- cross-posted to:
- enshittification@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- enshittification@lemmy.world
Uh huh, but collecting Blurays is just silly I’ve been told.
Watching Roku steadily decline from a trusted brand has been something. For a time, they were the alternative to the other bigger more Ad driven companies. I’ve owned 2 and used to enjoy them overall. Now, they’ve slowly become just as bad or worse than their competitors in some regards. When history looks back on streaming boxes as a failed delivery method, Roku might just get to be the example in the forefront.
I have a Roku ultra in my kid’s room.
I do not want her subjected to ads when she turns on the TV.
This is unacceptable to me and I will be replacing all my Rokus immediately.
pirate, or you’ll just be doing the same fucking thing again in two years.
good news: pi’s can do everything a roku does, plus any you install of: retro gaming, libreoffice, web browsing, shit tons of educational software, IDE’s, and teaching her computers.
I have a 200+TB library for my Plex and jellyfin instances. The Roku was just a family friendly launcher and remote. I bought them when you could still disable ads in the secret menus and most of the Roku BS is blocked by a pair of piholes, but I’ve gotten annoyed chasing new urls to blacklist.
It’s DRM for the other app bullshit that becomes a hindrance for going the Kodi route. There really isn’t a good alternative that I’ve found. Linux boxes will limit some services to 720p and jt’s mostly baseball and local news programs that I’ll lose.
For the news, I need to look at something like hdhomerun or something else I can pair with an OTA antenna.
For baseball, not much other than the absolute mess that live streaming sports is. Doable, sure. But a pita and sketchy last I looked into it. My season ticket comes with MLB.tv, but the irony is that I’m “in network” so all my teams games are blacked out for me. I had previously created a VPN tunnel and routed one of my Rokus to a different state to watch it. But it’s not a user friendly experience.
For games, I already have a batocera box running on an old dell thin client with way more power than a pi, and it has Kodi on it. But the UI/UX still sucks.
I just got an HDHomeRun that I use with an antenna and love it. I use Mac and they are one of the only boxes that works on Mac.
They don’t have a native Linux client, but you can use VLC supposedly: https://info.hdhomerun.com/info/linux
It also works with Jellyfin through a plugin, but I haven’t tried it yet so idk how good it is
You can connect your HDHomeRun with Plex too. It’s really a nice setup. Plex can work like a DVR to record live channels and even has some capability to remove commercials. I’ve started letting NFL games be DVR’d and commercials stripped before watching the game. It’s a much better experience if you can tolerate the delay.
I use an Nividia shield that I’ve had for about 5 years. Have an alternate ad free launcher enabled. Still works really well. I use it mostly with Kodi streaming from SMB, some Jellyfin though I have Jellyfin hosted on a Pi4 so video quality is somewhat lacking. The 4k upscaling still works very well and is somewhat unique among streaming boxes
Cabernet with daddylive plugin, this can emulate hdhomerun on your network, add this to plex/Jellyfin for live tv. https://thedaddy/ . to Check the list and see if these 24/7 channel streams work for you.
I integrated these into plex and are able to watch live tv the way I want. Cabernet is a docker container on my network, ensure you set the ip address to the server vs the docker IP, in the Cabernet web ui settings.If you want to just watch streams off that site, I recommend using brave browser, turn on all the ad block capability and set it to strict and even import the hagezi multi pro blocklist in brave. The amount of pop ups on that site is horrible. But brave smooths them out and streams are fairly reliable. Plenty of sports.
mostly seems like you’ve tested stuff and got your shit together.
but the 720p limit is surprising to me. any idea why this happens?
DRM. They don’t like how open Linux can be so to combat people using it for pirating their content the companies restrict it.
For instance, Netflix is capped at 720p on Linux unless you are on Opera, apparently.
oh, you’re not sailing the high seas. got it.
Get to the endgame. Just strap us to a chair and make us watch your crap ads Clockwork Orange style.
If this happens on my box I’ll be taking them to small claims court and let you all know how it goes…
Just a heads up that you probably “agreed” to binding arbitration…
Bought a Roku back in 2020 or 2021 because the Apple TV was more expensive.
Now I know why.
For what it is worth, I have Roku set up as a REGEX in my Pi-hole so for the most part, any of this nonsense is completely blocked on my Roku.
Needless to say, I shouldn’t have to do this shit with a device I paid for and mainly use for Plex streaming.
I know it’s being lazy. But if you have the regex you could post, I’d appreciate it.
I had this happen to me just a few days ago. Within the hour I bought an Nvidia shield and came up with a plan to install the projectivy launcher and button remapper.
I’m mostly happy, it’s much more snappy but it’s missing a couple apps I used on the Roku (WGN and Marquee Sports). At least I can use my own pictures for the background and screensavers.
Roku box: Bye, bitch!
