Hands-On Tech 197 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
 

00:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Coming up on Hands-On Tech. We are going to take a look at the plague of auto-on features. We will take a look at how to deal with your devices powering on when you don't expect them to. Stay tuned for this episode of Hands-On Tech. This is Twit. Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech, the show where you write in with your tech questions and I write back. No, I speak back with your tech answers. You can email me hot at twittv to ask your question and I am happy, happy, happy to answer it.

00:44
Today we've got a little short episode. We're going to answer one question. We'll have a little bit of a follow-up, but I would love to get going. Richard has written in, and Richard has written in with an interesting question because it offers the opportunity to talk about something that you might miss when you're setting up your devices and that actually is a feature of not just the television that we'll be talking about, but also many tech device, and that is the sort of power on behavior or auto on behavior or default power behavior. It has a bunch of different names, but let's take a look at Richard's question. So Richard writes I have a 65 inch TCL TV that I bought a couple of years ago, I noticed that most of the time, if the power goes out, even for a few seconds, when it comes back on, usually the TV will turn itself on.

01:42
Sometimes the cable box will do this as well. Why? Thanks, richard? Again thank you for your question on this. The TCL TVs actually have a feature and again, this is a feature of many a smart TV that basically keeps the device powered on but has the display turned off. The reason for this is so that you are able to turn this on and then you are able to use this so that you can quickly access your network. Okay, so you are already going to remain connected to Wi-Fi, or however the connection is made there, and then also some of the features of the TV are just ready to go. This is likely going to be something that you have turned on if you're using a feature called HDMI CEC, which I'll talk about in a moment. But essentially what this does is it says when the TV is, when I hit the power button to power off the TV, really just turn off the display, keep everything else kind of running in the background, ready to go, so that all I have to do is when I hit that button, it turns on again. In fact, what TCL says about this feature called fast TV start is it maintains the network connection and allows other wireless devices to connect to your Roku device when it's powered off.

03:06
So we'll start, richard, by what we need to do to look for this feature, and thank you, scooterx, in the chat, for your help with this. So you press the home button on your TCL Roku TV remote, you scroll up or down and select settings, you select system, then you select power, and you may not have a Roku TV, but you have a TCL TV that may not be Roku. Look for system in the settings and then look for power in the settings. That's the most important thing. Get to settings, look for system, look for power and then look for a feature called fast TV start or quick TV start, called fast TV start or quick TV start, and then you want to depending on what I what, depending on how you take what I say, next, make the choice of whether to enable or disable fast TV start. If you disable it, then it's going to turn this feature off. Now here's my thought when you are powering not you powering off, but whenever your home is powering off, the, uh, the, the whenever you're losing power, not whenever you're powering it off, but whenever you're losing power and the power comes back on. A feature like this fast TV start is maybe playing at what's going on here, because it is expecting that the television is supposed to stay on when there's power to it, just with the display off. So when you lose power and you're not telling this system to power down, it's still trying to draw power from the plug in the wall right, and so when you turn that power back on, when the power comes back on, it goes to draw power from that again and because the power was off before then, it kicks it into just fully turning on the TV.

04:53
Now, with HDMI CEC at play, you've got more that's involved here. So this is where it kind of depends on the devices that you have and the settings that you have. There could be a similar feature with your cable box as well. So you want to go to your cable box and check the settings there to see if there's some sort of auto power on behavior or fast start behavior or hibernation mode, something like that. That is also doing the same, where it's just keeping it powered on, and if the power shuts off, it's still kind of waiting for that power there. The second the power comes back, then it goes ahead and turns back on again, because then what's happening is, with HDMI CEC, you have devices that are able to communicate with each other over your HDMI cable. So HDMI CEC is a tool essentially it's a feature that stands for Consumer Electronics Control that lets you do more with your HDMI than just simply provide that signal from one device to the other. So, depending on the device and depending on the features that it has, it may do something as simple as just when one device powers on, go ahead and power on the other device.

06:16
Think about something like. This is one example that I actually have in my home and it works both ways. I have a television and I've got an Apple TV connected to it. When I hit the power button on my Apple TV Siri remote, the Apple TV turns on and then, over HDMI CEC, it tells the television boop, you turn on as well. In my guest bedroom there's a PlayStation and a television and when the PlayStation gets turned off over HDMI, it tells the television go ahead and turn off as well. So these devices can communicate with each other over that consumer electronics control, that CEC, and that is likely playing a role here in why both of those devices are turning on whenever the power gets turned back on after being off.

07:19
Drawn to this idea, richard, as to what might be the issue here, is because you talk about how it's, because you use the word sometimes. Sometimes the cable box will do this as well. If there's one set of features that are very much a sometimes it's HD by CEC you think it's going to work and most of the time it works, but every once in a while you just can't seem to get it to work. I want to read this message from ScooterX in the chat, who says it can be the opposite the cable box comes on after power is restored and the TV senses it via CEC and turns on. If I wake my Apple TV, the TV will sense it, power on and switch to the Apple TV's input, same as with many devices I wake. Also, my LG TV will suddenly shut off when the idle. Apple TV connected to it goes to sleep after 15 minutes, even if the TV is viewing another source. I have the Apple TV set to sleep after many hours.

