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”!
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 just recently started using my Samsung TVs as dumb screens because they’re slow as shit, but a nice side effect is zero ads.
ONN 4k streaming box for $20 at Walmart.
Install a custom launcher.
Install a button remapper for the remote.
Install SmartTubeNext for YouTube (no ads, SponsorBlock).
Install whatever other apps you need (Plex, etc).
FAR better experience. Turn the TV on and it’s ready to go in a few seconds, not the ~60-90 seconds it takes the Tizen nonsense to “warm up.”
It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better. Can recommend, especially for only $20.
Just picked up the Onn box and did all that. Also installed RetroArch and so far the SNES era stuff all plays good with my bluetooth controller though there is a slight input lag or i just need to adjust lol.
Your comment inspired me, so I picked one up today for my Roku TV, and I had it running in under an hour! We really don’t know how many ads we’d been seeing until we stop seeing them. I already had a PiHole on my network, but getting SmartTube running is so nice.
I’m glad you’re having a better time with it! Honestly, if you watch any amount of YouTube on your TV, it’s well worth the $20 just for SmartTubeNext. Such a massive improvement to skip all the sponsor, promotion, intro, etc segments.
Thank you! For me, that’s half of it. The other half is removing everything that’s not my subscriptions on the home page so I’m not seeing a bunch of “the algorithm”. And then being able to boot to the subscriptions page too is so nice.
Seriously, people, use some pattern recognition here. Plex is already on its way down the enshitification pipeline, you’ll be sick of it in a couple years too, just like Roku. Why wait?
Jellyfin is definitely on my radar, and I’d love to make the switch. One thing that’s important to me and my family, however, is the library sharing between accounts. To my knowledge, Jellyfin doesn’t support this.
Directly from the play store, you can install alternative launchers. Some people like FLauncher; I did not. I went with Projectivy. Highly customizable, very clean.
You can also grab a button re-mapper there. I went with tvQuickActions Pro - it’s paid, but quite powerful.
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.
It is, but steam does have its own form of advertising. Their front page is all ads for games and sales, go to your library there is ads for updates for your games.
It just seems to be acceptable since it’s their ecosystem content, but it’s still ads for all intent and purposes.
Except it’s for any “game news”……, so if they are peddling another game of theirs, it shows up there as well. Or we are selling a plushie, it’s there in the same place. It’s not just patch notes dude… and never has been either.
Ads are ads, just because it from the same ecosystem is moot.
so should Steam not have any game discovery features? Is it bad for Steam to display “trending games” because it’s technically advertising them by showcasing them?
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.
Unless you change the launcher on your Android TV box, Apple TV is the most ad free now. Unless you want to just hook a PC up to the TV anyway. Which can introduce codec and DRM issues if you want to use Netflix and Prime video from the PC.
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.
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
Yeah, something is failing in playback and it’s simply falling back to the previous screen. I’d suggest posting this to the troubleshooting forum. I’m sure the support team will be happy to help out!
I have a little mini keyboard/trackpad controller. Primarily just use the directional pad and media controls to navigate Plex, but if I need to pop into a web browser or whatever, it works great.
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.
As I have found trying to see if I can sideload or jailbreak or otherwise hack the software of my Samsung TV, I have found plenty of ways to totally disable ads on a Roku or Android TV or anything that runs on Android in general (Chromecast, and firestick also IIRC). Too bad I don’t have one of those… 😩
You can turn that off pretty easily. The AppleTV+ app has the ability to configure how it uses that little quick look space. You can set it to only display your “up next” content.
Any apps in that dock region can show featured content when they are highlighted by the user. Any app can do that, not just Apple’s. Quite a few third party apps use that space to show featured or watchlist content.
Technically that Home Screen can display an app’s featured content. And Apple and other apps often use that space to promote new shows. But you can turn off TV+ promos and or move apps out of that region.
Roku actually installs physical ads onto its damn remotes. I have remotes that promote streaming services that don’t even exist anymore.
God damn this shit is so fucking annoying. I paid something like $100 last year for the Roku Ultra because it was better than the built-in software on my TV and now I have to see ads? Fuck em, I’ll repurpose a mini PC I have and replace the Roku.
I don’t think so, I searched around but didn’t see anything noteworthy. Maybe a hacker will get bored one day and jailbreak them, but seems like there’s no hope as of right now.
Of course. I did the same thing until my OCD got the better of me and I got an AndroidTV device with a custom launcher, as well as an AppleTV4K. I love having no ads and no blank spaces now.
If it’s a Google TV you can always install a custom launcher and even disable the stock launcher via ADB and never be bothered by any of the curated bullshit again
From what I gather, making your own little “media PC” connected to a “dumb TV” or never-connected “smart PC” can give you a similar if not better experience!
KDE has a big TV style desktop environment they’ve made for TVs now, and you can use KDE connect to use any phone as a remote control.
Yes, this is what the people want! More ads! Skip the content, just show ads 24/7! That will definitely keep people from pirating out of sheer frustration.
Well time to replace my roku TV with a Goodwill special TV because fuck that shit. Fuck smart tvs in general and what they have become. They used to be neat little editions added on for value on your TV back when Netflix made sense. But now they don’t especially with the ads that automatically get shoved into your face depending on what you are doing that have started to interrupt your viewing experience. It’s not like I’ll be downgrading at all when just using a computer with a TV using Stremio and AllDebrid.
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