Vendor bricking of hardware

https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA34642/what-changes-are-coming-to-skype-for-tv
http://support.logitech.com/en_us/articl...i00000069v07AAA

So the kids and I went to use Skype, only to find the MS has cut off Skype for TV. So now I have a very nice, but useless Logitech TV Cam HD. And I'm not finding a replacement product

Nobody has hacked it, but Amazon is accepting it for trade-in, giving $80+, and selling it from it's warehouse. Unfortunately the second one I bought is an ocean away, and likely does not make sense to mail back.

Thank you for this! I had a client who could no longer get his Skype app to launch on his TV, and we couldn't figure out the problem after calling the manufacturer. Strange that they didn't know about this when we called.

Anyway, thanks for solving the mystery!

Glad to help. What do you think your client will use as a solution going forward? The Logitech Cam wasn't perfect, but it did enable the kids to interact more easily then when crowded around a laptop or phone/pad.

I'm honestly not sure. My client really liked being able to sit on his couch with his wife and talk to their kids/grandkids without having to crowd around a laptop or their MacBooks.

The only way I can think of to replicate the setup would be to attach a computer and a webcam to their TV.

I don't know what brand the webcam is. Their TV is an LG, and the webcam is branded as LG, though I'm sure they don't make it. It didn't look like any Logitech model that I've seen, though.

An Xbox would be the closest, but that is an almost $300 solution
https://www.skype.com/en/download-skype/skype-for-xbox-one/ but might be easier to support then another computer or a Raspberry Pi.

I'm curious to hear what they end up with. For now I think we'll try a laptop connected to the TV, or iPhone, until we figure out something better.

That's a pretty good idea, actually. But yeah I hate to suggest that much money. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it'll be over $330 if you want the model with the Kinect, which I'd think you'd need. I have no idea if their current camera would work with the XBox.

I was swagging at the answer, and yes, you'd need the Kinect. It is a lot if it is only to be used for Skype. It could also serve as a bluray/DVD player and media streaming, but this is stretching the justification
A small PC, standard webcam, etc, is the same money if not more.

Yeah, I guess it all comes down to how much they like the specific use case of talking over Skype on a TV. They have two Macbooks so they could always do a group chat.

They're currently using their LG TV for Netflix and vudu, so I guess they don't have a high bar for user interface Otherwise I'd recommend an XBox just for the superior UI.

I love how, in all the justifications you guys listed for getting an Xbone, playing video games wasn't one of them. :-)

I thought "surely AndroidTV must be able to do this", but it appears not to be so (relevant discussion thread), even though the NVidia Shield comes with a camera. They do seem to support video chat over Twitch, but not others. Weird.

One other option is a Chromebox. These came out in 2014 and don't appear to have been updated since then, which is always a red flag, but $140-160 gets you a PC-in-a-box which is relatively hard for somebody to screw up, since all it does it run a web browser. Any video chat that uses HTML5 goodies will work with it.

At least a year ago, Google was pitching this explicitly as a low-cost video chat solution for business.

A cheaper solution is to buy a Chromecast device ($35-ish) and cast to it from a laptop running your video chat. This will definitely work for Hangouts running in Chrome (instructions here). You'd need some kind of third-party screen-scraping-to-Chromecast solution to make it work for Skype.

Here's another infuriating vendorbrick I read about this morning:
http://www.diyphotography.net/eyefi-drop...tember-16-2016/

I am fairly certain that I have spent more time looking at the store and grabbing the monthly free games than I have actually playing games. The only ones I really spent any time with were Fallout 4, Destiny and Titanfall.

Ugh.... I have one of those cards as well... but we've not used it in a while, as phone have become our primary photo taking tool. Yeah, not the best, but good enough for snaps of kids.

And yes, I know the X-Box does games. As soon as these ankle biters grow up, and I get some free time, then maybe I can find out what all these game things are



While this lets the kids see more easily, it takes the kids away from the mic and camera, so grandma doesn't see them And trust me, she is not Skype'ng us to see me

While Googles solution might be low cost for a business, at $1k+$250 management fee... ouch!

For some reason your post reminded me that we use to use a regular webcam+laptop connected to the TV, so we might go that route. Thanks!
The biggest problem is at the other end, and getting grandma to press the right buttons, so there is a HUGE preference for not changing anything at that end.

Add the Garmin GTU 10 GPS Tracker to the list. Supposedly it relied on ATT Wireless services that are/have been retired. Garmin doesn't provide any successor products either.