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.
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
Somewhere, an ad exec just stiff.
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.
This (and the ridiculous, eye gouging price) is why I’d never go to a UFC event. It’s bad enough when I’m home and I have to go clean the kitchen or fold my laundry for 30 minutes if a fight finishes even slightly early, but having to stand around waiting for ads to finish on a PPV card would turn me into Ted Kaczynski
I’d honestly return it as faulty. Preloaded adware shouldn’t be acceptable.
Don’t ever connect a “smart” tv to the internet. Period.
Yo dawg! I heard you like ads. So we put ads in your ads
Disable all internet functionality, set the time to the 1990s to prevent many timers from going off, attach the tv to another device that doesn’t have ads via your cable of choice. But why was your smart tv 1700? Did it have some special features?
Have you ever looked at OLED TV prices? This is absolutely a normal price.
Probably 4k oled
Not disagreeing, but at some point this won’t be enough. Assuming companies aren’t already, “offline” devices will get shipped with the ability to utilize unsecured networks and/or other devices. Better hope any neighbors are privacy conscious too.*
(they’re not)
I’ve been recommending physically snipping radios, but that can cause issues if you don’t understand what you’re doing. Any chance you know whether it’s possible to simply delete drivers and backups on modern smart tvs? Mine is ancient, so I have no clue what they’re doing to y’all, nowadays.
Personally, I don’t have the energy to go to such lengths. My “good enough” has been using AdGaud Home as a network-wide DNS blocker and connect my smart TV to it. It’s been great so far.
Plus, I get the bonus of seeing how much gets blocked.
Why the fuck does your television have a home page?
Never give the TV the wifi password.
Why the fuck does your television have a home page?
FLauncher is pretty great :)
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.
Buy a smart TV box like Apple TV or Nvidia Shield. You can get full quality streaming with some ads but not nearly as bad as the software that’s built into some of these TVs.
I know, I was just letting people know that this guys solution comes with downsides.
HDMI 2.1 can support 4k. Find a ship that doesn’t sink. Voila. No ads. Zilch. Zero. Nada. No HDR? Better than a single second of an ad.
It’ll be 4k if you install the windows app for the service or watch in Edge.
What do we do when they come with 5G modems built in?
Don’t buy a TV anymore. Seriously though with the direction things have been going in the “tech world” for the last couple years (maybe even decade) it is probably better to start adjusting to some level of digital minimalism. For some of us it will become a necessity for financial reasons anyway…
Razor blade to specific pcb traces?
Detailed instructions for things like this will need to documented. It starts with ads… does it evolve into 1984? Who knows, but it seems more likely in light of recent events.
I agree. I could see manufacturers add anti tamper features that could brick the device if opened if people started doing this anyway.
That’s unlikely, the additional R&D cost probably won’t weigh up to the costs incurred by the small minority that removes it.
hah, there’s nowhere near enough infrastructure to handle that.
Tangentally related, FUTO put a bad taste in my mouth when they were harassing the graphene os team https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113443396794247106
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.
My TV has an even better operating system, Linux, because it’s a display panel with an old laptop connected to it. Imagine seeing advertisements on your television screen, couldn’t be me.
This might depend on the version the OS is. I have an LG that’s been great for years, then it got a ““fresh new look”” that featured a giant banner for “recommendations.”
I had auto-updates off, too. Thankfully, they still had an option to revert to the previous menu - but who knows how long that’d stay an option? It pissed me off enough to finally setup AdGaurd Home on my home server.
Fun Fact: It’s increased my phone’s battery life by ~48 hours (excluding the rare occasion where its being actively used all day).
is this about the stupid football thing?
Yeah I guess the superbowl is soon, there’s another row of football ads one or two rows up. I’ll remind myself that I paid for the TV, the electricity to run it, and the bandwidth to connect it, yet I’m still shown full screen ads first thing when I turn my TV on. And I don’t even watch football. And I can’t disable it.
Corporate America and gargle my balls
That is absolute cancer.
