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.
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.
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.
I thought it’s always been like this? No?
Back when it was only Roku boxes, I don’t recall any ads at all on the home screen. Then when I got a TV with Roku built in, I recall it also being zero ads. That was like 10 years for the Roku TV where it still had no ads on the homescreen of the RokuOS. Then they added that big right banner ad. It was that for a number of years and then they added a row at the top advertising some streaming apps. Then they started this beta program for the new layout and they jacked up the size of the content advertisement space and pushing your stuff further down where your cursor focus defaults at when starting the TV/Roku. The expanding presense of advertisement icons have been pretty rapid.
Roku used to be have no advertisements. Then they started trying to be a digital storefront for movies/tv and that was just a button on the side list menu. Then they started adding advertisements more and more
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.
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 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.”
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
Roku has had a big ad on the side for a while now? I’ve been blocking it with DNS.
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!
Roku is another prime example of enshitification
Agreed, but are there any realistic alternatives in the android space to firestick and roku?
Enshitification is just business doing business. It suck as much value as it 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.
I’m also curious what you ended up with
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?
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.
The easiest way to avoid ads is use an android streamer (I use the Google tv streamer) and install projectivity launcher. You get the cleanest UI that’s fully customizable with only what you want to see. I also installed a button remapper app to change the netflix button on my remote to open Plex. It’s a very easy stress-free experience using my tv
It’s been like this for a while. Nvidia Shield is even worse but I put up with it because it’s so useful.
Apple TV hasn’t been enshitified yet. The hard part is finding a non smart tv to plug it into.
It is? I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad on mine.
On the homepage there are ads
People probably wouldn’t like it to have only one product without a single ad. They probably had bug reports about it “my roku doesn’t display ads on my smart TV, does that mean that it’s broken?”.
Since there are a lot of comments here I want to ask this: we purchased a xiaomi tv stick (specs below) and a 15 year old intel pentium dual core w/ android runs circles around it with the exact same apps plus the PC has significantly more stable network connection. The stick’s OS is old however not bloated and it even blocks google banner ads OOB. Did we get a very bad unit or are all of TV sticks / boxes unusably slow unless you get a shield or an apple tv?
When my really old TV box was in it’s last legs I tried 2 different Android TV boxes, which whilst not in TV Stick format like that, have very similar hardware specs.
These things were around €50 from AliExpress.
They were frustrating, one was actually sluggish, the other not exactly fast (it really boils down to the version of the cheap ARM CPU in your device and the processor names don’t exactly make clear which ones are more or less powerful), and ran Android TV isn’t all that great at customizing it and comes with pre-installed crap and Google spyware.
Replaced them with an N100 Mini-PC running Lubuntu and with Kodi always on top. That thing runs circles around those 2, not even reaching 10% CPU usage when playing 1080p h256 videos.
Now, I also use the Mini-PC as a home server, hence Lubuntu makes sense, but for the stupidly simple solution just install LibreELEC which is a distro pre-configured to just run Kodi.
You can get a wireless remote for it, at which point it’s pretty much the same sofa experience as a TV Box or TV Stick except for the ON/OFF button (because it only works to turn the Mini-PC OFF, not to turn it back ON).
That said, that Mini-PC with 8GB memory and a 128 GB SSD was about €130 over a year ago and now it’s about €240.
I believe the Shield and Apple TV are actually more expensive and you don’t fully control what’s running in that hardware, what it does with your personal data and even if it will end up enshittified or not, unlike with a Mini-PC were you installed Linux.
My current setup is similar. the pc runs a custom build of android tv w/o google services, with the remote of the tv box. I already have checks notes 5 spare pcs, i just had no idea 2.4ghz remotes could be dirt cheap. The item you sent appears as 2 usd before taxes & shipment but doesn’t ship to my location lol. Oh and every single one of the pcs have hdd, i’ll need either a new ssd or use one of my flash drives with a live linux install as permanent is very slow from USB.
Well, a quick check of my Mini-PC which has a bit more software than Lubuntu and Kodi but not by much (so, also stuff like Firefox and qbittorrent) shows a bit over 20GB used for everything but the mount to were the qbittorrent is downloading files, so even in this day and age of stupidly expensive storage all the storage you need is still going to be about €20 or less (that’s the price of a new 64GB SATA SSD from AliExpress, which should fit the same connectors as your HDDs unless those PCs are so ancient they still use PATA instead of SATA).
I expect a dedicate distro for just a TV box like LibreELEC should be even smaller.
Mind you, I have the storage for the videos I watch in Kodi outside in the form of portable mobile HDDs since its a much better price per GB for bulk storage and the speed of even mobile HDDs is fine for playing h264 and h265 compressed stuff, so that’s of course not counted in those 20GB.
Upgrading an old PCs with a 64GB SATA SSD should be reasonable cheap and more than enough to run either LibreELEC or Lubuntu with Kodi plus a bunch of extra stuff.
That said, the benefit of a Mini-PC like the one I got (with an N100 processor or similar) is that it uses very little power (unlike old desktop PCs or even notebooks) so it’s cheap to just leave running all the time and it’s quiet.
I use Nvidia shield and never update it. So far no ads.
You can update (and probably should to get things like security fixes), just make sure you then also install a custom launcher like FLauncher to replace the original one after updating.
Don’t need security fixes. Updates always makes things worse. So I’m very happy with current version and will keep it forever.
But the hackers! They could hijack your tv and make you watch something boring!
Are there any TVs nowadays that don’t advertise to you? I bought a Hisense about 6 years ago because it supposedly didn’t advertise. 2 years into getting the TV it advertises now. Any suggestions for a TV that just lets me watch?
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.
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.
I know its possible to jail break a roku, but is there a follow up to remove ads after doing so?
Really sick of it. Though I need to get a pi-hole set up anyways
Are they ads for thing to pirate…?
At this point, I’m not even sickened any more. Anyone who buys these consumer goods and willingly uses them as intended DESERVES this shit. Fuck them. Before someone says “It’s all I could afford” or “What’s the alternative? We can’t seem to find “dumb” TVs anymore!”
Dead. Simple.
Buy that trash Roku TV. Take it home and set it up. NEVER, EVER allow it to connect to the internet. Set it to ALWAYS go to the “PC” hdmi input and put a tiny, cheap Linux PC on the end of it. If you need a remote, there are dirt cheap gyro mice “remotes” on Ebay.There should be a large, soft keyboard with attached touchpad for the sofa, then a setup like that would be perfect. Using a mouse on the couch is kinda weird.
What streaming services will you be able watch decently on a Linux pc? They all cap resolution at 720p for Linux browsers.
Don’t know, I host my own media. 4K works a peach. The rest of the time I watch youtube essays and long videos about ARGs/analog horror, also on yt.
Most ppl don’t have the time to figure out how to set that up and maintain it
Sure but that’s because most people won’t try.
Each their own, you do you.
I self host, others are in monthly subscription hell until the end of time.
I do too, and I recommend it to people in my line who I think would be interested. I just don’t think it’s fair to act like people who aren’t equipped for that do that are lesser than or deserving to live with slop.
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.
