That’s one reason I ditched cable years ago. Why the hell should I pay Comcast for the “privilege” of watching commercials?
Fun fact, Mythbusters episodes have a longer international edit length because America has substantially longer commercial breaks.
My attitude is if I’m paying, I’m not watching a single ad.
If it’s free you can send me ads.
Pi-hole, nvidia shield, custom launcher = less ads for the whole family
Which custom launcher are you using?
Flauncher here, and its great
How did you set it as the launcher? Adb?
Wasn’t even needed. Just downloaded the app with another downloaded app and then installed it. Then it props you what launcher you want. Plenty of videos on yt about this.
Do you know of a good tutorial on how to do all that? I’m planning on buying a new TV towards the end of this year and want to have the pi-hole, etc working first
Pi-hole is super easy. Literally just install it, and set your dhcp on your router to push out that IP as your dns server. Configure pi-hole to use an upstream dns server.
There’s a bunch of launchers out there. I did mine a whole back and used Wolf launcher, but later found out it was a “hacked” version of some other paid launcher. I used launcher manager to “enable” it on boot. Right out of the box, it has all apps and no ads. I suspect any launcher you go with will be similar.
People let their TV’s onto the internet? I thought we already had this discussion and nobody does this anymore.
Dumb monitor > smart TV.
Point is, it’s near impossible to find a dumb tv with good specs. Like LG is producing no-smart version of LG C3 (best display ever so far), but it’s only sold to businesses.
Jokes on them, my TV can’t connect to the internet anymore because of the the bloat added by Roku in automatic updates.
I pity the poor fool who sets up their smart TV instead of just grabbing an HDMI cable and plugging in their computer.
Yeh, if I ever see my TV’s OS I’m like “fuck off! HDMI4!”
Ew.
Ive been pretty happy so far with roku and blocking stuff with pihole, but every day I am more and more tempted to build a media pc…
This is the way to go. I tried pihole using Samsung smart features, but if you block so the telemetry eventually your apps stop working and you can’t get them working again without doing a factory reset with blocking down. It’s prohibitively a pain in the ass, taking hours every time YouTube stops working.
Never had any issues with Roku on pihole.
I believe one reason maybe that the software is so garbage it can’t handle not being able to submit all its logging information when otherwise the system thinks it’s online.
This is the case with Rokus as well. If you also redirect or block the hard coded DNS (Google) from bypassing your local DNS it starts to get extremely sluggish over time… presumably from background processes repeatedly resending requests out.
That makes perfect sense and explains why you can’t fix it just by bypassing blocking temporarily and reinstalling the app.
Depends on your blocklist. It would freak out every so often on me when I was preventing it from bypassing my DNS with its hard coded ones until I added in a forced redirect instead.
Currently trying that for the same reasons you are tempted. Roku was passable and even a good choice years ago and it’s on a precipitous race to the bottom now.
Problem for me currently is finding a non windows solution that is navigable from a controller or remote is … tough. Steam, emulation station, Kodi all have reasonable interfaces but there seems to be a gap in a unified launcher solution (as well as a decent ‘app’ for accessing YouTube.) I really don’t want to spin up a single VM for each activity when they all in theory should play nice together.
My solution to this problem is Jellyfin, fed by usenet-backed sonarr/radar and Tubesync to pull in YouTube channel subscriptions. Those are added to a Jellyfin library which is accessible right next to movies and tv shows.
This is all through the Jellyfin app on a 2019 Nvidia Shield Pro. It’s a perfect couch-friendly setup. For just regular YouTube browsing, SmartTube can be installed on the Shield and on your phone. You can then cast to the SmartTube app on the Shield instead of to the YouTube app.
It seems we have similar backend setups 🏴☠️
I’ll need to dig into an android solution a bit - smarttube seems pretty nice but has no Linux version unfortunately.
Exactly what I’ve been looking for too, and have come up wanting. I got excited recently about finding KDE Plasma Big Screen, but then it falls at the last hurdle on the app selection.
That gave me abandoned vibes when I looked into it. Maybe they just didn’t update anything on their site but I struggled to find any recent info or reviews on it. A shame honestly. I loved the idea.
That is my preference, but my wife says she prefers only one step (turning on and using the TV) over multiple (turning on the TV, turning on the secondary system and using multiple controllers) so we go with the simpler setup per her request.
I did put my TVs on a Wi-Fi network separate from my main one so, while they do show ads as much as my pihole allows, at least they’re theoretically only spying on each other.
