Samsung televisions offer various intelligent features and image enhancements, but some settings should be adjusted before use. Enabling the correct settings can improve the brightness, speed, and performance of your television.

1. Update Your TV Software First

The Samsung Smart TV runs the Tizen operating system, which controls the apps, menu, and other features of your TV. It is recommended that you always have the latest version of the software installed on your device before streaming any movie or installing an app.

The best way to manually search for updates is to go to Settings > Support > Software Update. Some users disable Wi-Fi after the update is complete, since advertisements, suggestions, and applications can interfere with menu navigation. However, you can still connect the TV to Wi-Fi periodically to install other software updates. Other gadgets, such as Roku, Fire TV, and gaming consoles, can be used as alternatives for app downloads.

2. Turn Off Eco Mode for Better Brightness

If your Samsung TV appears dimmer than you expect due to its energy-saving feature. The Samsung model offers several features, including the Eco Sensor and Brightness Optimization modes, which can be enabled. These modes operate based on environmental lighting information.

To enhance visual quality, the user can disable settings such as Eco Sensor, Brightness Optimizer, and Energy Saving Solution. The features can be found under Settings > General & Privacy > Power and Energy Saving. This is done so the TV can maintain a consistent brightness level, which will improve image quality.

This feature will come in especially handy when watching movies, playing games, or watching sports, since higher brightness is essential for clarity. Users who would like to enhance their HDR settings can navigate to Picture > Expert Settings and select High under Peak Brightness.

3. Enable Intelligent Mode for Automatic Picture Adjustments

Intelligent Mode is one of the Intelligent Features on the Samsung TV, enabling it to regulate itself. The TV uses Artificial Intelligence, which allows it to adjust brightness, color, and sound based on room illumination and users’ personal preferences.

Furthermore, the Adaptive Picture and AI Customization options are available in Samsung’s Intelligent mode. They allow the television to adjust the image settings differently depending on the content – whether movies, sports, gaming, or regular TV shows. The learning process occurs as the user regularly uses the television, gaining more experience.

This feature is especially useful for users who do not want to spend time manually tweaking multiple picture settings. Intelligent Mode becomes more efficient as the television gets used to users’ viewing habits. The option can be enabled under All Settings > General > Intelligent Mode and may be turned off at any time.

4. Disable Auto Motion Plus for Movies

Samsung also includes an Auto Motion Plus feature that creates smoother motion on the TV screen. The feature inserts artificial frames between scenes to reduce motion blur. While this may improve motion clarity, it often creates the “soap opera effect.”

The soap opera effect gives films and TV series a look that’s too natural and unrealistic. Rather than achieving the desired cinematographic style, the scenes begin to take on a daytime television or live-broadcast feel. Many viewers feel this removes the original film-like appearance from movies and streaming content.

This setting can be turned off by navigating to Picture > Expert Settings > Auto Motion Plus. Turning off this setting makes the picture look more natural for video streaming and films. However, when it comes to gaming, a bit of motion smoothing could still make a difference.

5. Customize Audio Settings for Better Sound

Samsung TVs have built-in features that enhance sound quality without requiring any additional equipment. Modern TVs are quite thin, which can hamper speaker performance. For this reason, Samsung offers various sound modes and enhancements in the Sound tab.

Among the many attributes, the one that stands out is the Adaptive Sound feature, which automatically adjusts audio settings according to the environment and the media being played. Presets such as Standard, Optimized, and Amplify are provided by Samsung TVs to help users choose the sound profile that suits their needs. Furthermore, there are multiple EQ settings available for bands.

For customers using Samsung sound bars that support Q-Symphony technology, there is no need to turn off the television speakers, as Q-Symphony ensures the two speakers work synergistically to deliver high-quality sound.

Generative AI’s rapid transition from text-based chatbots to high-fidelity media—spanning images, video, spatial 3D, and audio—has exposed a glaring bottleneck in the modern tech stack: infrastructure. Rendering pixels in real-time requires a staggering amount of compute, and developers are increasingly struggling to manage fragmented GPU clusters just to keep their applications online.

Enter fal, a generative media creation platform that has quietly become the connective tissue for 2.5 million developers across the globe, offering literally hundreds of leading AI image, video, and audio creation and editing models — from proprietary ones like OpenAI’s ChatGPT-Images-2.0 and Google’s Nano Banana Pro 2 to open source rivals — all through its unified interface and APIs.

