π
2026-02-14 01:01
in Linuxha, Public
I started with a Samsung QN90D which talked perfectly to my Denon AVR3808CI AV receiver. It was able to talk HDMI CEC to it, it knew how to send volume commands directly to the receiver while sending sound over optical fiber given that the receiver only supports HDMI 1.3 CEC but not HDMI 2.0 with eARC (audio return channel).
Unfortuantely the samsung had some ridiculous OS that kept forcing me into making and using a Samsung account for just about anything, including watching youtube, it was terrible. So, I decided to switch to a TCL instead. The TV panel is great, the Google TV OS on it is decent, but:
they are using a 32 bit ARM CPU in their top of the line TV. It will stop working in 12 years due to time_t year 2038 overflow because they saved a few dollars on the CPU (android will never support a 64bit time_t migration in 32bit userland because everyone will have or should have switched to 64bit CPUs)
the TV refused to use HDMI-CEC as soon as I turned optical output for sound. That same HDMI-CEC did work otherwise
Their GoogleTV also helpfully removed infrared support in the remote, so it cannot send IR codes to the receiver even though the remote and googleTV support it.
Then I spent 2.5 months with their tech support team. Worst experience ever. They asked me for my feedback, this is what I sent them. Not impressed TCL, this is a new level of amateur hour I had never seen in a company that size. Actually I also forgot to mention that after my TV never getting any update whatsoever, and support saying I should have a later version that wasn't pushing, they sent me one by Email, with a link to their intranet, requiring a microsoft live.com account, and eventually telling me I'm not a TCL intranet user so I can't download it. To this day, they have no idea how to fix it or how to send a file to any customer.
First, I want to point out that I'm an engineer who has worked with android more than 15 years and filed over 1000 android bugs at google. I have also worked with many tech companies, found bugs in their products and helped them address them.
I'm sorry to say, but this has been the worst support experience of any major company I've ever dealt with.
1-2 days after I bought the TV, now 2.5 months ago I immediately called you to report the biggest issue with your software, namely that when using an older AV receiver that supports HDMI 1.3 with CEC, your TV is able to talk CEC to it, but as soon as I switch the TV sound to optical out, it refuses to send CEC commands over the HDMI cable coming from the receiver. This works perfectly with the Samsung TV I had, and fails with your because your engineers not only didn't test this, but did not even understand or envision that this exists and that it should work.
The first agent, after being confused about how HDMI CEC works, said she would file a bug or a report and someone would get back to me. After a month, no one ever did, and no report was filed, it was just entirely lost.
Now, what a normal company would have done is filed a bug, sent it to their engineering team for review, and they would decide whether they want to support this use case.
With you, nothing went anywhere, no one got back to me when they said they would, and it took over 10 phone calls and followups from me to get some traction, often wasting 30 to 60 minutes with agents that simply do not understand that eARC and HDMI CEC are separate and that you can have one without the other. They kept repeating it's impossible to send volume commands over an optical cable, which is totally true, and would not understand that HDMI CEC is separate, is what the volume commands are sent over, and that it works totally fine with both your TV and my denon AVR 3808 receiver, until I turn optical output on and then you disable it.
I spent over 5H on the phone with mostly agents that were undertrained, were unable to access my ticket in your own system (I should add it took you over 1.5 months before you even filed this ticket after I called multiple times asking why I had no ticket, no Email and no status). Why are your support agents not even able to access the ticket system, what madness is this?
Emails sent in reply to the ticket went 100% unanswered, so I would have to call to get an agent to ask me questions for 10 to 30 minutes before they would have to call someone else to access the ticket system they can't see, and get what I typed there.
I also tried to file 2 more bugs, which I think were both ignored, one of them being that Google TV, the HDMI dongle buy from google supports sending IR codes from the remote to the receiver to change volume directly. Once I re-paired my googletv remote with your TV, your TV wiped my remote, removed the IR codes that were working, and you also removed the part of googleTV that supports re-adding IR code to my remote. This is another example of already working functionality that you have removed, and no support agent ever acknowledged this and maybe filing a bug to consider adding it back, would be a good idea. Jow that you have wasted 2.5 months of my time before maybe finally filing one bug out of 3 internally, too late for me to return the TV and too long for me to keep waiting for this to ever work, so now I'm going to lose $1000 to $2000 to replace my top of line AV receiver with a newer one that supports eARC because of your unwillingness to support HDMI CEC without eARC or have ever considered how many AV receivers are in the field that do not support eARC and yet support HDMI CEC
I'm sorry to say, but this has been the worst support experience of any major company I've ever dealt with.
1-2 days after I bought the TV, now 2.5 months ago I immediately called you to report the biggest issue with your software, namely that when using an older AV receiver that supports HDMI 1.3 with CEC, your TV is able to talk CEC to it, but as soon as I switch the TV sound to optical out, it refuses to send CEC commands over the HDMI cable coming from the receiver. This works perfectly with the Samsung TV I had, and fails with your because your engineers not only didn't test this, but did not even understand or envision that this exists and that it should work.
The first agent, after being confused about how HDMI CEC works, said she would file a bug or a report and someone would get back to me. After a month, no one ever did, and no report was filed, it was just entirely lost.
Now, what a normal company would have done is filed a bug, sent it to their engineering team for review, and they would decide whether they want to support this use case.
With you, nothing went anywhere, no one got back to me when they said they would, and it took over 10 phone calls and followups from me to get some traction, often wasting 30 to 60 minutes with agents that simply do not understand that eARC and HDMI CEC are separate and that you can have one without the other. They kept repeating it's impossible to send volume commands over an optical cable, which is totally true, and would not understand that HDMI CEC is separate, is what the volume commands are sent over, and that it works totally fine with both your TV and my denon AVR 3808 receiver, until I turn optical output on and then you disable it.
I spent over 5H on the phone with mostly agents that were undertrained, were unable to access my ticket in your own system (I should add it took you over 1.5 months before you even filed this ticket after I called multiple times asking why I had no ticket, no Email and no status). Why are your support agents not even able to access the ticket system, what madness is this?
Emails sent in reply to the ticket went 100% unanswered, so I would have to call to get an agent to ask me questions for 10 to 30 minutes before they would have to call someone else to access the ticket system they can't see, and get what I typed there.
I also tried to file 2 more bugs, which I think were both ignored, one of them being that Google TV, the HDMI dongle buy from google supports sending IR codes from the remote to the receiver to change volume directly. Once I re-paired my googletv remote with your TV, your TV wiped my remote, removed the IR codes that were working, and you also removed the part of googleTV that supports re-adding IR code to my remote. This is another example of already working functionality that you have removed, and no support agent ever acknowledged this and maybe filing a bug to consider adding it back, would be a good idea. Jow that you have wasted 2.5 months of my time before maybe finally filing one bug out of 3 internally, too late for me to return the TV and too long for me to keep waiting for this to ever work, so now I'm going to lose $1000 to $2000 to replace my top of line AV receiver with a newer one that supports eARC because of your unwillingness to support HDMI CEC without eARC or have ever considered how many AV receivers are in the field that do not support eARC and yet support HDMI CEC