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I built Kyu Launcher so you can get Roku experience on your Android TV.
Had to Google it but it looks pretty nice. I thought you meant that you were injecting giant ads into Android TV.
Fighting fire with fire, they’ll never see it coming
laughs in a Linux Raspi, hooked up to a dumb projector, sitting behind a pihole and streaming from an in-house Jellyfin media server
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was literally about to buy a Roku TV. not anymore
anyone have suggestions for a decent new TV that isn’t so invasive?
I have an LG TV with all promotional stuff disabled. Not sure if they all do that, but my 65 inch TV is ad free!! For now.
I see Alexa is on the LG TV, and there’s a way to turn it off in settings, but is it actually truly off when you do this (do u know)? lmao
I try to not accept any optional terms and conditions and never set up any assistant. If I don’t accept all the legal stuff, those features stay disabled. Again, this depends on your TV and generation. I have the 65C1.
I can’t tell what Spectre units do but they look like maybe an option
e.g.
https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV/U750CV-UMRD-75-4K-UHD-TV-product1131category1category73.html
plain old TV, and then add what you want? I have a flat screen, and a little roku box ($30 at Best Buy). I always wondered what you do if your Roku tv farts out–take the whole thing off the wall and tote it back to where you bought it? If something happens to my roku, or I don’t want it anymore, I just unplug it.
I don’t have a Roku. I own a non-smart TV connected to a mini PC. But for folks that don’t want to go through that setup, wouldn’t using an adblock DNS block it?
TCL TVs (whose OS is just Roku, and I imagine Roku is the same situation) blink the front LED as an Error when there’s no network connection or it can’t hit whatever servers it has configured for FW update check. It can get stuck on partial firmware updates when it can’t cokplete every check it wants to make. The LED has a diffuser on it so it’s a significant negative impact.
I can’t even tape that LED because that’s also where the IR sensor is. My next step is to disassemble the thing and snip snip.
I don’t use any smart features, just HDMI input like you. Finding a Dumb TV has been a challenge.
You might want to replace the LED with a normal silicon diode since if I were a piece of shit TV company I would measure that circuit as a voltage divider, and for a complete circuit. No current flow and no 0.6V drop, and that means I activate my out of warranty self lobotomize routine.
That’s not something I would have considered and thank you for pointing me in the right direction. Now I know about silicon diodes.
Because this reminded of it: For a similar reason, and if you own an older vehicle, you don’t want to replace the warning lights (battery, oil, engine/MIL) with LED bulbs. Or you’ll need “error free” bulbs with built-in parallel resistors. LED gauge lights are usually fine but, on a lot of vehicles, an incandescent bulb is expected on the warning light circuits. If you replace, for example, the battery bulb with an LED - the alternator might not engage as it should, because there won’t be sufficient current for it to do so, and your battery could drain despite a running engine.
(I’m far from an electrician, nevermind an automotive one, but I did a lot of research before upgrading/replacing my burnt out dash lights and that’s a mistake I would’ve otherwise made)
TCL makes Google TV models which explicitly allow you to set them up without Wi-Fi so only HDMI and antenna work. You should buy one of those next time.
Oh good to know. Much appreciated. Thisnines still going strong after 6.5y, great panels honestly. If LED neutering failed I was only going to look for other brands because of this thing so this is super good news
I did a factory reset on my TCL roku tv and use a third party streaming box. Blinking red light on the TV went away after the factory reset for me.
Ooh, definitely gonna try this first. I actually assumed that factory reset would use the 1y old firmware that introduced the problem, but it could well roll back to the 6y original.
Don’t worry, the next model they release probably won’t allow you to do that.
Never used it, preferring my ways.
Yeah, this gives anyone with tech savvy a reason to avoid the damn thing and make their own media center.
It gives us what?
Feels nice to get some trade-in cash for my Roku tv. Digital TV with the local channels and YouTube more than satisfies.
Is this on a hardware level? Or can I just plug it in a nvidia shield or such and just use it as a screen
This is how I learn there’s a TV adaptation of “The Burbs”???
It’s pretty good too! Low impact, great cast and decent story that takes place in world but not as a reboot or anything cheese like that.
Bumbling oddball neighbors banding together to do a SERIOUS INVESTIGATION is such a no-brainer of a formula. I love the original film, just watched the trailer and it looks fun as fuck.
It really is. The cast has fantastic chemistry and feels like real people despite the heightened ridiculousness of the premise.
Dope. Will give it a look.
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.
<laughs in pihole>
does the UI just render blank squares in that case?
Yes. It’s obnoxious.
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’ve done this on VIDAA (Hisense) and there’s a placeholder for the homescreen ads that just say “VIDAA”.
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.
On my parent’s it doesnt render anything at all. Just shows the wallpaper.
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.
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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
This is technically correct, but it’s not new. They’ve had this ad for years.
looks like they shrunk the menu to icons in order to make room for the ad on the same view, not just when you arrow over to the app icons.
