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

I have a 200+TB library for my Plex and jellyfin instances. The Roku was just a family friendly launcher and remote. I bought them when you could still disable ads in the secret menus and most of the Roku BS is blocked by a pair of piholes, but I've gotten annoyed chasing new urls to blacklist.

It's DRM for the other app bullshit that becomes a hindrance for going the Kodi route. There really isn't a good alternative that I've found. Linux boxes will limit some services to 720p and jt's mostly baseball and local news programs that I'll lose.

For the news, I need to look at something like hdhomerun or something else I can pair with an OTA antenna.

For baseball, not much other than the absolute mess that live streaming sports is. Doable, sure. But a pita and sketchy last I looked into it. My season ticket comes with MLB.tv, but the irony is that I'm "in network" so all my teams games are blacked out for me. I had previously created a VPN tunnel and routed one of my Rokus to a different state to watch it. But it's not a user friendly experience.

For games, I already have a batocera box running on an old dell thin client with way more power than a pi, and it has Kodi on it. But the UI/UX still sucks.

Onn 4k box or Nvidia shield

Yeah I don't get roku boxes lol. I have an nvidia shield pro, and I'm considering loading the lineageOS software on it

Roku devices and fire sticks belong in the recycle bin.

I switched everything to Apple TV .

personally I prefer android streaming boxes, because you can install custom versions of android tv on them, so if the official release from google is bad, you can just go to the community version

We have several TCL Roku TVs and Netflix is trash on all of them. Netflix is fine on the streaming sticks though. And every app seems to take some time to load as well. The TVs are pretty old so that's probably why.

Casting, using your phone for a remote, so the popup for connecting goes away

What a goofy thing to ask. You know exactly why people use smart TVs on the Internet.

Wake on LAN. At least that's what I do. I can turn on the TV and adjust the volume from Home Assistant but the TV itself can't reach the Internet.

I used Netflix on my TV but after the password sharing and other issues I choose to block network access.

Most of my Internet is done on my computer.

When my girlfriend moved in, she had a big TCL Roku TV its software absolutely sucks. But it would keep a blinking led on ALL THE TIME if it wasn't connected to wifi.

I put it on my iot network, and I'm considering null routing it.

I actually had a Roku box plugged into it since it had a better experience, but I'm probably going to switch that to a Nvidia shield pro because of this ad bullshit.

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

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.

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.

the largest problem with older TV's isnt the resolution. even on my 75" its hard to tell the difference between 4k and 1080p... But HDR is amazing, it really blows me away each time a scene lights up!

you can get a raspberry pi and install something called pihole on it, it's a DNS server with ad-blocking. basically, it converts a domain name like example.com into an IP address, but rather than just faithfully supply DNS, it also effectively blocks some adverts by acting like the domain names don't exist for servers that run ads

once it's set up it'll just work, and it should protect everyone on your network/wifi from some ads

Install a Pihole server on your network. It's a DNS filter. When a client tries to access a domain that has been blacklisted (ie a known ad or tracker domain), it denies the lookup.

On my roku homescreen it just has an empty placeholder where it tried to put the ad, but my Pihole server denied 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.

i have 3 just in case one dies

At the moment I just have an old laptop and connect it to my TV via hdmi and installed Parsec on both devices. It's a nice, free method.

In the future though I do want to look into getting a mini PC and doing essentially the same thing except it could be an individual device for the most part.

Not sold new

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.