I think people have lost the disconnect.

Yet, it makes BILLIONS and companies spend billions on it,

The question is where does THAT money come from? And then ask yourself why everything is so expensive… because ad money isn’t plucked out of thin air. It’s added to pretty much EVERY product you buy.

So until people boycott ad products more than buying then nothing will change and everything will just keep getting more expensive as they all outbid each other for ad space because they don’t care how much it costs them because it’ll always get taken out of your wallet!

Well, in case anyone thinks of torturing yourself building doing, don’t use SD cards!

Set everything up but there was a little stuttering and no amount of offloading to ram eliminated it so now testing an NVME drive thru USB. Again, not ideal but I’m not in a rush to pay inflated PI prices so while I have a 2TB NVME hat, I don’t have a PI 5 so… make do where you can! lol

My plan was to get a 2-3TB but thought it’d be too much so tried shoehorning it before remembering I already had the drive! 🤦‍♂️ 🤨

I run my own unifi setup so network stuff spread over a number of devices so don’t really have much of an issue. The zero’s only do audio streaming though on minimal os that can’t phone home or update and they seem ok so far but atm i’m still breaking stuff while i tweak stuff, lol

But when i leave them alone to play they seem to do fine. I mean they should all cache a few seconds of audio so drop outs aren’t an issue, the problem with most wifi is likely too many devices on 1 AP or poor reconnect coding which unifi seem pretty good with. 😎

I’m in the process of building a multi-room audio system atm.

Snapserver/snapclients for the streaming audio, 1 audio stream with mpd to be set as 24/7 music, 1 for podcasts, 1 for alerts.

Alerts interrupt both streams to play the alerts. PI 4 for the main audio stack, first speaker, 2nd PI zero w/pirate radio hat/2 5w speakers for the portable speaker that should run most of the day on battery.

PodFetch gets the podcasts, script creates a playlist each day to play the oldest podcasts first. Although kinda surprised PodFetch doesn’t seem to let me do this.

Once it all runs smoothly i’ll put PI Zero W’s/Speakers in the other room and then going to build a 7” esp32 display to allow selecting which speaker plays which stream. Maybe later do something where each stream plays a different genre.

It sounds a bit like they can just magically connect via telepathy to their home base if you phrase it like that.

Its not that difficult, scan for open wifi, if detected, connect, phone home to spy central.

The more sinister, each tv that successfully detects a connection to spy central broadcasts a 2nd wifi that the tv can scan for and connect similar to mesh networking.

There are tons of reasons to want a network connected monitor, the problem is no-one seems interested in producing one without the spyware. I’d love a 40”+ device that supported rtsp, etc but until enough people step up and boycott all this spy crap it’ll never be worth producing better devices. 😞