Ugh. Roku was one of the platforms with fewer ads.
- Roku will be adding more ads to the home screens of its devices and TVs in the near future.
- The ads will be interactive and ‘shoppable’ and will cover a range of industries, including restaurants and cars.
- Roku already has a significant amount of ads on its home screen, and it is unclear if users will be able to change their preferences for the new ads.
After all the issues with software updates, ads, and just overall terrible experience of TV operating systems and those little media boxes, I just finally accepted that my life is better using my TV as a dumb screen that’s connected to a PC and then using Steam Big Picture for games and Jellyfin for media.
After various trial and error, not to mention irritation, I have determined that this is the way. It’s what I did in the dark ages back in the day (with a Pentium 3 that had enough hardware acceleration to play DVD’s!) and it’s what I do once more. By hook or by crook, one way or another you’re guaranteed to be able to retain complete control over a PC even if that ultimately means you have to install some flavor of Linux on the fucking thing.
You can get a perfectly capable media center PC for very little money if you don’t need it to be able to run AAA games, which in my case I don’t. Even the various nanocomputer boards like one of the beefier Raspberry Pi’s or any of its myriad competitors can do the job these days, fit in a tiny enclosure, make no noise, and consume very little power.
Fuck all the Chromecasts, Fire sticks, Roku boxes, Apple TV’s, and other sundry and bullshit devices of the world.
Nvidia SHIELD is still ok, because it’s Android TV, and you can install custom launchers on Android. Therefore no ads on your home screen.
Granted, Nvidia is letting the SHIELD line twist in the wind, and the most recent model is from 2019, but it’s not outmoded just yet. I’ll still be using mine for a number of years.
The shield is great for the reasons you mention here. I use primal launcher and have a custom home screen experience without annoying ads.
The shield also outputs music over HDMI without resampling, which makes it awesome for my digital music listening, except the app support is lame.
That sounds like it’s determined by the game developer and has nothing to do with steam.
Yeah I was getting fed up with apps and boxes said fuck it and am running a mac mini hooked up to a shitload of storage now and it’s been great. Plays media, works as a competent file server for said media, and emulates a bunch of console games. We don’t use anything else now.
Isn’t Apple TV the most ad free box now? I’m still on Roku but I’ve read that Apple TV is equivalent to a Roku but without the ads.
Yeah it probably is in terms of an off the shelf, purpose built option with no tinkering. They’re pretty snappy as well. Decent hardware in there it seems.
We have an ATV but our wireless network is kinda shit and we kept having connectivity issues between the ATV and the Plex server we were running on the Mini so we just went all in on running the Mini as the media player and Plex server in one to avoid it. Bonus was that we now have a very capable console game emulator hooked up to the TV too. Also we just ditched our last streaming subscription so all we were using the ATV for was the Plex app.
It’s a bit overkill but I will say as a server and emulator the new apple silicon minis are great. Zero fan noise ever and they sip electricity and run really cool.
I’ve been doing this for a decade.
Highly recommend it. The only thing some people don’t like is using a keyboard and mouse on the couch, but there are endless solutions for that.
Actually…that’s the sticking point at my house. I’m ok with mouse keyboard, but my wife and kids are not.
Still trying to find a remote that will suit that use case.
The Roku app has had a major update recently. Might be worth checking again.
Why would you run Roku on Jellyfin? Wouldn’t that open you to the ads you are trying to avoid?
Not the OP, but I have been getting a bug where I select a show/movie to watch in the roku app, and instead of playing it will exit out to the list of shows/movies menu. These same shows work just fine in the app on a google android TV, or on a computer
PiHole Domain regex blacklist:
(ads|logs|cloudservices).roku.com$
And there it is, folks.
I added the Roku and Samsung TV servers to my blocklist months ago, (maybe even years ago, at this point?) My three smart TVs are the most blocked devices on my network, by far. It’s not even close. Here are today’s stats from my pihole:
For reference, my phone (my most used device) is number four on that list. My three smart TVs (two Rokus and a Samsung) are numbers 1, 2, and 3. I haven’t even watched TV today. These blocked requests are simply from the TVs idling. Smart TVs are hilariously, mind-bogglingly invasive, and you should block them ASAP.
