Ugh. Roku was one of the platforms with fewer ads.
- Roku will be adding more ads to the home screens of its devices and TVs in the near future.
- The ads will be interactive and ‘shoppable’ and will cover a range of industries, including restaurants and cars.
- Roku already has a significant amount of ads on its home screen, and it is unclear if users will be able to change their preferences for the new ads.
PiHole Domain regex blacklist:
(ads|logs|cloudservices).roku.com$Anyone jailbreaking these damn things yet?
Rokus are not worth the effort. Nvidia literally publishes dev roms for the shield tv boxes.
I love the RF remote, the functionality, and the responsiveness.
Are the dev roms fully compatible with Netflix & Co.? I’m running a shield and the one thing that kept me from rooting it was compatibility with hardware DRM. Have since cancelled all my subscriptions after they locked my family out and tried to hike the prices, but I’m still following the developments out of interest.
Jesus, I hate that word, “shoppable”. It just sounds dystopian.
it’s not as brutal a construct as the other Sales-Bro trash we see: ‘the ask’, ‘the spend’, etc. It’s too bad that no matter how much we mock the soulless people who parrot that crap, it’s just our dumber friends who won’t learn anyway.
Y’know what I love most about the high sea, matey? She never gets enshittified.
If someone, let’s say, happened to own a Roku TV and a NAS full of some sort of DRM-free video content ripped from home-video media they legitimately own and have legally format-shifted and backed up, to watch their stuff they’d still have to wade through Roku’s enshittifying home screen to access the appropriate media player.
How do i pirate an ad free tv
Pihole helps. If you have androidtv you can setup a custom launcher and avoid it on your interface.
I will have to see about getting pihole on truenas core. It has a preconfigured adguard thingy but I didn’tblike it.
Might not be the exact solution you’re looking for, but I run my “smart TV” off a cheap ass laptop. The TV itselfbhas never been connected to the internet.
Hmm. Since all I use my tv for is local plex server and hdmi I could just disable its internet access in the router.
e: i did it
Absolutely! There is no reason for the TV itself to have access, I’m actually using this TV as kind of an experiment, I let my last 2 roku TVs access the internet, and after 2-3 years they both went tits up. I’ve heard rumors that they can pretty much be broken on schedule with “updates” and shit. No idea if that is true, But if this TV lasts me a good long while, I will assume it is lol. So far 1 year on this one lol.
Could your tv just phone home via another nearby (neighbors) tv?
I sure as fuck hope not lol. I don’t think my TV has that capability, even if it wanted to. If I don’t give it access to my shit, its just a big-ass monitor lol.
Step one.
Buy a thing. It is a good thing.
-
Oops, now it only works if you pay monthly. Ok maybe they’re doing some upkeep.
-
Now there’s ads. You’re paying them money, but they want even more so now you’re the product.
-
Haha it broke! My family tech guy says it’s literally impossible to fix without the cheat codes.
Final step. Don’t buy the thing again. Don’t buy anything with “terms may be altered. Pray I do not alter them further.” Probably stick to open source.
Me after getting those dumbass Canary cameras that cost $200 a piece then they completely wrecked the free tier then started giving them away for free to get more subscribers.
Wyze cams with wz_mini_hacks firmware offline in a VLAN with Frigate and Home assistant from here on out!
-
Google is already doing this with their default Android TV launcher. I tolerated their home screen ‘recommendations’ for a while as they occasionally highlighted something interesting to watch, but one day I switched on the TV and was greeted with a huge advert banner for a fucking watch on the home screen.
At that point I spent a few hours setting up FLauncher on all my ATV devices.
I did the exact same thing. Also blocked androidtv updates in case Google starts pulling shit regarding custom launchers.
It’s gross how ads are being crammed in every little nook of our lives. Not like the ShieldTv was a cheap device either.
Pretty sad to see Roku going down the same road. Guess forcing a third of the screen devoted to ads just wasn’t enough.
I prefer projectivy launcher. It’s got a few more features and feels a little more polished.
This launcher looks super cool, does anyone bychance know if it works on FireTVs? I was ok with the FireTV launcher up until they made it autoplay ads with sound everytime you turn the damn thing on.
Same! I recently found this “feature” can be disabled in the preferences, along with a bunch of creepy tracking options.
I can’t speak from experience as I don’t own any Amazon devices, but I have read reports that it seems to work fine with the FireTV variant of Android.
The dev has only tested it against Chromecast with Google TV, with that said I’m using it on a Shield TV and a Shield Pro and it runs fine on both.
That’s the reason I’ve been using Roku. I couldn’t stand all the suggestions and ads on my Google TV. If Roku does that, too, then there’s nothing good to distinguish them.
I like that I can install custom apps on Google TV, but Roku beats them in UI IMO.
Chromecast 2. No ads ever. Just send stuff from your device to your TV.
Yes, this is what the people want! More ads! Skip the content, just show ads 24/7! That will definitely keep people from pirating out of sheer frustration.
And dont forget about that ad space on the remote control too.
Can these ads be blocked with pi-hole?
I block logs.roku.com and cloudservices.roku.com on my pihole without impacting any functionality.
Is there a good resource to learn how to install that kind of a system for a person who’s tech knowledge ends at one semesters worth of C++?
A semester of programming is more than you need. The hardest part would be installing the OS on the raspberry pi. https://pi-hole.net/
I set one up. My IT skills begin and end with being a millennial that had to troubleshoot what I wanted to get to work before App stores.