With HDMI-CEC you can achieve what your wife wants. I have one remote to turn on my Nvidia Shield (with Plex, Jellyfin, Netflix, etc), and that same remote also controls all TV functions.
That is beyond the capabilities of normies.
My wife would agree with this:
And I’ve got Plex running on an always on NAS.
This is the way
Lmao that greentext was literally me before I finally set up arrstack. One of the best investments of my time, it has definitely paid off over many years of just having things automatically download.
It seems like way more stuff than I want though
I mean yeah there’s a lot of stuff it does, but you can pick and choose what you want to use it for so it depends on what you would find useful - you don’t have to use the full automation. I started just by using it as a read-only way to see what movies I had and in what qualities and keep things organized. You can use it as a manual interface to do one-off downloads - basically just as an interface to search 5 torrent sites in 1 place where you are still picking exactly what you want it to download. You can use it only to rename files to a consistent format. So there are a lot of ways to use the various features of sonarr/radarr besides automatic downloads. You’re not forced to go all-in and out of the box it doesn’t start automatically downloading until you enable that.
That was definitely my misconception
I’m glad to clear it up! It’s a super powerful tool, and I still occasionally skip the automation and just use it for manual searches since it reduces that process to a single click to search all configured torrent sites and a single click to download and have the rest automatically handled.
Before when I was visiting friends and wanted to quickly add something to plex, I used to need remote access to my torrent client and separate remote access to my NAS filesystem to move/rename files when downloads finish which was a really manual process. Now all I need is the reverse-proxied sonarr/radarr UI since it handles moving/copying/renaming on download completion - and while the UI isn’t mobile-first, it’s very usable and feels less error-prone than moving/renaming files remotely using a file explorer app.
My Arr’s are unreliable. The trackers they search keep becoming unavailable for some reason. Flaresolver doesn’t seem to work with my VPN setup. Sometimes the file it finds to download turns out to be 54GB for a 1080p movie and I can’t figure out what the hell is going on there either. I haven’t got the time to look into Usenet any time soon. If I try to deploy something and it doesn’t work 100% right off the bat then the “wife acceptance factor” drops to zero, so I’ve got to be damn certain before I start tinkering.
This comes off the back of a device on my network causing router issues and making Plex unreliable for a couple of weeks. By the time I diagnosed and fixed the issue, the damage was done and wife acceptance factor was lost.
Man that sucks. I must have gotten lucky or something with my setup. I also have trackers go unavailable all the time but I enabled 8 different ones and usually multiple will have the same torrent so it usually has no problem finding something even if 1 or 2 are down. I also don’t VPN tracker searches, just my BitTorrent client so flaresolverr seems to work fine for me (I only have it enabled for 2 of my trackers since most of the ones I use don’t seem to require it).
If you end up trying it out again I would look into the quality settings and make sure you’re not using the remux quality profile (edit: apparently the default 1080p quality profile has the 1080 remux quality enabled so this might have been the problem). By default most of the quality profiles seem to limit at 100MB/min, so a 2 hr movie shouldn’t allow anything over like 12GB. Whenever I tweak quality or custom formats I refer to trash guides which has a lot of battle-tested rules you can copy. I have my main quality profile set to only download qualities between hdtv720 and br1080 (which is just below remux) with custom formats copied from trash guides set to prefer hevc with surround sound since I have 5.1.
Thanks. Really helps to know where to start looking when I get time over the weekend.
You may also want to look into Usenet instead of torrents when you’re researching. Sonarr/Radarr/Readarr etc all work (in my opinion) better with Usenet.
You’ll need to pay some, but the reliability is amazing, which is extremely helpful for the partner acceptance factor. I pay for two providers (newsdemon is primary and eweka is a backup) and two indexers (drunkenslug and nzbfinder), and everything has been rock solid reliable for years. Download speeds are also MUCH faster than torrents.
Combine this setup with overseerr (or jellyseerr) so your partner can find their own things to download and you might be able to get them back on board.
Plus, no flaresolverr required!
My gf loves stremio + torrentio + real debrid I set up for her
It does go down occasionally and she is more techy and patient than most but give it a try if you havent.
Its dead simple compared to what you’re doing now and good to have in your back pocket even if you want to maintain a local library. Having an issue? NP just open stremio and everyone’s happy
imho adb works wonders debloating many smartTVs. mine shows zero ads outside of commercial tv breaks. not even suggestions for amazon shows or anything in the dashboard. smarttube,kodi etc are just great!
