we live in hell
I don’t even understand the pitch? you have the disc playing, in your hands, your ownership, no buffering, no subscription required. and they’re saying…hey do you want a worse experience?
See the problem is that you let a display device connect to the internet
No, the fault is with the people who make the TV. It’s not the customers fault that other people are evil.
My TV is connected to the Internet and doesn’t do this. There’s a setting to turn it off.
Mine doesn’t have anything like this and is connected to the internet, no settings to change either. LG Oled
All new Roku devices do that, even if it’s not a Roku tv. Roku went from one of the best video devices to the worst in one fell swoop. Literally the only good off the shelf device is the Apple TV.
I prefer the Nvidia shield over Apple TV. It supports direct streaming of Dolby Vision/Atmos on Plex. Pretty sure the Apple TV is missing some key codecs.
My Roku TV will be in a landfill before I allow it to send 1s and 0s through anything but the HDMI cord
More like everything will be in a landfill before you allow it to send 1s and 0s through anything but the HDMI cord.
How does it stream things/what’s the point of a Roku if it’s not connected to the Internet?
Connected a Samsung smart TV to my network when we first got it. The thing damn-near crashed my pi-hole asking for so many ad/tracking domains. Factory reset it later that same day. I think my % of requests blocked went from 15% to 68% in just the 3 hours or so the Smart TV was connected.
They started to wisen up and hard-coded dns requests to 8.8.8.8 to bypass dns ad blockers now. Heck, some apps like Netflix already do it for years now. If your router can transparently redirect all dns requests to your pi-hole, you should use that feature.
That’s my next project now that I have my pihole set up. My basic ass router from my ISP does not support that though.
Side question: do you know of any openWRT supported routers in the $100-150 range with external antennas? Everything I’ve taken a look at is either an internal antenna, or like $400.
I deny all DNS traffic except traffic going to my router IP so my pfBlocker will always work.
So they recognize that the owner of the product is trying to prevent them from collecting data, and actively try to circumvent the owner’s security measures? This shit should be illegal, and carry a huge fine. You paid for the device, and it’s connected to your network, which you control. I’m sick and tired of corporations thinking it’s totally okay to be straight-up spyware and adware. Some supposedly legitimate companies these days make old-school computer viruses look down right respectful.
Easy enough to do with NAT unless it uses DNS over https. Then you have to block a lot more than just DNS.
or use the blocking feature of your firewall. Here’s Roku being persistent and ignoring my pihole. Firewalla for the win.
Yep - this. I absolutely abhor “smart” TVs for just this reason.
But, even lack of internet sometimes isn’t enough. I recently, and inadvertently, left the wireless adapter on my TV enabled, after having to temporarily join it to my wireless for a firmware update (digital TV tuning needed updating for my region). After I was done, I cleared the wireless config, but I didn’t think to go into the other menu where you can entirely disable the wireless adapter.
Little did I realise that meant the TV started broadcasting its own SSID, for friggin’ Apple Airplay or some other shit. I found this out when my 9yo daughter was suddenly exposed to some adult content for about 10 seconds. Best guess is a nearby neighbour mistook my TV for theirs.
I’ve obviously disabled the wireless adapter again, but this has been a terribly difficult lesson I’ve had to learn.
For anyone concerned, my daughter is OK. My wife had a good chat with her about it. She had considerably more talking down to do with me - I was ready to start knocking on doors, to have my own chat.
I work in IT at a fitness center and we have TVs in front of the treadmills. They are not enterprise TVs, just standard Samsung TVs. Above the treadmills, we have a conference room. After setting up a conference room with wireless screen sharing, I found that all of the TV’s below show up when trying to cast. Obviously I tried to disable them, but there is no way to do so outside of physically ripping out the antenna. I called support and everything. Why the fuck was that decision made
Sounds like the next conference you are going to have in that room is with the Supervisor or the CEO about either downgrading that shit and have everything wired instead, or physically ripping out the antenna is going to happen.
Yeah - I had to dig around in my Samsung to find it. Under Settings | Network | Expert there’s a radio button labelled Wireless. Disabling that turns wireless off completely. Mine’s a 65" Q60A QLED 4K bought in 2021. Same on my Samsung 43" in the bedroom, so seems fairly common across the models, at least in the Q range.
honestly, whoever connected to your TV is probably used to their device being the first one to show up. i would blame the streaming protocol for not requiring one of those one-time pin thingys.
