People love to hate Apple, and that’s fine (Tim Cook sucks ass), but the AppleTV is honestly the best streamer and you can’t change my mind.
Zero ads on the Home Screen, and even the first gen 4K box that came out 8 years ago is still fast as hell and getting updates.
I know this because I had one in my closet and just took it out the other day when setting up a TV in my bedroom. It downloaded updates and is now rocking and rolling again.
It’s best because everything else is worse
I wonder how much of the anti-apple stuff comes from the extremity of the person’s views. I have always preferred PC/windows due to familiarity with it, but I’ve used iphones for 12 or 13 years, and by extension, some of apple’s services (like icloud). They’ve been pretty great this whole time. And, as a normie, I’ve been happy with what I’ve heard and seen about their stability, general lack of ads, and security/protection of customer data. I doubt there’s many others on the Fediverse with similar views due to the nature of this place, but anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that it seems like some of the dissent toward apple is inherent to their position relative to the opinion holder.
Roku has had a big ad on the side for a while now? I’ve been blocking it with DNS.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always found smart TB UIs to be totally unnecessary and kind of an annoying feature. I’ve got a Sony smart TV and have never used the UI. I just use it as a monitor for my PC, and if I’m watching TV, it’s via the web or something. So personally, this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, aside from the principle of it, which is absolutely a big deal and super shitty.
Maybe some of this is being terrified about the quiet spreading of the IoT and how that feels like a really fucking half baked idea that’s going to be a big problem later on.
Roku is another prime example of enshitification.
Now I have all my “smart” TVs disconnected, and I hooked up some inexpensive Android TV boxes (with a couple minor modifications). No more ads!
can you go into detail on the boxes and your mods? interested in getting some of my family off of Roku for this reason
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
People probably wouldn’t like it to have only one product without a single ad. They probably had bug reports about it “my roku doesn’t display ads on my smart TV, does that mean that it’s broken?”.
I use Nvidia shield and never update it. So far no ads.
You can update (and probably should to get things like security fixes), just make sure you then also install a custom launcher like FLauncher to replace the original one after updating.
Don’t need security fixes. Updates always makes things worse. So I’m very happy with current version and will keep it forever.
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.
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.
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 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
That’s what I figured. I havent blocked the device completely, but I would like to block the update if possible. I just need to look and see if I can block just the update dns query. Was your fix a total block?
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.
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?
On my parent’s it doesnt render anything at all. Just shows the wallpaper.
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
