I use Nvidia shield and never update it. So far no ads.
The easiest way to avoid ads is use an android streamer (I use the Google tv streamer) and install projectivity launcher. You get the cleanest UI that’s fully customizable with only what you want to see. I also installed a button remapper app to change the netflix button on my remote to open Plex. It’s a very easy stress-free experience using my tv
Are there any TVs nowadays that don’t advertise to you? I bought a Hisense about 6 years ago because it supposedly didn’t advertise. 2 years into getting the TV it advertises now. Any suggestions for a TV that just lets me watch?
Every time somebody brings this up, there’s the same obvious answer. The only real option is to have an external streaming device and to disable or completely ignore the built-in operating system.
Finally got sick of the FireTV so I plugged a mini PC into a dumb TV. It’s kinda sad to have to use a keyboard instead of a controller, but it was a minor tradeoff for a much better experience.
I got a Philips TV and just never connected it to the internet. Only ad I see is the ugly Netflix button on my remote, rest is handled by OSMC.
I think most TVs can do this. I’ve even discovered that Samsung that’s notorious for forcing you to go through a network setup wizard can be bypassed just by pressing the right arrow button instead of selecting a WiFi. At least all the Samsung TVs from my old workplace had this bypass.
I know its possible to jail break a roku, but is there a follow up to remove ads after doing so?
Really sick of it. Though I need to get a pi-hole set up anyways
Are they ads for thing to pirate…?
Great, I got rid of Amazon fire stick after they stuck ads in movies and got a Roku.
Now I’ll have to switch again or start pirating. Another loss for civilization
Used a fire TV stick for a long time but multiple factors made me finally switch to an Nvidia shield.
Worked great for a year and then an OS updated made the home screen 60% ads, especially those that started to play with sound when I was on them for like 2 milliseconds. Installed projectify on it and now I only see what I want to see.
It is always disturbing to me how much ads I see when I am using someone else’s system, because I banned everything at home.
And they wknder why piracy is skyrocketing again. It’s not hard, dipshits. Fuck.
They updated my roku a few months ago with this and there was an opt out to revert, and I took it. It asked if I really wanted to change back to the old UI as it would be unable to swap back. I hope that stays true!
My understanding is that they pushed it to some people as a beta and eventually they would roll out the update to everyone even if they opted out of the beta. I opted out to go back to the not as bad homescreen and blocked it from the Internet in my router settings
Roku used to be pretty great, but the writing was on the wall after the IPO in 2017. This is just one more step in the decade-long march toward total enshittification.
Mine haven’t been connected to the internet since about a year before they pushed out that update that forced you to agree to their revised surveillance terms or you could never use it again.
My googleOS TCL never got internet access in the first place. Who needs integrated apps when you have tons of mostly old computers kicking around?
You can also just block it via a Pi-Hole. My Roku works fine as a smart TV, but has no ads because they can’t load from the ad server. I also blocked the telemetry server too. So I get all the benefits of having a smart TV (like convenient apps, instead of needing to use a HTPC as a workaround), and none of the downsides like ads.
The built-in ads were actually what led to me finally setting up my pihole after moving. I had it set up in my old apartment, and my wife was used to having it quietly running. She didn’t really realize how much it blocked until we moved. After the move, I was busy with unpacking, work, etc and didn’t have a whole lot of free time. So the network was just running on the new ISP’s provided modem/router until I had the time to get all my server shit unpacked and set up. My wife kept dragging me away for other tasks, so it was like three weeks before I even had time to touch the box that my pi-hole was in.
I finally got time to set my pi-hole up because my wife had the Roku TV paused, it went to the idle screen, and she saw an ad scroll past on the idle screen. She turned to me and was like “okay yeah, you need to go set up that adblocker thingy. Ads on the fucking idle screen? I knew ads were getting pervasive these days, but what the fuck?” The next day, she left me alone so I would have time to actually get everything plugged in and configured. Seeing that ad on the idle screen was the moment that cemented in her mind that an adblocker is a necessary part of the network.
You can, but I found that roku forced my apps (specifically plex, the only app I really ever used, which should have needed an update exactly never because my server doesn’t get updated either) to break in such a way that I needed to unblock everything and redownload exactly once every 3 months (I assume to collect your stored data), and that wasn’t worth it to me, so I factory reset it and left it that way, because idgaf. I have enough old computers to have one in every room, so roku gets nothing. They are just dumb tvs now.
Maybe that’s changed, but I’m not risking fucking it up to find out.
I had gotten a roku for us for xmas the year before. Saw that tos update and stopped using it immediately. Tbh it kinda sucked anyways.
I know everyone shuts on Apple but … my cheap Apple TV has 0 ads, except the ads the apps may have.
I assume Google has, and probably killed, at least 1 variant?
<laughs in pihole>
does the UI just render blank squares in that case?
Yes. It’s obnoxious.
In some cases. There is a blank square on the main menu. The idle screen also normally had an ad. The idle screen looks like a scrolling cartoon panoramic shot of a street, and the ad is a billboard on the side of the street. That billboard simply isn’t there at all if the ad is blocked.
I’ve done this on VIDAA (Hisense) and there’s a placeholder for the homescreen ads that just say “VIDAA”.
I think it hides the big ad area if it can’t get the data, but I haven’t used my Roku outside of the setup in so long I don’t know what the UI would look like.
I use adguard on my opnsense with several lists… one of them snags it by default. the big blank border of a square is still lame.
deleted by creator
yo this looks like a good gist, thanks!
whoops! deleted it because it was posted elsewhere in the thread but i hadn’t noticed yet.
here it is in case anybody wants it. https://gist.github.com/sidward35/cea28bedd0ec0b1bceec8c2b22c163c4
We really need to figure out an open source TV OS or something. I want a Linux based OS for a small PC explicitly to stream Plex or other streaming services. I think I read that licensing for the transcoding or something was the hang up.
