I just finished setting up a custom router with dns ad blocking. Next comes a media player so I can purge this smart TV filth from my household.
Huge shout out to Louis Rossmann and the FUTO communuty contributors, check out the wiki on self-hosted software if you haven’t already.
I tried to search modern basic TVs without the ”smart” stuff. I only found few from Philips and Procaster. Also all of them were small 24”-32” and only 720p.
Fuck ”Smart” TVs!
Is American football not merely a vehicle through which advertising can be pumped? You’d think the entire sport had been designed from the ground up for such a purpose.
Four seconds of action, six minutes of commercials….3.6 seconds of action, 47 replays, five minutes of commercials.
P.S. Smart TVs can eat shit and die.
I went to a game for the first time a few years ago. I recall the moment where everyone was sitting around and not doing anything because they were waiting for the commercials to finish. It felt like watching actors drop their characters the moment they step out of the spotlight.
To be fair, the super bowl ads are seen as part of the entertainment by many people and the companies generally do go out of their way to make the funniest or cutest ads of the year. Any other time I would fully agree with you.
This is insane.
USA really is a cyberpunk dystopia.
Yeah. Yeah it is. I was in Times Square recently and had the thought that this was the glitzy permanent neon lighting to go with all the other stuff.
A cheap computer/laptop. HDMI cable. Ublock origin (sprinkle some sponserblock and privacy badger in there). A TV that is never connected to the internet. Voila. No ads. None. Zilch. Zero. Ad free.
Streaming platforms that have gone to ad supported formats make me laugh because it’s just a 3-5 second black screen, not the ad, and it’s back to the content. Been doing it for decades. Don’t sit there and get reamed by their bullshit.
AFAIK this will only get you 720p to 1080p depending on the streaming service. No 4K, no HDR.
Plenty of 4k with HDR on Real Debrid. Or even better quality and bitrate ripped from BRs, in the open waters.
Return it. If you hold on to it (even if you block the ads and all) it will signal the manufacturer, that this practice is fine.
Most smart TV OS are Cancer doesn’t matter how much you paid for it
LG TVs, at least three one I have, have a pretty good operating system. I’ve never seen an ad (yet)
LG is one of the worst. Only TVs with ROKU are worse for privacy concerns. ROKU, LG and Samsung make Google look good when it comes to invasion of privacy.
I’ve been against the idea of smart TVs from day one. A good panel will easily have a longer life than whatever smart box they shoe horn into TVs now. That’s reason enough to avoid that trap.
Mark my words on this: on top of the privacy invasion Future smart TVs will be designed to slow down to the point of being unusable well before their panels wear out to force upgrades and prevent third party repairs.
This feels like my Philips. It has gotten so damn slow lately. I thought I had partially cleaned the system and yesterday I did a check and removed 25 apps thanks to adb. 25. I could not remove them from the TV setttings. Most of it was co.uk.freeview shit… was it there on my previous cleanup? Doubt. Did I install that? No.
I made my Smart TV into a dumb TV by never activating the smart TV functions. And then I plugged a relatively cheap computer into it. So I don’t have this kind of problem.
Your grandma does.
I installed her TV and internet last week. She barely understands the concept of switching TV inputs, and her Roku smart TV doesn’t let you rename inputs from HDMI1 to [ISP NAME] unless the thing is connected to the internet. It also defaults out of the box to show the smart TV bullshit every single time you turn it on, instead of just showing the last used input before the TV turned off. So she’s completely baffled how to watch simple television channels unless I spend 10 minutes reconfiguring this garbage so it’s usable.
Go visit your grandma, everyone. And reconfigure her smart TV. I’m joking but I’m not. I can only visit so many grandmas per day.
I have a very old 4K Toshiba TV with a built in “smart browser” that, due to me never plugging into the Internet, has a home page with news about how well Obama’s doing in the polls for being a relatively unknown junior senator.
Which only works for now. They’ve already gotten you to be ok with the upcharge price for the “smart” hardware. Soon they’re going to require online activation for “reasons”. So choosing to not connect it won’t work. And they’ll do regular ad connection checks and if it fails to update ads after so much time the TV will prompt an error to please correct the network.
Hate it all you want, it’s going to happen.
It doesn’t need to happen if we actually do something about this hate.
Like what?
organize.
is a matter of pushing advertisement and privacy restrictions
Yeah all that bluster in Congress about TikTok collecting people’s data and yet not one single privacy bill materialized anywhere. Not even from Democrats. It’s almost like the privacy concerns were not even real.
It will be a dark day indeed when I allow my TV to connect to the internet. These things are glorified monitors.