08:17
So again, hdmi CEC can be the culprit here, where you don't even realize that it's happening, richard, and it's playing in the background. So again, going back to the first thing, check to see if you've got that fast TV start thing turned on We'll have a link in the show notes to the TCL support page where you can learn more about that that. But also on your television, check your HDMI CEC settings and see what they say, because they may also be playing a role here. And then, last but not least, head to both of those places for your specific cable box and your specific TV LTV and look into the settings for a hibernation mode, a sleep mode, a fast start mode, a fast restart mode there are all sorts of different names for this, but they all essentially mean I'm not actually powering all the way off, I'm just making it seem like I've powered down a little bit.

09:13
Now this brings up an important thing that I want to say for people who are tuning in and who are, more importantly, sending their questions. Something that's very helpful, if you are able to, when you send in your questions, is give me model numbers, model names, that kind of thing. So for your cable box, if you looked on the back of it, looked on the bottom of it somewhere and told me about the cable box, might be able to get you directed to the right support page for that cable box and learn if it has a hibernation feature or a quick start mode or something like that. So if you are writing in with your questions, love, love, love, love them HOT at twittv Do provide as much of that kind of information as possible so that I'm able to do more for you, so you don't have to do all that work on your end after the fact. So thank you, richard, for your question, and this is where I want to briefly mention that this is a feature that you will find across a lot of different products.

10:14
A lot of smart home products, particularly smart lighting, has an auto-on feature, where I think they call it even auto-on after power off, and it's very common for people to have an issue where their television or their power goes out and their power comes back on in the middle of the night which has happened to me in the past and the lights, the smart lights, were set to return to a default state and unfortunately the default state is 100% at a soft white color temperature. So at three in the morning, boom, their lights come on and are just blasting their retinas. Check, always, always, always check your settings for these kinds of features to tell these devices what to do whenever they lose power. And come back on. My studio lighting has features for this as well that tell it. Hey, when you lose power and you regain power, just have those lights off. I don't want you to turn them on, I want you to keep them off. So that's a great option.

11:20
And, yes, as ScooterX has pointed out in the chat as well, many more devices are starting to add this feature over time, because power outages are a common thing that we experience and we should have a way to tell our devices what we want them to do when power returns. Rather than, I had a robot vacuum that every time it lost power, it would think that it was no longer because it didn't have power. It would think that it's no longer connected to its charging base. So then the power would come back on. The device would drive off of the power base where it's charging and then sort of spin around and find the power base again and then move back and start charging again. So silly, so silly. So, yeah, those things can be kind of obnoxious if you have those smart devices in your home. Look for that. What to do after power off behavior.

12:17
All right, I've got one piece of follow-up and then, believe it or not, it's time to say goodbye for this unique episode of Hands-on Tech. Thomas has written in with some follow-up that I think is very important and it is an oversight on my part, so we're doing some clarification here. Thomas writes to say well, actually, let me tell you what the follow-up was about. A couple episodes ago, episode 195, ross wrote in and said my internet provider here in Canada has 2.5 gigabits per second. Service used to have 1.5 gigabits per second and I have had around 960 megabits per second up and down speeds using Ethernet connected to an Apple TV 4K box. Now that I have 2.5 gigabits per second package, the speed test is showing pretty much the same. Do you have any advice on how I can get close to the 2.5 gigabits per second speeds? So I recommended at the time a few things.

13:15
There were a lot of different devices that needed to be looked into, a lot of cables that needed to be looked into. There was a bunch at play, but Thomas wrote in with a very important point. Thomas writes not sure you have heard this or not, but in Hot 195 for the last question about internet speeds, the Apple TV 4K he was using to check the speed will always show about 990 megabits per second, since it supports gigabit ethernet and that is the max it supports. Hopefully the Mac he is using because Ross also talked about a Mac where he was expecting to get faster speeds is new enough to support the full 2.5 gigabits per second that the adapter will make available in order to check the speed accurately. So, thomas, very good point.

14:04
If you have a gigabit port on your Apple TV, because you've got the Apple TV 4K, yeah you know you're not going to get speeds that are faster than gigabit speeds because that's the port that you have on your Apple TV. So that's something to bear in mind, that if you're using the gigabit ethernet, you're going to get gigabit ethernet. It does support Wi-Fi six speeds in its current version. So that is also something to bear in mind, and that's kind of been the issue that I have had with Apple's Apple TV set-top box. The port seems to always lag behind the Wi-Fi offerings in the device. So there's what you need to know, ross, and for those folks who had tuned in Wi-Fi 6 speeds theoretically cap out at 9.6 gigabits per second. As you might imagine, there are so many things that come into play when it comes to Wi-Fi and where the device is and where the router is and what speeds you're getting into it. So, ross, you may very well find that using your Wi-Fi connection, you will have faster speeds than you would have from using the port that's on it. And once again, that's something that I used to have to tell the people because at the time that was the case, that the speed was not fast enough, uh, from the, the port that was on it, and instead you needed to use a um. You, you were just stuck with whatever that speed was Now. You were just stuck with whatever that speed was Now. Uh, folks will remember that I recommended to uh Ross the 2.5 gigabit per second ethernet adapter that is offered by Apple um from Belkin, but offered by Apple in the Apple store, and it is supported with the Pro that I'm forgetting his name Ross has. So that is an option when it comes to the Mac. For the Apple TV, ross, you may try your Wi-Fi and find out that, wow, that in this case is faster because it supports Wi-Fi 6, assuming that you've got a router that supports Wi-Fi 6. So thank you, thomas, for that follow up and for that explanation there.

16:51
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17:15
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18:08
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