a little HDMI CEC controller that could block certain control sequences, but I haven’t looked into that yet.
At least for my case, turning on my receiver doesn't turn my TV on, though turning my TV off turns the receiver off, in such cases I just turn the receiver back on again, or never turn the TV on in the first place.
When I turn on my TV my receiver also turns on, but when I turn on my receiver my TV doesn't. My apple TV (connected through the receiver) turns on both. Same goes for off in all cases.
BTW, if you happen to have an OLED device, when you display a black image on your display, other than the electronics that run to render the image, it's equivalent to actually having the screen functionally off. Unlike an LCD display where dark versus white pixels use approximately the same power, on an OLED display black pixels use no power.
A lot of setups route audio through the TV so if you turn it off you turn off music / podcasts which a lot of people use to sleep. (including the author, as noted in the article)
> We consume lots of media, just on laptops and tablets instead.
Everytime I meet a no TV guy they have a laptop or a 37 inch monitor in the corner of a room somewhere with a comfy chair. It wasn't they had no TV, they just had a crappy TV.
Assuming you’re excluding laptops, tables, and phones I know quite a few people without any TV’s hooked up.
Watching YouTube on a tablet you can drag it around the house as you do stuff and easily use the interface or do web searchers etc. With a larger screen you’re just stuck in that room and remotes suck for navigation.
There’s been several attempts to be able to seamlessly swap content from one screen to another, but their clunky.
Maybe for YouTube, but for consuming long-form content like movies, there’s something to be said for sitting down and watching purposefully with a more immersive experience.
I don't think it's very common, although having a TV is increasingly meaning something different than it used to. A TV now is just another glorified tablet that a family might share some time in front of, but isn't necessarily the entertainment center of the home like it once was given the amount of personal screens and choices available to everyone.
There's a TV in my home, but if it died I probably wouldn't replace it, at least for a while. I barely need it. Only if I have someone over to entertain might I want to use it. For most people, TVs will still be around because watching a movie together with friends is simply a better experience in front of a TV than someone's 13" laptop.
I have a TV, but only because the previous owner left it attached to the wall. It's easier to not take down than it is to take down and donate. I've never turned it on.
It's partially cultural. At some point I realized that when American friends say "I've watched that", they more often than not mean it was running off to the side or in the background while they were doing other tasks. Previously I was mystified why anyone would watch certain type of content that wouldn't be able to hold anyone's attention span.
It seems quite common in the US to have TVs in several rooms and have them run in the background for long stretches of day. This is far less common in the cultures I've lived in where sitting down to watch TV alone or together is more of an occasion and modal, and TVs have no place outside the living room.
This is to say the use case different folks have for TVs also varies widely. Now, when I do sit down at the TV, I generally appreciate the nice big screen.
> It seems common in the US to have TVs in several rooms and have them run in the background for long stretched of day. This is far less common in the cultures I've lived in where sitting down to watch TV alone or together is more of an occasion and modal.
> Tomorrow Warner Bros. Discovery is supposed to reveal it’s new but not really new streaming service. What once was called HBO Max will now just be called Max, according to The New York Times.
> Beyond the name change, it could include more light reality TV shows like “Dr. Pimple Popper” and “House Hunters International” —you know, the shows you might put on in the background while you’re doing chores, paying bills or working.
> There’s a term for shows like that: ambient streaming.
> In this and other recent programming, Netflix is pioneering a genre that I’ve come to think of as ambient television. It’s “as ignorable as it is interesting,” as the musician Brian Eno wrote, when he coined the term “ambient music” in the liner notes to his 1978 album “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” a wash of slow melodic synth compositions. Ambient denotes something that you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily. Like gentle New Age soundscapes, “Emily in Paris” is soothing, slow, and relatively monotonous, the dramatic moments too predetermined to really be dramatic.
For me, the culture has shifted. With regular cable TV, we definitely had the TV on more often and just in the background with maybe nobody paying particular attention to it. I actually found it quite helpful when working from home to have that sort of background noise.
However, in the time of streaming this has gone completely away in our household. The TV is only on for the time it takes to to watch a show and then is immediately turned off.
Frankly, I find a lot of films are better as "background watching".
