Ugh. Roku was one of the platforms with fewer ads.
- Roku will be adding more ads to the home screens of its devices and TVs in the near future.
- The ads will be interactive and ‘shoppable’ and will cover a range of industries, including restaurants and cars.
- Roku already has a significant amount of ads on its home screen, and it is unclear if users will be able to change their preferences for the new ads.
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.
Yeah, DNS blocking is quite effective for not just ads, but also telemetry on Roku.
Personally, I use nextdns until I can can a good pihole setup going.
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 $35 if you’re patient
I can confirm that I’m blocking all the Roku ads with adguard now. You just plug this list in: https://oisd.nl/
PiHole Domain regex blacklist:
(ads|logs|cloudservices).roku.com$Y’know what I love most about the high sea, matey? She never gets enshittified.
How do i pirate an ad free tv
Might not be the exact solution you’re looking for, but I run my “smart TV” off a cheap ass laptop. The TV itselfbhas never been connected to the internet.
Hmm. Since all I use my tv for is local plex server and hdmi I could just disable its internet access in the router.
e: i did it
Pihole helps. If you have androidtv you can setup a custom launcher and avoid it on your interface.
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.
Any guides/links on setting up my Onn box like that? It’s been great for the $20 but removing ads and deeper customization sounds amazing
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.
For SmartTubeNext, I followed this guide.
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.
SmartTubeNext might be the greatest thing about AndroidTV just for the sponsor block. It’s so amazing.
Step one.
Buy a thing. It is a good thing.
-
Oops, now it only works if you pay monthly. Ok maybe they’re doing some upkeep.
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Now there’s ads. You’re paying them money, but they want even more so now you’re the product.
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Haha it broke! My family tech guy says it’s literally impossible to fix without the cheat codes.
Final step. Don’t buy the thing again. Don’t buy anything with “terms may be altered. Pray I do not alter them further.” Probably stick to open source.
Me after getting those dumbass Canary cameras that cost $200 a piece then they completely wrecked the free tier then started giving them away for free to get more subscribers.
Wyze cams with wz_mini_hacks firmware offline in a VLAN with Frigate and Home assistant from here on out!
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Can these ads be blocked with pi-hole?
I block logs.roku.com and cloudservices.roku.com on my pihole without impacting any functionality.
what info is sent to these domain?
None if you block it.
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.
They’ve gotten great at this war of attrition. They know if they make changes incrementally people wouldn’t accept all at once then most people won’t notice or care. That’s why I through that trash and two firesshits out in the garbage where they belonged when they started with “related” ads and app store ads.
So you go from owning a multi media entertainment system to owning a online store front where you must buy crap that you don’t need.
This is bait and switch level bullshit
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.
Google is already doing this with their default Android TV launcher. I tolerated their home screen ‘recommendations’ for a while as they occasionally highlighted something interesting to watch, but one day I switched on the TV and was greeted with a huge advert banner for a fucking watch on the home screen.
At that point I spent a few hours setting up FLauncher on all my ATV devices.
I did the exact same thing. Also blocked androidtv updates in case Google starts pulling shit regarding custom launchers.
It’s gross how ads are being crammed in every little nook of our lives. Not like the ShieldTv was a cheap device either.
Pretty sad to see Roku going down the same road. Guess forcing a third of the screen devoted to ads just wasn’t enough.
Anyway to roll back firmware on some of these TVs?
Mine was never connected, except once a friend came over and connected it and it updated and now it requires a connection to rename inputs…
It’s never been connected since that day either.
Hate this kind of crap.
Hey, nice, I get to build an HTPC again and check out the latest streaming shit for Linux.
I’m not even being ironic. Tired of this corporate hellscape and finding joy in returning to the kind of hobbyist tech I grew up on.
corposhit used to at least be worth paying for with all it’s flaws but they’re shitting it up so bad it’s increasingly not even worth it in the slightest
Yep. There was a little while there where things coulda maybe been fine but the greedy psychopaths decided they wanted to fuck it up.
I’ve been doing some research for the last few days on setting up a home server/NAS. If anyone’s going to ruin my entertainment, it’s going to be ME
For anybody who has one, here’s a dns block list specifically for Roku: https://github.com/asimcard/roku-ad-list
That list doesn’t seem to work for me. I get this error on pihole when updating gravity:
Parsed 0 exact domains and 0 ABP-style domains (ignored 1 non-domain entries)