KDE Plasma Bigscreen is joining the Plasma release schedule next month and will then be available in distro repositories. That at least will be a big deal for Linux HTPCs.
I think I read that licensing for the transcoding or something was the hang up.
There’s several problems. Transcoding is one but there’s also issues with content providers requiring the use of their own apps along with Linux not (until very recently) being able to use any HDMI spec beyond 2.0.
I’ve been a ROKU user for over a decade but the last year has had me thinking more and more about boxing up my devices and sending them to their HQ with a note “Since you treat these like you own them I figured I’d just send them to you.”
I am really REALLY tired of them dicking with my boxes and updating / reconfiguring things however and whenever they see fit.
I’ve been a ROKU user for over a decade but the last year has had me thinking more and more about boxing up my devices and sending them to their HQ with a note “Since you treat these like you own them I figured I’d just send them to you.”
I’ve been considering what to do with mine that has been in a box since they pushed spyware to them. I might do that.
The biggest hurdle is streaming services’ DRM (something called widevine iirc) that just doesn’t work on linux, which limit you to low resolutions like 720p. There was some struggles between AMD and the HDMI consortium preventing them from shipping HDMI2.1 drivers, but that appears to be solved.
The biggest hurdle is streaming services’ DRM (something called widevine iirc) that just doesn’t work on linux
Good point. Of course, while technical solutions make for an interesting discussion, piracy is both an excellent free solution, and can get rid of the pesky anti-piracy ads.
But I do appreciate the discussion, as I remain unwilling to bother with piracy, and I might still use and pay for a service that works on Linux without too much effort.
I love how both streaming and blu-ray both made piracy the simpler solution by having ungodly amount of DRM that only screw over the paying customer (that don’t even work to stop piracy, by the way).
As some old gaming dude once said “Piracy is almost always a service problem” , said dude is now a billionaire by providing a correct service by the way.
Show me a steam or gog equivalent (ie just a platform that is not outright hostile to consumers) to buying movies and tv shows and my money is yours. In the meantime I’ll keep sailing the high sea.
Are you familiar with Kodi?
I wish there were something more like Apple TV UI. Kodi is weird and hard to navigate. Apps are more like plugins instead of just Apps.
Plasma Bigscreen is scheduled for its first release next month: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
Looks good and I’ll definitely try it but this likely won’t get you any of the streaming services. But I don’t personally care about that.
Seems like doing some clean room design off of Roku OS would be a good choice.
This is technically correct, but it’s not new. They’ve had this ad for years.
looks like they shrunk the menu to icons in order to make room for the ad on the same view, not just when you arrow over to the app icons.
Yea I’ve been ignoring that forever. I jsut go to my Jellyfin app at square 1
FYI if you already have a Roku, you can block these with a network level ad blocker like Pihole.
Edit: Here’s a list of common Smart TV domains to block.
I was using NextDNS instead of pihole because I wanted my ad blocking to still work when I’m out and about.
Couldn’t stay on the free tier because I make so many DNS requests. Which seemed weird - it’s just the two of us using the network?
Lo and behold, the fucking forgotten Roku attached to a TV was doing a fresh DNS lookup every 30 seconds to try to call home and send telemetry data. It accounted for like 60% of my DNS traffic!
I use a simple WireGuard VPN to use my home DNS when I’m out. This container from linuxserver.io was really easy to set up, and the WireGuard app works great on iOS/Android. You can even have it automatically turn on and off depending on your network.
I tried fancy mesh networks like Tailscale, but it was over-complicated for my setup and kept causing DNS issues. Some people find this works well for them, though.
Either way, you can go full self-hosted this way and save money.
If you already have a Roku you can probably just stop using a Roku.
I’d rather show people how to de-shittify their existing devices than create more e-waste.
What do you recommend instead for $30-40?
Yeah like the other guy said. One of the ONN devices with Projectivity Launcher to get rid of ads and organize your apps in a sane manner.
One of the Onn streaming devices from Walmart. Picked one up last month to replace an old Fire Stick, and it’s been great. Runs stock (or close enough to it) GoogleTv and it only cost about $40. Downloaded Projectivy Launcher and set it as my default home app, so no more home screen ads. Will probably end up throwing ReVanced on it, too.
And when Google inevitably pisses me off enough, I can unlock the bootloader and try my hand at flashing a custom ROM without any Google Play services.
Is anyone running https://plasma-bigscreen.org/ yet?
It’ll be packaged up in plasma 6.7, I think mid June. Then it’ll be easy for distros to make it available. I want to try it but I don’t want to change distro or build it myself. When 6.7 rolls out, I got my computer plugged into my TV with CachyOS handheld edition. Right when Plasma 6.7 is available in the Arch repos, I’m installing it
Somehow, it appears to already be packaged for fedora, I already tried it and it looks extremely promising while still being in beta.
From https://plasma-bigscreen.org/get/
Plasma Bigscreen is not yet widely available.
We are planning to join the Plasma release schedule starting with Plasma 6.7 (in June), which will make it possible for distributions to ship it in their repositories.
In June, so almost!
want to. Got a rpi5 sitting waiting but too many other projects ahead of it.
I did try android TV on it. it was utter horse shit, so I’m hopeful for pbs.
I’ve got Android TV on a Rpi5 and it works fine. It does have some bloat but it gets the job done.
playing anything 4k makes it too choppy for my taste. even 2k has issues.