Today, the San Francisco-based startup, recently valued at a massive $4.5 billion following a $300 million Series D round led by Sequoia Capital, announced it has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider.

While the financial terms of the deal weren’t made public, the move signals a maturation in the generative media space, shifting the focus from simply building foundational models to effectively scaling them for mass, commercial consumption.

“AWS has been there for distribution and monetization, and for the use of AI in creative pursuits — helping designers, developers, and the creative community think through how they can use AI responsibly, scalably, and at global scale,” said Samira Panah Bakhtiar, General Manager for Media, Entertainment, Games, and Sports at AWS, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat.

A one-stop-shop for Gen AI media allowing enterprises to plug in and choose the best model for their needs

At its core, fal operates as a unified gateway to the rapidly expanding generative AI ecosystem. Rather than forcing developers to provision their own servers, deal with latency issues, or string together disparate open-source model weights, fal provides a single, unified API. Through this API, users gain instant access to over 1,000 production-ready AI models.

Think of it as the Stripe or Plaid of generative media: abstracting away the devastatingly complex back-end plumbing so developers can focus solely on the user experience.

It is a “plug-and-play” solution that has already attracted independent creators and enterprise giants alike, powering generative workflows for enterprises including Canva, Adobe, and Amazon MGM Studios.

“Generative media workloads demand a fundamentally different infrastructure layer, one that can handle massive parallel inference, rapid model iteration, and production-grade reliability at scale,” said Gorkem Yurtseven, CTO and Co-founder of fal, in a statement provided to VentureBeat.

Neither AWS nor fal specified what other cloud or GPU providers the latter was using prior to their deal together. Asked who fal had been using before AWS, Bakhtiar did not name a prior cloud or GPU provider, saying instead that fal is now using AWS services.

In a blog post, fal’s Head of Compute Partnerships Emir Lise described AWS as providing the “global scale and reliability layer” for its existing serverless generative-media infrastructure — framing the partnership around elasticity, reliability and enterprise scale rather than a replacement of a named incumbent.

A public search turned up Tigris as a storage provider for fal — with Tigris saying fal runs a “global fleet of GPUs across many clouds” — and an announcement from fal in Septemeber 2025 that it was available through Google Cloud Marketplace, allowing customers to buy fal through Google Cloud billing and governance, but that listing does not state that Google Cloud powered fal’s GPU infrastructure.

99.99% guaranteed uptime?

By partnering with AWS, fail aims to merge its highly optimized inference engine with Amazon’s global reach to handle millions of daily API calls with 99.99% guaranteed uptime.

In addition, Bakhtiar said fal users can expect to see “faster inference and performance, greater efficiency, more scalability, and more seamless service continuity — all things you would expect as a result of partnering with the world’s largest, broadly adopted cloud.”

Therefore, the primary benefit for fal users is better performance and reliability without changing how they work: faster inference, more scalability, smoother continuity, and access to production-ready AI models without managing their own infrastructure.

For fal, the partnership makes its platform stronger for creators, studios, and enterprise customers by backing it with AWS’s security, global scale, and cloud infrastructure.

For AWS, it helps push cloud and AI deeper into creative production, not just distribution or monetization. It positions AWS as a key infrastructure partner for studios, media companies, developers, and individual creators building AI-powered content workflows.

Offloading the GPU burden

The partnership with AWS is designed to address the sheer physics and cost of rendering generative media. By migrating its operations to AWS, fal will be able to leverage Amazon’s broad suite of AI services, including the Bedrock platform, alongside custom-built silicon like Trainium and Graviton processors.

“You don’t have to manage like a GPU fleet to use the AI for creative pursuits,” Bakhtiar explained.

This is a critical pain point for larger-scale media generation demands in 2026. Securing high-performance GPUs for parallel inference is both expensive and technically demanding.

By shifting that burden to AWS, fal ensures that creatives can focus on their workflows, without needing a dedicated DevOps team.

Bakhtiar also noted the powerful “network effect” of building on AWS. Because major studios and creative platforms (like Adobe and Canva) are already deeply entrenched in the AWS ecosystem, integrating fal’s API into their existing pipelines becomes a frictionless endeavor.

Enterprise-grade security and compliance with gen AI creative speed

For IT leaders and developers, fal’s architecture offers a distinct advantage regarding licensing, security, and deployment.

Historically, utilizing frontier generative models meant either accepting strict vendor lock-in from a single provider or attempting to host open-source models locally.