You’ve gotta realise the average joe doesn’t know how to do any of that stuff though. Even trying to explain it to most people is too much. The frustration I find is, most people don’t actually want to learn, and they’d rather stay ignorant, and basically take pride in it.
I am so genuinely surprised that there isnt a bigger movement to hack TVs to replace the OS’s on them with non-invasive open software alternatives.
Especially with shit like this.
Because it’s not actually necessary; leave the TV isolated from the internet and use a set-top box (Apple TV, Shield, game console) as the media player.
While I agree, I think this solution is some nonsense. I bought a “TV” and paid for all the hardware and software that went into it, but I essentially have to use it as a monitor with my own hardware to escape the enshittification.
Kind of, I haven’t had to buy a new tv to replace my dumb tv from 2014 but my understanding is that these awful smart TVs are at least cheaper because they’re subsidised by all the ads. If that’s the case, at least you didn’t actually fully pay for the hardware and can hopefully afford to put your own on there without being out of pocket by too extreme an amount.
That’s not really true because even the high end top of the line Samsung QD-OLED TVs have ads on the home screen if you connect Internet. If you want the latest display technology, your only options are Smart TV with ads, or spending 10x the price for a commercial display that nobody will actually sell you.
They can’t show you ads if you never connect them to the internet
The best solution os actually to keep the decoder smarts separate from the actual displaying of image because those two things have different life-cycles and different costs.
A decent TV screen will last you decades and work fine at doing what it does, with the only pressures to upgrade being video connectors - which change maybe once every 2 decades and usually you can use adaptors to give them another 2 decades or so of life - higher resolutions - which make no difference unless you have a very large screen, something which requires a large living room to view at the optimal distance and in which case what really drove you to replace it was not obsolescence - and screen tech advances -, which is another of those “every couple of decades it changes but the old ones are generally still fine” kind of thing.
Media Playing, on the other hand, has its life-cycle linked to video encoding and compression which change every 5 years or so and either you have a seriously overpowered generic CPU there (which smart TVs do not) or you have hardware decoding, and in the latter case new video encodings require new hardware with support for them.
So your TV with built-in decoding - i.e. “smart” TV - will need to be replaced more frequently driven by the need to support new digital formats, even though the part that costs the most by far - the screen - is still perfectly good. On the other hand if your media player functionality is separate, all you have to replace with some frequency is the much cheaper media box whilst only replacing the much more expensive screen side once in a blue moon.
Smart TVs are great for manufacturers because they force people to replace the TV much more often hence they sell 2 or 3 times more TVs, but they’re in the mid and long term a really bad option for actual buyers who needlessly spend, much more on TVs, not to mention Ecologically with all those perfectly good screens ending up in landfills because the $20 worth of “smarts” tied to a $1000 screen is not capable of handling new video encoding formats.
I also agree, but I view it more as ‘I bought a TV, and that’s all I want it to be’.
I don’t care about the built in software features foisted on me because I wanted an OLED panel; simply because they are going to be abandoned within 1-2 years, are powered by some anaemic chipset that is already multiple generations behind what is already available in my TV stand; and will likely end up as an attack vector to my network some period down the road.
The article mentions that TV manufacturers make ~$5 a quarter from selling your data. So those ‘features’ aren’t even free, they come at the expense of your personal information, privacy and likely security as a result.
So to quote a famous Dave Chapelle skit: “fuck ‘em, that’s why!”
simply because they are going to be abandoned within 1-2 years, are powered by some anaemic chipset that is already multiple generations behind what is already available in my TV stand; and will likely end up as an attack vector to my network some period down the road.
You do realize all of that would probably cease being a problem if people were able to hack their TVs to install custom OS’s.
all the spyware bullshit would also be gone with a custom OS.
Literally every one of your gripes would be addressed and fixed by being able to hack your TV
Custom OS isn’t going to address the anaemic hardware, nor do I think relying on open-source custom ROMs for a niche item is the best way to ensure any hardware-level vulnerabilities are covered.
If you already have an Internet-connected device hooked up to your TV (eg. PlayStation); there is no need to connect another, especially when it provides an overall worse experience.
Shit, a basic HTPC is infinitely better - using a Linux-based distribution (which will have a lot more support vs. a niche TV ROM), and it’ll be supported well beyond what the hardware could handle.
