For instance: You can control other devices with the TV using voice control because it includes IR blaster, and it utilizes HDMI CEC effectively. But the functionality keeps going from there. Anything you can do with an Amazon Echo speaker, you can do with this TV, sure. In fact, Amazon’s voice assistant really is at the heart of the Omni QLED and its appeal. Everything else takes a back seat, and, yes, that includes Siri. And as voice assistants go, Amazon’s Alexa can only be matched by the Google Assistant. I like a smart TV interface that moves as quickly as I can click a remote, and the Fire TV Omni QLED absolutely does that. There’s virtually no lag between clicking a button on the remote and the corresponding action on the TV. One of the best things about the Fire TV Omni QLED is that it runs Fire TV OS effortlessly. If you like it, you'll have to pony up a whopping two bucks (via an in-app purchase) to lift that restriction and make it work with your entire image collection.Amazon’s voice assistant is really at the heart of the Omni QLED. Last but not least, prepare your virtual piggybank: By default, Photo Screensaver shows only your 50 oldest photos - basically a trial mode so you can check the app out and see if it's right for you. Make sure Photo Screensaver is selected, and set how much time you want to go by before the screensaver kicks in. Once you have everything set to your liking, you'll want to hop over to the Display section of the main Android TV settings and look for the option labeled "Daydream" (yes, that term was used for screensavers on Android before it became the name of Google's new VR platform). Oh, and make a mental note: With this setup, you can manually skip forward or back anytime the slideshow is playing - if you ever come across a photo you want to bypass quickly or maybe see again - by pressing the forward or back button on your Android TV remote. There's a setting called "Smart Random" that's supposed to help "intelligently" pick what pictures are displayed, but I've found we've gotten far better variety with that feature disabled in fact, my wife and I have both noticed that we're seeing a much more varied and diverse selection of images now than we ever did with the Chromecast, which for some reason always seemed to revisit the same relatively small pool of pictures from our collection. You can also pick what sort of info is shown on the screen along with each image - a clock, the name of any currently playing music track, and photo date or album info. The app lets you select exactly how long each image should stay on the screen as well as how different types of photos should be handled in terms of cropping or fitting to your TV's dimensions. And you can specify which albums you want to be included from any of those services, in case you need to exclude certain (ahem) extra- personal photos from being featured. You can also opt to connect it to Facebook, Flickr, and 500px in addition, if you have images in any of those places and want some extra variety. The first thing you'll want to do, of course, is connect the app to your Google Photos library. The app you want is by a developer named Furnaghan.) Open that sucker up, and take a minute to poke around through the options. (Open the Play Store app on Android TV, then search for that title and install it. Ready? All you've gotta do is download an app called Photo Screensaver onto your Android TV box. The Android TV-Google Photos screensaver solution In fact, it's actually quite a bit better than the native implementation on Chromecast. And sure enough, I found a pretty simple workaround for getting Google Photos to work as the screensaver on an Android TV device. But let's save that discussion for another time, you handsome devil."Īnd so I started digging. Find a way."Īnd then I thought, "You know, it's kinda weird that you address yourself by name when you're talking in your own head. You write a column about Android stuff, for Goog's sake. I actually considered aborting our Android TV experience entirely when I dug through our new Mi Box's settings and discovered there was no option to create a custom screensaver with Google Photos. And when it comes to Google, logic doesn't always apply. Well, it turns out I forgot one critical fact: This is Google we're talking about.
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