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 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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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 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.
On my parent’s it doesnt render anything at all. Just shows the wallpaper.
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.
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
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 or 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
People love to hate Apple, and that’s fine (Tim Cook sucks ass), but the AppleTV is honestly the best streamer and you can’t change my mind.
Zero ads on the Home Screen, and even the first gen 4K box that came out 8 years ago is still fast as hell and getting updates.
I know this because I had one in my closet and just took it out the other day when setting up a TV in my bedroom. It downloaded updates and is now rocking and rolling again.
It’s best because everything else is worse
My family knows me as the anti-apple IT Guy. So, it shocked everyone when I brought home a Best Buy open box Apple TV 4K (saved me $20US).
Honestly, this is my first Apple purchase since my ipod and I have to admit: it’s good.
Roku has lost their way and my 3 Roku Ultra devices are all dying for reasons unknown (freezing, random reboots, spinning endlessly when trying to open an app). I’m just so done with them (and Nvidia) for my streaming hardware business.
I wanted to buy one but Apple banned stremio recently…
I bought an AppleTV device and it is by far the best out of the box TV product I’ve purchased. It’s pricey but I highly recommend it if you don’t want to self host.
They are certainly more expensive, but it’s a “buy once cry once” type of thing. You pay a little more but the box works SO MUCH better and for longer than the cheap junk that’ll show you a bunch of ads.
I have two of them at this point and zero regrets.
Plus, it´s pretty easy to find used ones that are cheaper.
I’ll see you walled garden bullshit and raise your an nvidia shield. I think I Stoll got till September before I’m in the sane boat.
I know it’s not for everyone but fuck nvdia too, I build a pc next to my tv it’s everything and then some.
Again, I know it’s not for everyone.
My other tv’s just have onn 4k seems non enschitified yet… And is dirt cheap
I wonder how much of the anti-apple stuff comes from the extremity of the person’s views. I have always preferred PC/windows due to familiarity with it, but I’ve used iphones for 12 or 13 years, and by extension, some of apple’s services (like icloud). They’ve been pretty great this whole time. And, as a normie, I’ve been happy with what I’ve heard and seen about their stability, general lack of ads, and security/protection of customer data. I doubt there’s many others on the Fediverse with similar views due to the nature of this place, but anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that it seems like some of the dissent toward apple is inherent to their position relative to the opinion holder.
I definitely think it’s “linux brain” that exists around here to a degree. You can see it on any given thread that talks about…well…anything technical. “Just download Linux!” they’ll say. And I say this as someone who LIKES Linux. I have it on two of my pcs (and I have a Mac and iPhone/iPad, etc. as well). It’s great. But there’s a zealotry around here around it.
That said, it’s not hard to dislike Apple right now. I’m pretty mad at them for cozying up to trump all the time. I’m glad Cook will not be leading Apple soon (though I wish he’d just leave outright. He’ll still be at the company). But it’s hard to deny the hardware is great and the software is generally good and generally works well.
But Lemmy is certainly a niche population of nerds. And that’s fine! It’s great! But a lot of those nerds seem to love the “console wars”-type mentality of “MY thing is the best and anything else is bad.”
MacOS is on a steady decline though. Since Jobs died, it has become worse with each release.
Apple TV is great, though.
I really appreciate your response and I agree completely. Linux seems awesome (I’ve played with Mint a little bit, and have heard a lot about Bazzite and Kinoite, and I do plan on moving over when I have the time/energy/motivation. It does seem significantly better than the commercial offerings once one gets past the (often exaggerated) learning curve.
Would you mind expanding on the Apple stuff? I haven’t looked into them as a company since they told the courts to fuck off during the Snowden trial or something like that. I’m realizing that I’m not an Apple fanboy, but I also don’t have the data pool to really form an opinion one way or another.
I grew up an apple fanboy but in my early twenties I realized I couldn’t afford to stay one. Since the iPhone came out they’ve gotten more and more closed off and hard to modify. The last straw for me was realizing you couldn’t install older versions of software (someone gave me a 1st or 2nd Gen iPad) and I couldn’t even put an older version of home assistant on it. That really showed me how hard they push for “you must buy the newest thing” because they’ll deliberately break the old one
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
How do people tolerate this? Just looking at this pic makes me want to turn it off and throw it out the window.
Literally nothing about the interface is about the user. It all screams everything except what you might want or need. Well, maybe the Zootopia tile is good, of all things, but not much else.
They were born in it, moulded by it, they’ve never seen a world without an add somewhere in it.
*molded.
*Mauled
Madded, the ad version of being mogged.
I’m on the home screen for one second. The remote, in fact, has buttons on it, I don’t even need to look at the home screen.
You can add or remove tiles as you see fit (although they definitely like to add some for you from time to time), but like I said, I barely use the tiles.
I love people on here who don’t and have never used it expressing any feelings on it at all. Like, why do you care, other than were all here (on the internet) just to get mad about shit?
They “don’t have” the technical expertise or energy to avoid it.
That’s very true. I don’t mean they should run their own Linux on their TV’s or something, I’m more like…not having a smart TV at all must be better than this abomination.
You have to spend a multiple of a smart TV and buy a commercial TV (as in the type of TVs businesses use for display) to ensure a dumb tv if you can’t lobotomize it yourself.
Insanity ensues
So I have one of these pos “onn.” Wal Mart brand Roku tvs. It was legitimately the cheapest 40 something inch tv (250bucks?) they had to offer, I did not realize that the smart part isn’t like an input it’s the home screen every time u power it on. Had I known, I would have spent up to 100 bucks MORE to just have a regular ass TV. Live and learn I suppose.