- Disconnect from network
- Factory reset
- Use HDMI to plug into a device that actually respects your privacy and does what you want (Jellyfin, Plex, Pihole for even more goodness, and simply run other streaming services via privacy enhanced browser)
- Enjoy life without enshittified asshole OS no one asked for by going back to a time that was better.
EDIT: I haven’t tested this as of yet, but it seems like a decent option for converting and old PC (or if you have a RaspPi) into a media platform with comparable functionality: https://arcadian.cloud/pi/2023/04/27/easily-turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-smart-tv/
Roku is the one that bricked peoples TVs unless they agreed to their new terms of service.
PiHole.
My friend doesn’t understand this reference, could you elaborate, please?
you can get a raspberry pi and install something called pihole on it, it’s a DNS server with ad-blocking. basically, it converts a domain name like example.com into an IP address, but rather than just faithfully supply DNS, it also effectively blocks some adverts by acting like the domain names don’t exist for servers that run ads
once it’s set up it’ll just work, and it should protect everyone on your network/wifi from some ads
Just gonna add that it can also be installed directly to any Linux PC or in a docker container. The raspberry pi isn’t necessarily necessary.
Beautiful, I like the sounds of that.
Install a Pihole server on your network. It’s a DNS filter. When a client tries to access a domain that has been blacklisted (ie a known ad or tracker domain), it denies the lookup.
On my roku homescreen it just has an empty placeholder where it tried to put the ad, but my Pihole server denied it.
Is there risk of a sort of arms race wherein services will update and decline to render services to those who block said blacklisted ad domains, or has that already happened?
I can’t imagine that happening with today’s systems. Yes, it’s theoretically possible. It just seems unlikely that they’d go through the trouble of denying service to someone who didn’t fetch data from one specific domain but did get it from another.
That’s good to know, then. Here’s to hoping they don’t bother, the last thing we need is another opaque, dystopian tech feature.
Reasons I turn off WiFi on any TV I buy and use a streaming box
Roku will do this on their boxes too.
Yeah I don’t get roku boxes lol. I have an nvidia shield pro, and I’m considering loading the lineageOS software on it
I got the shield too, it’s amazing. Upgraded from an old Chromecast and it’s night and day, didn’t realize how slow the Chromecast was, even on Ethernet.
oh man, hard agree, the shield is the kind of android boxes
Roku devices and fire sticks belong in the recycle bin.
I switched everything to Apple TV .
I’m not into the apple walled garden, I use android boxes
Any good recommendations?
Onn 4k box or Nvidia shield
Onn is just Walmart Roku, they will absolutely slather it in ads as soon as they figure out how. +1 on Nvidia shield.
You can boot lineage os’s android TV version easily on the onn one
To my knowledge that only works for the 2021 version which is no longer sold. The newer 2024 version is locked down further and cannot have its bootloader unlocked.
Oh, I’m not sure, maybe
I was seeing the Moana promo with my Roku streaming stick on a Samsung TV. Didn’t look like an ad exactly tho, just a nice ocean background behind the menu.
personally I prefer android streaming boxes, because you can install custom versions of android tv on them, so if the official release from google is bad, you can just go to the community version
That general principle makes me confident that opensource community-driven software will eventually replace corporateware. As long as people get equivalent features they’ll eventually gravitate toward the alternative that has no opportunistic agenda.
I agree
There any custom versions you can point me to? I’ve been looking for a custom Android OS to install on my Insignia Fire TV.
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
lineageOS, but you have to have a supported device, and I’m not seeing that device on there. Plus fire tv’s are pretty locked down. I would suggest walmarts onn 4k box or an nvidia shield
I think this happened to me last night with an ad for Moana 2 playing automatically. I just assumed I accidentally hit a button. I was on the home screen but it enlarged and played in the basically the top quarter of the screen. I hit Close and it closed.
Also, the Netflix app is absolute garbage on the TCL Roku TVs. Constantly freezes and crashes, sometimes while not even try to rewind or pause/resume. It just decides its had enough and causes the TV to restart lol.
I thought the Netflix issue was just me! I also got the Moana 2 ad yesterday and assumed that I’d hit something, too. Good to know it wasn’t me, bad to know it was intentional on Roku’s part.
We have several TCL Roku TVs and Netflix is trash on all of them. Netflix is fine on the streaming sticks though. And every app seems to take some time to load as well. The TVs are pretty old so that’s probably why.
I noticed the Moana background a couple days ago and thought it looked very nice. But to me it didn’t seem like it was “playing” an add, in the sense that there wasn’t a noticeable wait time before the remote worked. Checked again just now and it’s gone back to a plain gray background.
Aaargh matey!
This kind of garbage is why I’ve never connected my tcl tv with bulit in roku to the internet.
Ughhh just unsubscibe