I especially find Marvel movies much better at home. I might find one entirely OK watched at home, but get frustrated and bored with the same film in the theater, and leave feeling pretty unhappy with it. This is because I can divide my attention at home, and most Marvel movies are kinda worse the more closely you're watching them. Poor filming and editing, interminable action scenes that have me wanting to take a nap rather than watch them by a certain point—all that's better if you can check out for chunks of the movie.
And this isn't a my-attention-span thing: I closely watch "boring" shit like silent films all the time, because they reward close watching far more than a lot of modern blockbusters do (older blockbusters often reward it better, too—at least, the ones we still remember)
I don't think it common, but I feel you. I have a TV, but it's a 3rd computer screen just for playing movies. Every now and then someone from my family calls me asking for help with her TV, something broke, video is breaking, there's white noise on, or audio interrupts, etc. Gradma calls me because I work with computers. I don't have an antenna or decoder or something else I don't even know what these things are called. For music I play from phone connected to bluetooth speakers.
>I’m happy to announce the release of a new tvOS app called Blank
This got me so confused, I didn't even know TVs have apps, I mean I knew there is AndroidTV and nvidia shield, but somehow concept of 3rd party apps on a TV didn't get to me.
Have you used a TV in the last? Don’t you miss the larger screen and not having to squint when there’s some tiny text within the show that’s hard to read on small screens etc?
I’m more curious the last time you saw a show with significant text on screen. It seems far more common to have essentially no text or “complicated-science gibberish-for-the-geek”. Everything else is read by a character.
Less common than not paying for a cable subscription service I would imagine. There's still a lot of advantage to possessing a really big screen even if the traditional way of consuming media on it has gone out of fashion
I wonder what this does for the lifetime of the TV. Is the the video really off? Is it just showing a black screen, but the screen is still on? Is there a difference between the two from a wear & tear standpoint?
From TFA.
"An additional benefit became apparent after we started using Blank: it significantly lowers the energy consumption of the screen.
All modern TVs have circuits that detect a blank signal and turn off LEDs to reduce the power required by the device. If you’ve ever felt heat coming off your big screen, Blank makes that go away."
I wish my chromecast could turn my tv back off when done with it. It can turn it on. And then when done with an app it wastes power telling me the weather with random photos of graffiti and mountains.
my perticular setup is chromecast connected to a soundbar (vizio) connected to the TV (LG) I use the chromecast to turn the pc on remotely. chromecast is registered with google home and all I have to do is "ok google - tv on" or "tv off" and it all just works...
> As you get older, a good night’s sleep becomes harder to achieve. One thing that works well for my wife and me is to lower light levels before bedtime.
Blackout curtains and put tape over any obnoxious LED light.
Software doesn’t have to be complex to be useful. Rudimentary-ness isn’t really a good barometer for “interesting-ness to the sorts of people that browse HN”
My various smart TVs have all have a Picture Off function. It's a menu button and third down from the top on the current Sony TV. I suspect this feature is far more widely distributed than anyone realizes, and this app is certainly a valid response to that.
Samsung - All Settings, General, Accessibility, then Picture Off; or Bixby "Picture Off On" (heh).
Sony - Remote button Quick Settings (gear), then Picture Off.
Vizio - Remote menu button, Timers, then Blank Screen.
LG - Full settings, Energy saving, then Turn screen off (I think?); or voice command "Turn screen off".
etc. But these are all atrociously unusable. I would say I don't even know what they were thinking, except I'm certain it's "if we give people a button to turn off the screen, they'll call tech support after they turn off the screen" — which, having worked in tech support, is completely valid.
It'd be nice if the HDMI CEC folks would add a command "turn screen off but maintain audio playback/passthrough", but as of HDMI CEC 1.4b, they assume that all streams are video, and so provide (and mandate) the Display On commands when a source is active.
There are a large number of low-effort apps in this space that flood the App Review process and resulted in a policy that apps must have a minimum level of functionality.
For my uses, no. The soundbar was a compromise between tiny, terrible built-in speakers and all the space and wiring needs of a proper surround sound system.
We got a soundbar which mounts to the wall, and has detachable satellite speakers if we really want "surround." And it comes with a wireless subwoofer, so we still get the boomy sound for action movies.