You’ll be fine in general searching “Pihole setup (insert OS here)”. Some minor troubleshooting was necessary in my case, could be an ID10T issue though.
Yes setting up a Pi-Hole should be pretty doable for someone like you. I can’t recomend a specific tutorial off the top of my head, but there should be plenty to find.
You mainly need a pi running raspbian or a pc running some debian based distro.
Anyone can set them up, it’s just running an app
what info is sent to these domain?
None if you block them.
Yea my Adblock Home (pihole alternative) blocks the ads on my Roku home screen. Now it’s just a big blank box.
Yes.
What domain list(s) are you using? Mine are still showing up with pihole. I do think some are being blocked, but not all.
Firebog.net Ticked lists as a collective, over 10^6 domains long now. Firebog have lists organised by how likely it is to impact general browsing, ticked being least likely (basically do you want to be black listing or white listing).
Thank you. And good advice about over-doing it. I’ve had people complain about “the internet being broken” on my wifi because of an overly-restrictive pi hole.
PiHole blocks the current ads. Hopefully these new ones too.
Well time to replace my roku TV with a Goodwill special TV because fuck that shit. Fuck smart tvs in general and what they have become. They used to be neat little editions added on for value on your TV back when Netflix made sense. But now they don’t especially with the ads that automatically get shoved into your face depending on what you are doing that have started to interrupt your viewing experience. It’s not like I’ll be downgrading at all when just using a computer with a TV using Stremio and AllDebrid.
So you go from owning a multi media entertainment system to owning a online store front where you must buy crap that you don’t need.
This is bait and switch level bullshit
I’ve been doing some research for the last few days on setting up a home server/NAS. If anyone’s going to ruin my entertainment, it’s going to be ME
You are still likely going to want some sort of streaming device though. I have an old computer of mine running unraid with Plex in a docker container and still use a chromecast in apps only mode to stream to my TV.
Oh yeah, I already have a Chromecast. I know this is a post about Roku specifically, but it was just another example of enshittification getting me to finally set up my own system. It was honestly the HBO Max disaster that got me started.
Good to know about App Only Mode, though! So far the Chromecast interface doesn’t bother me, but it’s good to know there’s a ripcord I can pull if it gets worse (unless they take that away).
I do see the appeal of non-smart TV’s now. Just getting a device that host your media is a good option.
All i need is to find one, preferably affordable obviously.
Just the thought of being able to use it until the hardware fails, instead of when the maufacturer decides to abandon it after 2 years.
I remember the 20 years i lived at home, we owned 3 tv’s and 2 of those were passed on to people who didn’t have the money to upgrade. The last one is still in use today, 15 years later.
While my own tv now requires 2 devices to stay functional one of which i need to rent from my isp, in a way i’m being forced to buy a new tv even though i don’t need one and then everyone wonders why the planet is going to shit.
I’m surprised we aren’t living in a cyberpunk esque landfill bordered city.
Every smart TV is a dumb TV too. Mine has some smart stuff, I think, but I have never used it, and it has never been online.
I’m looking into getting a projector and just hooking it up to my pc for media. I don’t watch all he time anyways, it’s mostly for movie/game night.
“commercial display” is the search term you want.
Why won’t anyone make a privacy focused premium streaming box with no ads? I’d pay so much for this thing that will never exist.
Apple TV is a premium streaming box without ads. The privacy aspect is less clear, but probably better than Samsung, Google and Roku that are all harvesting data.
An open source solution would be better.
The privacy aspect is less clear, but probably better
I love how dividing by an unknown somehow makes a bigger number for you. The bias is leaking.
Apple chargers more and isn’t openly selling data (Samsung) or openly selling ads (Google). The commercial activity provides some insight here, that suggests Apple is better for privacy.
IMHO, for a quick out-of-the-box solution, the AppleTV is still the better streaming box.
Performant, tight software experience, large software catalog, proactively asks about blocking tracking data, and no ads all over the place.
It does advertise Apple content but its not too bad.
You can turn that off. If you don’t want the TV app to show new TV+ shows when it’s highlighted in the dock, you can set it to display recently watched content. And recently watched content will be app agnostic.
The feature is a little buried, but it’s a nice experience upgrade that is worth switching over to.
Mainly because the major streaming services wouldn’t allow their platforms to run on it.
I don’t use major streaming services. I just want something that runs NewPipe and Jellyfin. Lol
Until then, a Raspberry Pi or SFF PC will do the job just fine. They even work with remotes if you get an IR receiver for them.
We need a fediverse streaming service.
Torrent? PeerTube?
For paid options I see no sense in decentralization. But a standard protocol for rental tied with some protocol for payments (like GNU Taler) to rent movies from any source with one tap and no install would be cool.
Is there any way to repurpose an old android phone into an android TV? Sometimes like Linage OS but TV focused. Even older Android phones can be considerably more powerful than any current streaming box. Add on privacy and you’ve got the perfect solution. It also would save on e-waste.
Kodi is probably one way to do it
Smart TV: Runs Android Smartphone: Runs Android
Oh, so can I install Android TV interface to repurpose my phone as TV box?
Google and capitalism: No!
Also why I’m looking forward at Linux phones in the future.
They’ve gotten great at this war of attrition. They know if they make changes incrementally people wouldn’t accept all at once then most people won’t notice or care. That’s why I through that trash and two firesshits out in the garbage where they belonged when they started with “related” ads and app store ads.
through
You sure?