You should get a Google TV one. You can select basic TV mode and it lets you set it up without Wi-Fi and has the option to power on to last input.
Smart TV is basically what most people would buy if not an apple TV. Amazon and Roku sticks are still around.
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.
was literally about to buy a Roku TV. not anymore
anyone have suggestions for a decent new TV that isn’t so invasive?
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
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.
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 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?
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.
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
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?
Great, I got rid of Amazon fire stick after they stuck ads in movies and got a Roku.
Now I’ll have to switch again or start pirating. Another loss for civilization
And they wknder why piracy is skyrocketing again. It’s not hard, dipshits. Fuck.
Worst part are the psychopath lawyer trolls acting like we’re violent criminals just for non-voilently CLICKING A DOWNLOAD link. So glad that Sony lawsuit they sunk major cash into failed.
Used a fire TV stick for a long time but multiple factors made me finally switch to an Nvidia shield.
Worked great for a year and then an OS updated made the home screen 60% ads, especially those that started to play with sound when I was on them for like 2 milliseconds. Installed projectify on it and now I only see what I want to see.
It is always disturbing to me how much ads I see when I am using someone else’s system, because I banned everything at home.
Roku has had a big ad on the side for a while now? I’ve been blocking it with DNS.
We really need to figure out an open source TV OS or something. I want a Linux based OS for a small PC explicitly to stream Plex or other streaming services. I think I read that licensing for the transcoding or something was the hang up.
I think I read that licensing for the transcoding or something was the hang up.
There’s several problems. Transcoding is one but there’s also issues with content providers requiring the use of their own apps along with Linux not (until very recently) being able to use any HDMI spec beyond 2.0.
I’ve been a ROKU user for over a decade but the last year has had me thinking more and more about boxing up my devices and sending them to their HQ with a note “Since you treat these like you own them I figured I’d just send them to you.”
I am really REALLY tired of them dicking with my boxes and updating / reconfiguring things however and whenever they see fit.
I’ve been a ROKU user for over a decade but the last year has had me thinking more and more about boxing up my devices and sending them to their HQ with a note “Since you treat these like you own them I figured I’d just send them to you.”
I’ve been considering what to do with mine that has been in a box since they pushed spyware to them. I might do that.
spice things up and put a bomb in it /j
Roku solved my wifi/buffering issue way back in 2015 or so, when i was using a Sony bluray player that had built in streaming capability. I became a devout user after that.
Also the UI isnt clunky, laggy like so many cheap TVs and such (except the Youtube App is fucking laggy trash).
Is the recommended ONN streamer (see above) as good as the Roku at all the same shit?
I would love to ditch the rokus for all the same shit.
Roku’s slide into corporatism kinda hurts. I really liked their product and their lead developer came from the Amiga Universe.
Is the recommended ONN streamer (see above) as good as the Roku at all the same shit?
I honestly don’t now. I haven’t owned a Google Streamer since the Asus days.
KDE Plasma Bigscreen is joining the Plasma release schedule next month and will then be available in distro repositories. That at least will be a big deal for Linux HTPCs.
There are solutions aiming to help with that like LibreELEC (basically a minimal backing OS for Kodi). But unfortunately any Linux-based streaming solution will have issues with DRM connecting to Netflix, Prime, etc. There are sidesteps around that too but starts to get more and more challenging for the average user
The biggest hurdle is streaming services’ DRM (something called widevine iirc) that just doesn’t work on linux, which limit you to low resolutions like 720p. There was some struggles between AMD and the HDMI consortium preventing them from shipping HDMI2.1 drivers, but that appears to be solved.
The biggest hurdle is streaming services’ DRM (something called widevine iirc) that just doesn’t work on linux
Good point. Of course, while technical solutions make for an interesting discussion, piracy is both an excellent free solution, and can get rid of the pesky anti-piracy ads.
But I do appreciate the discussion, as I remain unwilling to bother with piracy, and I might still use and pay for a service that works on Linux without too much effort.
I love how both streaming and blu-ray both made piracy the simpler solution by having ungodly amount of DRM that only screw over the paying customer (that don’t even work to stop piracy, by the way).
As some old gaming dude once said “Piracy is almost always a service problem” , said dude is now a billionaire by providing a correct service by the way.
Show me a steam or gog equivalent (ie just a platform that is not outright hostile to consumers) to buying movies and tv shows and my money is yours. In the meantime I’ll keep sailing the high sea.
As some old gaming dude once said “Piracy is almost always a service problem” ,
So true!
Show me a steam or gog equivalent (ie just a platform that is not outright hostile to consumers) to buying movies and tv shows and my money is yours.
Dropout and Nebula both stream pretty well from locked down Android, without unreasonable permissions, at least.
Neither is at feature parity with Steam, by any means.
Are you familiar with Kodi?
I wish there were something more like Apple TV UI. Kodi is weird and hard to navigate. Apps are more like plugins instead of just Apps.
Plasma Bigscreen is scheduled for its first release next month: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/
Looks good and I’ll definitely try it but this likely won’t get you any of the streaming services. But I don’t personally care about that.
Looks much improved from the last time I looked at Plasma Bigscreen. Probably going to struggle to get any Streaming services support, but it might make a great base for something like Bazite to not be locked to Steam Big Picture mode for TVs.
Seems like doing some clean room design off of Roku OS would be a good choice.