The latter requires significant overhead and forces enterprises to navigate a minefield of disparate open-source licenses (such as MIT, Apache 2.0, or restrictive non-commercial licenses).

fal bypasses this friction by offering commercial API access to a curated ecosystem of models. Developers simply pay for the inference they consume.

Furthermore, the platform is SOC 2 compliant and explicitly built for “enterprise scale,” meaning it meets the stringent data privacy and security benchmarks required by heavily regulated industries and massive consumer platforms.

For large media conglomerates, this managed service approach allows them to experiment with the latest state-of-the-art tools securely, without the risk of exposing proprietary data or intellectual property.

Empowering devs and vibe coders

The true impact of fal’s platform, however, is best observed at the developer level. By democratizing access to high-end infrastructure, fal is enabling a new class of builders—often referred to as “vibe coders”—to create complex, multimodal applications without traditional computer science backgrounds.

As Bakhtiar pointed out, access to these tools fundamentally “levels the playing field”. Whether it is an individual developer or hobbyist vibe coding a side project, or a fully-funded editor or director rendering a blockbuster film, the underlying technology is now identical, infinitely scalable, and ready for production.

“More creatives — whether they’re full-fledged studios, indie brands, or individual content creators — are now going to be able to access these tools, and they’re going to be able to punch way above their weight as a result,” Bakhtiar said, casting the partnership as a way to serve even more users through fal thanks to the reliability of AWS’s servers and custom Trainium, Graviton and Inferentia chips.

The rollout of enhanced AWS capabilities for fal customers will occur in phases throughout 2026.

Google is working on a whole bunch of smart glasses. The first one running on the Android XR platform developed by Samsung is expected to arrive close to July. The slate, it seems, will get crowded pretty soon. Earlier today at the I/O 2026 Developers Conference, Google also showed off a new class of audio glasses that have been designed in partnership with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster.

But the most interesting of the bunch is the Xreal Project Aura smart glasses, which support full hand gesture support as well as mixed reality view for Android apps available through the Play Store. These smart glasses were first showcased in December 2025, but Xreal confirmed earlier today that the Project Aura smart glasses will hit the shelves in 2026. 

The Project AURA smart glasses by Xreal come equipped with a built-in display that offers a 70° field of view, which the company claims is the largest FOV that has ever been offered on a pair of AR glasses. Thanks to the built-in display, you can overlay digital content in your sight while still having a clear view of the world around you. The company notes that you can run multiple app windows and get the full Android app experience without any hacks.

This is the full-blown Android experience that we are talking about. So far, the Xreal smart glasses that have been available to customers have run a custom version of Xreal’s in-house software that is launched through an app. The only way you could access Android on the Xreal smart glasses is by mirroring them through your phone or by connecting them to a PC in order to run Windows or macOS.

They have supported multi-windows, offering a massive digital canvas for you to run different apps side by side. These virtual windows can be accessed either affixed in the air, or by making them track your head movements. With the Project Aura, Xreal is getting rid of the software limitations by making these smart glasses run the native Android XR experience, with plenty of Gemini experiences in tow. So far, the demo videos released by the company have shown these glasses connecting to a smartphone-shaped puck through a cable.

Unlike the audio glasses that Google showed off earlier today, these glasses won’t be able to run the full Android XR experience without a wired connection due to the processing limitations. Talking about processing, Qualcomm will supply the chip for the Xreal Project Aura smart glasses, promising a dual-chip design which includes a Snapdragon silicon as well as a custom X1S processor. 

Off-Prem

This is the service we get when we spend $10m plus? asks automated code deployment outfit

PaaS platform Railway says Google temporarily suspended its account on Wednesday without cause, inducing a major outage.

Railway automates code deployment by taking a GitHub repo and doing all the work needed to get it running from the cloud.

It’s struggled to do that for the last few hours and the company’s status page tells the sad tale, starting with an update time-stamped May 19, 22:29 UTC that said the company is “investigating a widespread service disruption” that meant “Users may be experiencing errors including ‘no healthy upstream’, ‘unconditional drop overload’, login failures, and inability to access the dashboard.”

Angelo Saraceno, a solutions engineer for Railway, told The Register the company noticed a problem at around 22:00 UTC. He said the company’s resources appeared to have been deleted and appeared not to exist. Google has since explained it suspended the account, making Railway’s resources invisible.