Old habits. Just as a general rule, I black out most IPs, even when private. I used to deal with a lot of horribly insecure devices at work, with default passwords that couldn’t be changed, no port security (so anyone who found the wrong Ethernet port could connect to the network,) etc…
So anyone on the network could fuck things up if they were on the wrong wifi and tried to reconfigure something they shouldn’t be touching. It was only an issue a few times, since the vast majority of people using said network were other techs who knew what they were doing. But there were a few times that someone screenshotted something, it got passed around to all the managers, and someone who didn’t know what they were doing got curious and went digging when they saw the IPs.
It was never anything catastrophic since the network wasn’t even connected to the internet, and we had backups of any important settings. But it was just a practice that we all eventually picked up, to prevent random employees from sniffing around. Because it always sucked to come into work the next morning, and discover that a particular piece of gear wasn’t working properly because someone decided to tick a stray checkbox or change a polling rate.
Not the guy you replied to, but my LG webos TV worked just fine after I added a whole bunch of domains to my pihole blacklist. Got rid of A LOT of crap from the “homepage”. Made it a hell of a lot cleaner and overall more usable. There are compiled lists of domains per brand and per region. Just find one that fits your bill.
I use past tense because last week I finally created a kodi box and took the TV offline entirely. Now it’s even better.
Step one.
Buy a thing. It is a good thing.
-
Oops, now it only works if you pay monthly. Ok maybe they’re doing some upkeep.
-
Now there’s ads. You’re paying them money, but they want even more so now you’re the product.
-
Haha it broke! My family tech guy says it’s literally impossible to fix without the cheat codes.
Final step. Don’t buy the thing again. Don’t buy anything with “terms may be altered. Pray I do not alter them further.” Probably stick to open source.
Me after getting those dumbass Canary cameras that cost $200 a piece then they completely wrecked the free tier then started giving them away for free to get more subscribers.
Wyze cams with wz_mini_hacks firmware offline in a VLAN with Frigate and Home assistant from here on out!
For those with Roku TVs or any of their products, I found that a PiHole blocks the ads on the home screen so far. Hoping I could pick up an ONN box in the future so I can just not deal with this shit lol.
A pihole is a whole “home” adware/malware/spyware blocker. It runs on a raspberry Pi but can also run on a physical/virtual install of several different Linux distributions. Not only can it block ads on your computer but can also block ads on technology that you can’t (easily) block ads on (“Smart” TV / stock cellphone / IoT devices / etc). In addition, with some easy to instal additional (free) software you can block ads even when not at “home”!
Thank you for the explanation. I felt very out of the loop on this whole thread. I’ll look into pihole.
Yeah, DNS blocking is quite effective for not just ads, but also telemetry on Roku.
Personally, I use nextdns until I can can a good pihole setup going.
You can comfortably run pihole, unbound, and a VPN like wireguard on a pi zero or zero 2. You can find entire zero 2 kits for under $35 if you’re patient
I can confirm that I’m blocking all the Roku ads with adguard now. You just plug this list in: https://oisd.nl/
Thank you Roku, a step forward towards self hosting and self managing of every service
How are you going to self-host streaming hardware? A HTPC for every TV in the house along with a mouse and keyboard?
I was already thinking of upgrading my old Roku to a $20 Onn (Walmart brand) Google TV box (which I’m told is hackable), but this will only accelerate that decision.
No need for HTPC, just a small USB device with HDMI output and DLNA support. You use your phone as a DLNA controller, a server running Jellyfin as DLNA provider, and the device attached to the TV as DLNA renderer. And sometimes TVs have DLNA support built-in (my Toshiba does).
On Android there’s an amazing app called BubbleUPnP that can source media from a wide variety of places, make playlists, and cast to DLNA devices as well as proprietary protocols like Chromecast.