You’re right, we should start putting ads on all monitors
cant one simple adb debloat any droid device? i mean adb list those packages, maybe even backup some and then remove the obvious ones?!
Not if they’re baked into the system. Although that may get into GPL violations, I forget. God knows a device can come with locked firmware though.
i dont know what you mean by baked in really. all services are packages i guess and a quick google search says stuff like that at least exist at some point, e.g.https://github.com/tutyamxx/androidtv-debloat-script
i wish op the best of luck to escape telemetry hell.
Adb is just an interface between computer and phone, the packages it lists may not be every system component, you can add anything in at kernel level, or also just not list it in that interface.
no. smart tvs are not phones.
Between computer and device running Android.
I bought a new TV last year after my Hisense kicked the bucket and had a similar experience.
Not sure if it applies to your situation, but I just factory reset my TV, never enabled wifi, and hooked up a smart device I had lying around (Nvidia Shield). Now it all works great and if the smart functions upset me I can throw just the smart TV part in the trash and go back to my VCR.
You have to reject smart TVs at the time of purchase, or manufacturers think this shit is okay and will keep escalating until even an Nvidia Shield won’t save you.
Unfortunately options are becoming increasingly limited. My guess is that they’re making more money cramming in ads for people that tolerate it than they are losing money from people who refuse it.
I recently took my brand new stupid fucking tv off the grid. I use Apple TV so not a big deal with the ads and shit but the damn thing forced an update mid movie, reset, and black screened. Couldn’t get it back on and went to bed, figured I’d deal with it in the morning. Luckily it worked the next day after that no more internet for you.
If you think that’s bad, my Denon receiver had to update itself which for some reason fails 100% of the time when using wifi so I had to find the longest ethernet cable I have to connect into the back (or disconnect 20+ wires from the back to move it closer to the network switch) so that it could finish downloading the firmware and complete the update before it would start working again.
Wait, receivers need wifi now too? This shit is getting ridiculous. I saw a mirror needed wifi access a few weeks ago
Sorry, I’m confused. You should easily be able to block these home screen ads ads with pihole or router dns blocking. I know because I do it with my smart tvs. Are you saying that that isn’t working?
I figure the ads are just cached from earlier. I took this picture a few hours after I finished setting up my pfBlockerNG feeds and changing my DNS to AdGuard’s public one.
If nothing else, this ad certainly reaffirmed my decision to update our network.
I would recommend hard power cycling the TV and re-evaluating. For example, on both my TCL Roku and LG WebOS TVs, home screen ads are completely eliminated with pihole dns blocking. Additionally, I got rid of home screen ads on my Nvidia shield and other devices.
Make sure that you’re blocking the right domains.
Edit: before anyone says “but why even connect the TV to the Internet at all?” - the reason is because you’re likely to get the best HDR quality (especially Dolby Vision) from the TV’s native streaming apps. Dolby vision is an absolute fucking disaster on external devices and barely works at all on Windows (if at all.)
Apple TV was the best media thing I’ve bought in over a decade. No ads ever, incredibly responsive (league of its own compared to stuff like Roku), and is able to stream from my Jellyfin server. Beautiful interface, fast, clean, simple controller with a battery life that is easily over a year. Just a really good product. Roku can suck by nuts. Literal full page ads in a product that advertises that it has zero of them. Even the most expensive version. Fuck Roku.
Same here. One is the best made TV boxes period.
I’ve found the shield pro is better, especially for customizability.
Isn’t that Android? Sorry, not touching Android unless it’s something like Calyx or Graphene or lineage. I’ll just build myself a pc to connect to my TV if I wanted to go anywhere near that.
Have you used an Apple TV or are you just claiming that the shield is better because you like customizing things more?
how does it go for codec support out of Jellyfin? I’m starting to collect and also rip AV1 content, which is fine for computers and phones (and my newer TV does it natively), but trying to find a streambox that wouldn’t need to transcode it is proving harder than expected
Have a previous gen 4K, and have not encountered any issues with Jellyfin on streaming. There’s a spectacularly annoying bug that you lose your config if the atv is full to capacity - and with kids in the house it means frequent logins are required. The iOS client also seems to lag on features and updates compared to the other clients, but other than that niggle it’s been great.
You’re talking about Streamyfin right? Yeah I’ve had so many issues with that. I just use infuse, but infuse is terrible for actually sorting and categorizing stuff. And it slows down massively with large libraries. I got to around 850 movies and it suddenly bogged down like crazy. Like, the Apple TV is super responsive still, but the app just has trouble loading each successive movie.
Honestly not sure and the kids are firmly ensconced watching at the minute. I tried two or three, but it’s the one with the “normal” Jellyfin icon. I tried infuse and another one, but this one was (for me) the best of the three.