Custom OS isn’t going to address the anaemic hardware, nor do I think relying on open-source custom ROMs for a niche item is the best way to ensure any hardware-level vulnerabilities are covered.
Not only would it give “anemic” hardware new life, I can point at how its already been done at another in home device. Routers. DDWRT/OpenWRT/Tomato do exactly that for old, otherwise useless routers.
Literally every single argument you make can make against it has been proven wrong, and has in other devices, be addressed with a custom OS/Firmware that is designed for purpose without all the bloat and other BS.
You can adamantly say “Nuh uh!” all you want, but it doesnt change the facts.
You can buy PS5s for every TV in your house if you want to, Not everyone has that money, luxury, or stubborn desire.
That anemic device uses hardware decoding in order to be able to decode the video data fast enough - it is literally unable to handle newer video encodings fast enough because it would have to do software decoding, which is were the anemic part totally kills it.
Routers on the other hand have been entirely done in software for ages (with at most hardware support for the encryption in things like SSL, which hasn’t changed in decades) and don’t have to reliably process 4k of data within 20 ms (for 50Hz) time frames.
Your example is very much an apples and oranges comparison.
Good luck implementing all the display color calibration, pixel refresher, anti-burn in features, etc… on these new TV panels. Personally I’d rather keep my warranty and just use a separate device to run the apps.
Which is exactly where you were before smart TVs.
Many of the cheap TVs with Roku built in require you to set up a Roku account before you can even use the HDMI inputs. After setting up your account you can disconnect it from the internet and use it as a normal TV, but I spent a while trying to get around this block. In the end I had to create a Roku account.
That sounds awful; hopefully you were at least able to poison their DB with a fake name and a 10minutemail (or similar) account?
Basically, though I tend to use GMX email aliases for these sorts of useless signups. I don’t want some temporary email account to be all that’s needed to get control over my TV should I ever connect it to the internet again.
i for one cannot wait for this future
I went to a buddy’s house to watch TV and that’s how his Xbox Live looks like.
Like they’re so oblivious and he’s paying for that shit.
Huh? Watching TV on his Xbox live? It definitely didn’t look like that
With that level of ads, they should get paid to watch it.
Best we can do is 5 minutes worth of additional in-game currency
Shut up and drink your verification can
Has it got electrolytes?
*Start menu in windows 11
… both Microsoft products … weird.
Have you guys started the new season of oww my balls?
Fun fact: Idiocracy came out the same year Google bought YouTube.
My 10 year old TV which I watch 10 year old TV-series via HDMI from? I don’t think so.
Tomorrow there’s going to be article about how my car spies on me as if that’s not 15 years old too. Or something about my office job that I don’t have.
I’m becoming irrelevant. Not the target audience for anything.
Unfortunately things wear out and you have to buy new ones.
That has also been my strategy (both for TVs and cars), but that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to pretend that it’s a solution for the general public or that consumer-protection regulation isn’t both abundantly warranted and sorely needed.
It tooke about 6 months to find my truck that didn’t have the connectivity link it. I think everything after 2022 on these you’re pretty much screwed, but it was an adventure to say the least.
Pro Tip: Connect your TV to your Wi-Fi so the TV doesn’t bother you constantly, and shut off access outside your network at the router level.
Ummm why even connect it at all…let the dumb thing stay offline
so your TV doesn’t bother you.
Many TVs have a constant “no wifi connection” visual error if it’s not connected.
Take the stupid thing back.
It also bugs me to turn on voice recognition by connecting
LET US LISTEN TO YOU IT WILL BE FINE.
IGNORE ME!
I haven’t bought a TV in several years, but is this something that is in general TVs? I ask because I plan on getting one soon and would very much like to avoid it having a mic
I can’t speak for all TVs of course, but from what I have seen, yes.
not if I don’t have a smart tv
I reset my Android TV to stock before the ads, block all updates, and just run Plex and Netflix when I choose.
Probably going to take it further in the future and just use a little android media stick and nuke the SmartTV is entirely because of how badly it lags.
Absolutely insane how badly AndroidTVs perform after a year or so of ownership. If I could revert the core software updates I would.
Also, wifi causes the entire TV to become a laggy unusable mess. Has to be plugged in over ethernet. Absolutely unbelievable.
Yet another justification for piracy
My TVs are pre-smart TV and only 1080p and I have yet to feel that I was missing anything important.
