Author: Press Room

Early in March, Netflix stopped working on a great number of older smart TVs and streaming devices around the world. This was not a bug; Netflix updates itself regularly, and some older devices are no longer compatible with it. That sucks for people who had relied on these methods to watch what is still the streaming service that gives you the most bang for your buck, but happily, there are ways around it, if you haven’t already found that out for yourself. What devices no longer support Netflix And why were they discontinued? One of the most notable devices that…

Add another reason to the growing pile of reasons why it might be a good idea to shill out $13.99/month to pay for YouTube Premium: if you use the free version of YouTube and have to watch ads before and during some videos, you may have been bedeviled by an annoying bug over the past few months. If you open the official YouTube app on either your Apple or Android mobile device and blow up a video so it takes up your entire screen, you may see persistent ads in the lower corner that don’t go away no matter how…

VLC is undoubtedly one of the best apps ever built, not just in the media player category. Almost everyone who has used a computer has probably used VLC at some point. But if I had one complaint about VLC, it would be the interface. It feels basic and hasn’t changed in years. This is what made me look for alternatives, and that search eventually led me to Screenbox. It’s a free and open-source app that packs the power of VLC in a modern interface. This means you still get the legendary file compatibility VLC is known for, but wrapped in…

There’s buzz around “Cancel ChatGPT” — a movement aimed at convincing people to cancel their OpenAI subscriptions, or to stop using ChatGPT altogether. The effort, documented by users on the r/ChatGPT Reddit, comes as OpenAI formed a deal with the U.S. Department of Defense (unofficially called the Department of War) to deploy AI models in classified government networks. The controversy isn’t about the deal itself, but how it came to be. Anthropic previously contracted with the Department of Defense, but the U.S. government took exception to the company’s safeguards against the use of AI for mass domestic surveillance or fully…

Anime has been popular around the world for decades, and is only getting more buzz in recent years. There’s an anime series for everyone out there, whether you’re brand new to the genre or an old hand who wants something strange and challenging. But there are still many people out there who just aren’t interested in watching animation, for whatever reason. In that case, I’d be tempted to recommend some live-action remakes of anime movies and shows…if they weren’t so reliably terrible. There are near-universally celebrated anime series like Cowboy Bebop and Attack on Titan that have gotten dreadful live-action…

Netflix has a ton of original spy dramas to watch, including hits like The Night Agent, which dropped its third season in February and quickly shot to the top of Netflix’s charts, where it remained for weeks. It had some strange bedfellows, as spies often do. February also saw the release of Unfamiliar, a German-language spy drama that got way less hype than The Night Agent, but which also climbed the charts. If you haven’t seen Unfamiliar yet, it’s a great watch that has the potential to blow up into a long-lasting series. How Unfamiliar stands out Spies of a…

While watching a new episode of The Pitt on HBO Max, I noticed a half-second lag between the actors’ mouths and what I heard through my Bluetooth headphones, which took me completely out of the story. At first, I thought it was a settings glitch. I restarted everything, re-paired my headphones, and dug through my LG TV’s menus. Unfortunately, nothing helped. It took me longer than I’d like to admit tracking down the actual cause, and once I discovered it, the fix became obvious. Here’s what’s really going on, and how to actually solve it. Related These Sennheiser headphones fixed…

I wired every TV in our house to Ethernet and figured that was that—full speed, done. Then I pulled up my Ubiquiti controller one afternoon and saw a number I didn’t expect. Every TV in the house had negotiated at 100Mbps. My Mac Mini had Gigabit, but the smart TVs? Every one of them was at or near 100Mbps. I went down a rabbit hole after that and learned something I wish I’d known sooner—most smart TV manufacturers use 10/100 Ethernet ports. Whether you have a premium model or a budget one, it doesn’t matter. They justify it because major…

When I started looking for background music while working, I relied on YouTube. The idea was to play some work-friendly music and keep working. But that rarely happened. One recommended video led to another, and before I realized it, I was watching something completely unrelated to work. To avoid falling into that rabbit hole, I eventually switched to Spotify. It was definitely a better experience since I could simply play a playlist and let it run in the background while I worked. The app is great and offers plenty of curated playlists designed for focus and productivity. However, Spotify is…

I have been a Spotify Premium subscriber for well over a decade, but I have to admit that, until relatively recently, I paid little attention to its audio settings. Back in the days of hi-fi separates, I was forever twiddling with the amplifier’s controls, trying to squeeze the best tone out of my system, yet for too long, despite having a high-quality setup with some impressive powered speakers, I always just hit play and let Spotify work its magic. After all, default settings sounded good enough, right? I was wrong. After tweaking just a few settings, I was pleasantly surprised…