“Our contacts at Google were confused, customers are irate,” he added.

We are livid and still trying to get all the details

Ironically, in 2024 Railway decided to shift much of its infrastructure into colocation services after Google “caused a multitude of problems that have posed an existential risk to our business.” Those problems resurfaced in 2025 after more trouble at Google Cloud that again impacted Railway’s services. 

But Railway kept its control plane in Google Cloud and still has a dependency on databases that run there. Those resources see it spend an eight-figure sum each year. Yet Saraceno said when this incident commenced, it took an hour for Google’s support team to engage.

“We are livid and still trying to get all the details,” he said before advancing a theory that Railway somehow triggered an enforcement rule.

Railway’s status page says that as of 22:43 UTC the company “escalated this directly with Google.”

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that escalation!

Railway’s most recent status update, at the time of writing, is an 03:05 May 20 missive that states “More workloads are coming back online. Some users may still experience intermittent issues during the recovery. Non-enterprise deploys remain paused; enterprise deploys are unaffected.”

The Register has contacted Google to ask if and why it blocked Railway’s account. You know the drill: We will update this story if we receive more than corporate platitudes.

Cloud providers might rightly block a customer’s account over unpaid bills or inappropriate use – but usually do so after giving fair warning. Railway told us this incident came out of the blue.

Google has form taking down customers without cause: In 2024 it infamously wiped out all rented infrastructure used by Australian pension fund UniSuper.

Railway’s status page includes apologies to its customers, despite the problem being at Google’s end.

“Our customers don’t care if it is Google,” Saraceno said. “We have to own our uptime.” ®

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Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight sees everyone’s favorite morally dubious hero return to the streets of Gotham once more in TT Games’ latest brick-based adventure. It’s a real mish-mash of genres, combining RPG and brawler elements with classic Lego action-adventure platforming fun, but it makes for a charming adventure that Bat-fans are sure to love.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and if nothing else, it’s something Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight has turned into an art form. Riddled with references, jam-packed with jokes, and quintessential comic book ka-powery, there’s no denying that this is an ode to all things Batman.

photo credit: Nate Edwards | BYU
Last month at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway a team of BYU engineers sent their hand-built machine around a ten-mile course and recorded a result that still seems impossible on paper. Their vehicle covered the distance using barely a thimbleful of ethanol and returned 2,145 miles per gallon, enough to carry the same amount of fuel from Provo, Utah, all the way to New York City.

The event was part of the Shell Eco-marathon, and just shy of eighty teams from all over the Americas showed up with one goal in mind: go the distance with the least amount of fuel possible. The rules kept things clear and straightforward. The course was a predetermined loop that drivers had to complete, with judges precisely assessing how far each vehicle could go on a specific amount of ethanol. Don’t even get me started on the weather; a headwind can undo all of your hard work in an instant, so every decision made, from the form to the weight, was important.

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A team from Brigham Young University (BYU) arrived with an innovative three-wheeler encased in carbon fiber, weighing only 108 pounds before the driver even sat in, and that driver had to be under five feet four inches tall and no more than 120 pounds to fit into the tiny cockpit. Once inside, with no air conditioning, no audio, and no extra buttons to mess with, everything had been sacrificed for one and only one reason: to keep that machine running as smoothly as possible.

The power comes from a compact engine, which is fueled by a tiny little bottle containing only thirty milliliters of ethanol. That’s the thing: picking ethanol was a deliberate decision; it has less energy per gallon than gasoline, but it allows you to run the engine at a greater compression ratio, which helps a lot within these extremely strict competition parameters. The top speed, which is actually not very fast, is 23 miles per hour; this is the sweet spot between going someplace and losing efficiency. The brakes are rarely utilized since the driver simply allows the momentum bring them to a stop, allowing the automobile to do all of the work.

Twenty mechanical engineering students spent months on the project. No single person assembled the whole machine. One group shaped the body panels. Another tuned the drivetrain. Others tested airflow and calculated every gram of weight. Faculty advisor Dale Tree watched the effort take shape and later noted that the students treat each component as its own engineering challenge. “No one person builds a whole car,” he said. “It is a team of engineers that are going to build each component of the car.”

Club president Camille Nobrega spent three years with the group and felt the final weeks pull everyone closer. “We worked so hard and I am grateful for all the members of the team and their commitment,” she recalled. “As we got closer to the competition it did not feel difficult to put in a few more hours here and there because of the people around me.”