“Awful”: Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen
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Sorry to inform you, but we are already in the Brave New World.
Ugh I wanna be in Brand New Animal
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What’s the best alternative? I have a fire cube, and I’m getting sick of it. Apple TV? Is there a FOSS solution that’s close to the same quality interface?
I have a Raspberry Pi 500 running PiOS that works well like a computer to just play things in browser. No ads or anything of course. But also no casting from a phone or anything
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Almost downvoted instinctually as a reaction to the headline. Visceral reaction. I hate this beyond belief.
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I wouldn't say this is "better"
I do run a pihole, but I still will never connect my roku to the internet. It is much better to have a media PC or other streaming device I have control of fully connected.
Amen. I run a PiHole, and also just use lil computers on all of my screens and download anything I watch and put it on a lil server they all can stream from! No ads, best quality!
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I use pi hole and the experience is not entirely smooth. I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this but my pi hole blocks ads but every few weeks Roku has an update and it locks up the entire operating system and I’m stuck in a loop of trying to get my update so I can return to normal. I for the hell of it disabled pi hole for 5 minutes and it wound up working but not until I dropped pi hole. So it’s as if it every so often decides to hold the operating system hostage if I don’t drop pi hole for updates. Makes me think they likely get all the telemetry they are trying to collect for selling data. I like not watching ads 90 percent of the time but it pisses me off that they are likely still spying on me by forcing me to communicate with their servers every now and then.
My brother in Christ, please just connect another device to your TV and disconnect your TV from the internet. No one should be using the built-in software for exactly this reason.
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They have models that blink the large white LED light until it’s connected to WiFi. Annoying as hell.
You can fix that in 3 seconds with a piece of electrical tape.
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Is there any point in getting anything above the bottom tier Shield? Just trying to use it to replace my chromecast/stream tv and youtube
You should not buy a Shield. They haven't been updated since...2019? And there's really no reason to. Get the $20 WalMart one.
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Nvidia has destroyed the stock Shield TV experience with ads, but it's easy to install custom launchers like Projectivy. The underlying system is still a privacy nightmare, but I don't care that Nvidia knows what TV shows I watch.
I mean, I do care, just not enough to use something like Kodi as my primary TV interface. Maybe if I used any ad supported services I'd feel differently, but I don't, so meh.
That's not Nvidia, that's Google.
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So, I use regex to block all Roku domains on my network via pihole:
(ads|logs|cloudservices|image|images|web|prod.mobile|wwwimg|captive|customer-feedbacks|amoeba|amoeba2|sr|giga.sb|cs).roku(.admeasurement)*.com$Then, possibly overkill due to the above, I used OpnSense firewall rules to block all traffic from my Roku tv. I think I just got fed up with seeing Roku spam in my pihole, as the above regex seems to completely "break" Roku.
After that, I set up FLauncher (following the method #2 instructions on the gitlab page) on my shield. This makes it so I only see the Roku launcher for a few seconds while the shield starts up, and then I'm dropped straight into flauncher. I chose flauncher because it's very simple and barebones, so you might want to explore other options if you want more advanced features. I don't really need those features since I'm usually using an app anyway.
Note that I did all of that after the tv was configured and set up, YMMV if it's a brand new tv as it may need to call home to do the initial set up.
Shoutout to the PiHole team!
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Is there any point in getting anything above the bottom tier Shield? Just trying to use it to replace my chromecast/stream tv and youtube
Get an AppleTV.
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Get an AppleTV.
Lemmy especially sleeps on the Apple TV more than most communities. It’s a solid box that has no ads and no privacy issues. Plex, Jellyfin, etc… all installable. With apples track record on previous versions of the Apple TV, software updates and support for about a decade
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So glad I ditched Roku. My modified Onn box (with an open source, ad-free launcher) is so much better.
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Get an Nvidia Shield Pro and disconnect your TV from the internet.
Or spend less money and get a brand new Apple TV 4K
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What’s the best alternative? I have a fire cube, and I’m getting sick of it. Apple TV? Is there a FOSS solution that’s close to the same quality interface?
Some good options already listed. But here's another.
Hey an Android TV box (Onn brand or similar) and install an open source launcher on it, like Projectivity. You have to use adb to disable the default launcher after the new launcher is installed, otherwise it keeps defaulting back to the default one. But once don't it's smooth sailing. You have a dedicated streaming device with a remote control and a nice UI with zero ads on the home screen.
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Lemmy especially sleeps on the Apple TV more than most communities. It’s a solid box that has no ads and no privacy issues. Plex, Jellyfin, etc… all installable. With apples track record on previous versions of the Apple TV, software updates and support for about a decade
I assume being Apple that it's not possible to sideload apps not supported on the app store? In particular I'd like to use some kind of a SmartTube or other youtube app that is ad free
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I assume being Apple that it's not possible to sideload apps not supported on the app store? In particular I'd like to use some kind of a SmartTube or other youtube app that is ad free
You can use sideloadly but IIRC you need a Mac for it to work. My YouTube workflow is a YouTube-dl wrapper that pipes into jellyfin for the small handful of things I still watch from YT, so I’m less familiar with live YouTube interfaces to know which ones are out there.
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I assume being Apple that it's not possible to sideload apps not supported on the app store? In particular I'd like to use some kind of a SmartTube or other youtube app that is ad free
That is correct.
But which do you want? Privacy or convenience? No one makes a streaming device that does both.
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I'm just glad I've still got my MythTV running.
Now that's a name I have not thought about in a long time
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I was thinking about changing my Roku TV anyway. "Dumb" TVs are the future for me.
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If you have some technical knowhow, you can configure your router to let things like Netflix through, but not the rest of the OS. Or you can try your luck with PiHole or similar.
I personally do have the capabilities I'm just pointing out this is unrealistic for 99% of TV watchers.
