“Awful”: Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen

Wish it had more apps, but Apple TV is pretty solid. With the Steam link app, it’s also good for couch gaming on your pc.

Yeah, that was my approach, but the forced ads are also on the roku stick :(

I'm looking to upgrade the living room TV soon, and this is what I plan to do.

That’s what I do

Just a heads up that the Smart Cancer has already begun infecting PC monitors. Samsung makes Smart Monitors.

It won’t be long before there are no longer Dumb Monitors.

I must not be looking at the right thing. All I'm finding are expensive displays that have all this fancy scheduling, web surfing, etc. built into it.

@T00l_shed @Mandragora yup https://lemmy.world/post/26386001

You know I only ever get more glad that I didn't learn to drive and went with cycling instead. It started due to not being able to afford it, now I won't own their shit and I will be happy.

Not sold new

Sure. The device I use is an Onn streaming a Android TV box. I think I got the 2023 4k streaming version and it was about $20, from Walmart. You can probably get cheaper models, but I wanted one with an Ethernet port.

Then I installed a couple of alternative launchers from the Play store on device. I also loaded F-Droid as well (though I had to do that directly through an apk). I can't remember which launcher I went with in the end, but it was either FLauncher or Projectivity. They were both good.

The wrinkle here is that the OS defaults back to the default launcher (which has ads and a lot of clutter on it). But I used a free command line tool called adb to switch the default launcher off.

I've been very happy with the new setup. My kids (who use it all the time) occasionally complain that an app will crash while they are watching something, and take them back to the home screen/launcher. But I haven't run into that, and it's probably just them accidentally hitting a remote (which I know they accidentally do a lot).

I documented the process and posted them here, in another thread a few months ago.

Additional note: The default YouTube app isn't very conducive to quick profile switching, which can be annoying. To switch profiles you basically have to go back to the OS level and do it there, then go back into the YouTube app. It's an Android TV quirk. But I discovered that if you side-load the Amazon Fire version of the YouTube app onto the device, you can switch profiles within that version of the app, and it works just fine.

Sorry to inform you, but we are already in the Brave New World.

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.

We’re pretty neat I like to think

Instructions unclear. TV now controlled by Nicole the fediverse chick.

This method will not work on all Roku tvs, some Roku TV brands require you to phone home to activate the TV before you can use it for the first time. Which requires you to not only connect to the internet but also log into a Roku account on it. It's stupid.

I’m not surrending shit. It’s really Android TV, they just call it Google. But whatever man, go off.

That’s such a cool and novel opinion. Wow. My Android TV does everything I need it to right out of the box. Never fucking shows me advertisements, and actually made it easier for me to stop paying for an overpriced Hulu subscription.

The sad thing is Roku's UI was pretty dang good before they added a row of ads at the top, a half screen ad on the left and replaced the background with an ad every 2 weeks, waiting a full minute for it to load the latest nonsense the highest bidder paid them to shove in my face. The ads absolutely ruin a good platform.

So far what?

Even if they do start putting ads on Android TV, all I have to do is switch over to my Apple TV. That’s the best performing streaming device on the market, regardless of your opinion on Apple.

How do you do that?

Im not very computer savvy and currently only have a tablet and a mac mini from 2008.

When was the last time they even refreshed the hardware? Kinda hard to justify a $200 streaming box that runs Google services on 6 year old mobile hardware.

Or spend less money and get a brand new Apple TV 4K

My tv is dumb. The roku is the device that connects to the internet.

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.

Get an AppleTV.

I have been using an onn 4k streaming box, which runs Google TV. They're $20. It's pretty easy to disable the default launcher and have it boot to Flauncher. Then you can side load smart tube for an ad free YouTube experience asking with Plex, stremio, or whatever else you want to stream.

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.

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.

I totally get it I could definitely bypass the ads. However the point is that they are doing it at all. I dont want to use their service if this is going to be their strategy.

I think it depends on the model, but there should be something in the power settings to change the startup device. I did a factory reset first to clear any network settings or user data, skipped the setup, and set it to startup on the HDMI input.

That's not better, you didn't allow any smart TV to connect to the internet.

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.

Would you happen to know of any guides or have advice on identifying the adservers to block?

Roku started as a streaming media box. You paid them money, they gave you a box that could play Netflix and Youtube. It was a simple transaction. Unfortunately, at some point they decided to start selling/giving their OS to TV manufacturers. This was actually nice at the start. You got a smart TV who's "Smarts" were designed by competent people. A revolution at the time. But the drive to drop prices lower and lower meant that there was no margin on the TV, which means Roku had to investigate other ways of making their revenue, AKA Ads and selling data.

Of course, the stand alone box probably would have went that way anyways, but at least with selling a dedicated box, there is a clear financial benefit without the need to get invasive.

Use a separate, not ad-riddled device plugged in via HDMI. If you have a game console it can do this.

I don't know what's good for Android TV boxes it used to be the NVIDIA Shield was a well regarded streaming device but it's really old now. Google makes one (Google TV Streamer) and you can install a custom launcher if you're a bit technical and the "suggested content" of the stock launcher bothers you. Same for other Android TV boxes.

Apple, like them or not, makes a really decent TV box with no system level ads and an interface that mostly stays out of the way.

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.

Apple has absolutely no interest in injecting ads like this. That’s not their business model. Apple has a thousand things wrong but it’s reasonable to assume they aren’t going to pull this kind of rug pull.

It's not that they won't do it. It's that they currently don't so it's a good choice.

When they add ads, then we can find something else. I'm on Roku now but have been increasingly annoyed by the increase in ads.

As it stands now Apple TV for the win and I'd be legit shocked if Apple puts ads as you boot up an Apple TV.