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.
Congratulations! So, how does the TV work with the adblocker set up?
It’s absolutely no different! The TV is doing something weird to get around it, or these ads are just cached from earlier. I’m not sure yet. Good news is that the ad blockers definitely works, we’re getting 96/100 on https://adblock-tester.com/
what brand is it? just to know what to avoid
Hisense. Name and shame baby
*with Google’s TV OS
Google TV is the easiest to get rid of ads on. I have a Sony and a Hisense both no ads.
Look up and use the Projectivy Launcher.
You’ll also want to sideload an app that forces the default launcher to Projectivy (can’t recall the name) because they don’t allow changing it through the stock OS. Projectivy tries to use accessibility settings to take over on its own, but it breaks some other features so I don’t use them.
Check for HTTPS traffic as well as the regular let 53. They could be doing DNS over HTTPS to get around the block, or a static IP for a nameserver.
DNS calls are definitely cached. You’ll have to wait a few days until your TV refreshes DNS entries.
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?
I’ve used both, still prefer the shield. Hardware-wise they’re about the same insofar as I never had trouble with any lag at any point on either. This is what sets both of them apart from all other streaming devices. Chromecast, roku, fire sticks, they’ve all had trouble with some of the higher bit rate media on my jellyfin server. Apple TV and shield did not.
I prefer the shield remote.
The main difference comes down to software. Android TV is simply better. I can get the interface exactly how I like it, and run all manner of apps in the background, making the remote more useful among other things. Apple TV doesn’t even have access to the jellyfin app, you have to use swiftfin on the app store which has issues. You can sideload apps super easily on the shield. (Though for the jellyfin example, you don’t have to. It’s on the play store.)
Developer mode is also a great thing to have on the shield. I can now transfer apps and media from my pc super easily, speed up animations to make it feel snappier, (a feature sorely missed on apple TV) or even remote control the shield (which I haven’t found a need to do yet so I’m not counting that as a plus).
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
Perfectly. I’ve never encountered a codec my Apple TV couldn’t play smooth as butter. Been watching a lot of AV1 anime lately, never needs to transcode. I use Infuse Player for its Dolby Vision support, because that’s the only format the native Jellyfin app has trouble with, but Infuse is also just a really solid app in general, and for me is the perfect way to consume my Jellyfin server. But the native Jellyfin app is also solid, and there are some other players which would definitely meet your needs (MrMC for example is very good, but not as polished as Infuse).
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.
Shield pro is the best, end of story
Are they still making those or are they all 5+ years old (2019 was latest I could find on eBay)?
The last model they made was 2019. I highly doubt we’ll see a refresh.
Yep, all 5 years old. I don’t see a need for another one quite yet when even the newest streaming devices still don’t measure up.
Any issues popping up (especially from the old version of Android)?
No, it’s smoother than even my brand new Google TV chromecast that it replaced. I replaced the default launcher with something easier for my elderly mother to understand because she kept getting confused with other devices. It’s snappy, has all the apps I have needed, and was easy to set up. New apps are still developed and updated for it too since it’s so popular, and ostensibly the best pre-built streaming device short of manually configuring a mini pc. I don’t see software support officially or from the app developers dropping any time soon because of that.
the age of the device put me off, it still runs android 11 as well apparently. I wouldnt want to buy one now and then a refresh comes out
https://9to5google.com/2025/02/05/nvidia-shield-tv-9-2-update-changelog/ Still being updated too.
It’s still the best streaming device hands down. There’s not even any competition.
Use Infuse as your playback client. It will direct play AV1. However there is no hardware decoding support for it. But the processor is fast enough to do it in software for 24fps 4K. But not 60fps.
Current gen iPhone chips do AV1 hardware decoding. And the AppleTV uses the same processor, just a few generations behind. The next AppleTV hardware refresh may add AV1 hardware support. But that’s just a guess.
I agree. I switched from Roku to apple tv recently (and I don’t really have apple devices), and it was worth it.
