Technology

Finally got sick of the FireTV so I plugged a mini PC into a dumb TV. It's kinda sad to have to use a keyboard instead of a controller, but it was a minor tradeoff for a much better experience.

Every time somebody brings this up, there's the same obvious answer. The only real option is to have an external streaming device and to disable or completely ignore the built-in operating system.

I got a Philips TV and just never connected it to the internet. Only ad I see is the ugly Netflix button on my remote, rest is handled by OSMC.

I think most TVs can do this. I've even discovered that Samsung that's notorious for forcing you to go through a network setup wizard can be bypassed just by pressing the right arrow button instead of selecting a WiFi. At least all the Samsung TVs from my old workplace had this bypass.

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.

And they wknder why piracy is skyrocketing again. It’s not hard, dipshits. Fuck.

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

does the UI just render blank squares in that case?

You can also just block it via a Pi-Hole. My Roku works fine as a smart TV, but has no ads because they can’t load from the ad server. I also blocked the telemetry server too. So I get all the benefits of having a smart TV (like convenient apps, instead of needing to use a HTPC as a workaround), and none of the downsides like ads.

The built-in ads were actually what led to me finally setting up my pihole after moving. I had it set up in my old apartment, and my wife was used to having it quietly running. She didn’t really realize how much it blocked until we moved. After the move, I was busy with unpacking, work, etc and didn’t have a whole lot of free time. So the network was just running on the new ISP’s provided modem/router until I had the time to get all my server shit unpacked and set up. My wife kept dragging me away for other tasks, so it was like three weeks before I even had time to touch the box that my pi-hole was in.

I finally got time to set my pi-hole up because my wife had the Roku TV paused, it went to the idle screen, and she saw an ad scroll past on the idle screen. She turned to me and was like “okay yeah, you need to go set up that adblocker thingy. Ads on the fucking idle screen? I knew ads were getting pervasive these days, but what the fuck?” The next day, she left me alone so I would have time to actually get everything plugged in and configured. Seeing that ad on the idle screen was the moment that cemented in her mind that an adblocker is a necessary part of the network.

I had gotten a roku for us for xmas the year before. Saw that tos update and stopped using it immediately. Tbh it kinda sucked anyways.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

From https://plasma-bigscreen.org/get/

Plasma Bigscreen is not yet widely available.

We are planning to join the Plasma release schedule starting with Plasma 6.7 (in June), which will make it possible for distributions to ship it in their repositories.

In June, so almost!

It'll be packaged up in plasma 6.7, I think mid June. Then it'll be easy for distros to make it available. I want to try it but I don't want to change distro or build it myself. When 6.7 rolls out, I got my computer plugged into my TV with CachyOS handheld edition. Right when Plasma 6.7 is available in the Arch repos, I'm installing it

I dont have ads on my Nvidia shield but I never updated it either.