Yea I’ve been ignoring that forever. I jsut go to my Jellyfin app at square 1
FYI if you already have a Roku, you can block these with a network level ad blocker like Pihole.
Edit: Here’s a list of common Smart TV domains to block.
I was using NextDNS instead of pihole because I wanted my ad blocking to still work when I’m out and about.
Couldn’t stay on the free tier because I make so many DNS requests. Which seemed weird - it’s just the two of us using the network?
Lo and behold, the fucking forgotten Roku attached to a TV was doing a fresh DNS lookup every 30 seconds to try to call home and send telemetry data. It accounted for like 60% of my DNS traffic!
I use a simple WireGuard VPN to use my home DNS when I’m out. This container from linuxserver.io was really easy to set up, and the WireGuard app works great on iOS/Android. You can even have it automatically turn on and off depending on your network.
I tried fancy mesh networks like Tailscale, but it was over-complicated for my setup and kept causing DNS issues. Some people find this works well for them, though.
Either way, you can go full self-hosted this way and save money.
If you already have a Roku you can probably just stop using a Roku.
I’d rather show people how to de-shittify their existing devices than create more e-waste.
What do you recommend instead for $30-40?
One of the Onn streaming devices from Walmart. Picked one up last month to replace an old Fire Stick, and it’s been great. Runs stock (or close enough to it) GoogleTv and it only cost about $40. Downloaded Projectivy Launcher and set it as my default home app, so no more home screen ads. Will probably end up throwing ReVanced on it, too.
And when Google inevitably pisses me off enough, I can unlock the bootloader and try my hand at flashing a custom ROM without any Google Play services.
Yeah like the other guy said. One of the ONN devices with Projectivity Launcher to get rid of ads and organize your apps in a sane manner.
I know everyone shits 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?
closest non-apple alternative to appleTV is probably nvidia shield, but it may have enshittified when i wasn’t looking. appleTV is pretty much the only apple device I use these days, every now and again i use my old ipad
Google has Google TV. It’s rancid with ads too. Basically the top half of the home screen is ad space, with more sponsored content recommendations below. There for a while it was running fried chicken video ads on that top half. That’s when I decided to replace my ChromeCast with Google TV with an Nvidia Shield that has all the Google crap gutted out of it. Not exactly perfect, but so much better.
Unfortunately, digital rights restrictions prevent an open source option from taking off. None of the streaming services want to allow their content onto a platform they can’t easily manipulate.
Gross.
You lose SOME extra functionality not being in an Apple ecosystem but the Apple TV is a pretty amazing device especially for the price.
I imagine the device is a loss leader for them
Oh, it’s worse than I even made it sound. Their sponsored video recommendations would often recommend me a show on a service I don’t subscribe to, even though the show was available on services I do subscribe to, and Google would recommend videos from the one I do subscribe to as not an ad, so they know I could get it for free, but still tried to sell it to me.
It’s sad, because Android TV was a very solid experience for years, and it slowly enshitified to being a pain in the ass to use, just like Roku. I feel the same about a lot of streaming services though. They started removing downvoting videos, made it so you couldn’t hide certain content, started changing the recommendation to recommend what they wanted me to watch instead of what I might want to watch. Half of them force sports in my face too, with no option to hide sports content. Hell, even if you had a sport you loved, that doesn’t mean you love whatever sport that streaming service has, yet it gets top billing on my screen for some reason.
Arg, I’ve been forced to a new solution.
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 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
I got some cheap ONN boxes, Which seem like the best value for true Android TV devices. If you have the funds NVIDIA Shield TV is probably the way to go.
It’s possible to skip the Walmart account login at setup, but probably not possible to skip the Google account sign-in (let me know if you find a way!).
Setting up side-loading is trivial, although largely unnecessary. I loaded Stremio, Jellyfin, and a VPN for better streaming experience and control. I replaced the default home screen with Projectivy Launcher. You don’t need to go into ADB shell or anything like that. There are also other home screen launchers that fix the major problems with the default GoogleTV screen; Emotin UI (closed source), FLauncher (dormant), Leanback Launcher, ATV Launcher (closed-source).
There are lots of options for web browsing, File Explorer, on-device media, stores, etc. that are easily available.
So how long before ONN gets enshitified?
Always a concern. They will eventually require a Walmart account I guess. I’ll have to remember to disable updates.
very neat! thanks!
I would love to exit the Roku ecosystem. I don’t use any Apple products and I’m not interested in starting.
It’s amazing how there are really no open-source products in this category of devices.
Enshitification is just business doing business. It suck as much value as it can out of anything it touches until it’s barely worth it then just let’s the quality hover there. They call it “the price the market will bare”, also known as, giving as little value as possible.
Everytime something turns to shit it’s because the business side of the endeavor has started making the decisions.
Roku is another prime example of enshitification
Agreed, but are there any realistic alternatives in the android space to firestick and roku?
I’m also curious what you ended up with
