Get to the endgame. Just strap us to a chair and make us watch your crap ads Clockwork Orange style.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Roku box: Bye, bitch!
Aaargh matey!
Roku is the one that bricked peoples TVs unless they agreed to their new terms of service.
I have a Roku ultra in my kid's room.
I do not want her subjected to ads when she turns on the TV.
This is unacceptable to me and I will be replacing all my Rokus immediately.
pirate, or you'll just be doing the same fucking thing again in two years.
good news: pi's can do everything a roku does, plus any you install of: retro gaming, libreoffice, web browsing, shit tons of educational software, IDE's, and teaching her computers.
I have a 200+TB library for my Plex and jellyfin instances. The Roku was just a family friendly launcher and remote. I bought them when you could still disable ads in the secret menus and most of the Roku BS is blocked by a pair of piholes, but I've gotten annoyed chasing new urls to blacklist.
It's DRM for the other app bullshit that becomes a hindrance for going the Kodi route. There really isn't a good alternative that I've found. Linux boxes will limit some services to 720p and jt's mostly baseball and local news programs that I'll lose.
For the news, I need to look at something like hdhomerun or something else I can pair with an OTA antenna.
For baseball, not much other than the absolute mess that live streaming sports is. Doable, sure. But a pita and sketchy last I looked into it. My season ticket comes with MLB.tv, but the irony is that I'm "in network" so all my teams games are blacked out for me. I had previously created a VPN tunnel and routed one of my Rokus to a different state to watch it. But it's not a user friendly experience.
For games, I already have a batocera box running on an old dell thin client with way more power than a pi, and it has Kodi on it. But the UI/UX still sucks.
I just got an HDHomeRun that I use with an antenna and love it. I use Mac and they are one of the only boxes that works on Mac.
They don’t have a native Linux client, but you can use VLC supposedly: https://info.hdhomerun.com/info/linux
mostly seems like you've tested stuff and got your shit together.
but the 720p limit is surprising to me. any idea why this happens?
Think of any invasive streaming devices in your house. Samsung, Google Chromecast, ATV, LG etc. Roku is by far the worst.
This was shitty, but the giants are worse than the smaller companies. Roku works fine and ad-free if you block the ad/tracking domains. Try separating the ads/tracking from the stuff you need on a Google device.
Bought a Roku back in 2020 or 2021 because the Apple TV was more expensive.
Now I know why.
For what it is worth, I have Roku set up as a REGEX in my Pi-hole so for the most part, any of this nonsense is completely blocked on my Roku.
Needless to say, I shouldn’t have to do this shit with a device I paid for and mainly use for Plex streaming.
I know it's being lazy. But if you have the regex you could post, I'd appreciate it.
I had this happen to me just a few days ago. Within the hour I bought an Nvidia shield and came up with a plan to install the projectivy launcher and button remapper.
I'm mostly happy, it's much more snappy but it's missing a couple apps I used on the Roku (WGN and Marquee Sports). At least I can use my own pictures for the background and screensavers.
Anybody notice the Max app on roku requires clicking twice to pause and then twice to unpause? Very odd and annoying glitch or feature.
FWIW Roku doesn't make the apps. That's on Max. The Paramount app is trash too, resume doesn't work.
Reasons I turn off WiFi on any TV I buy and use a streaming box
Any good recommendations?
Onn 4k box or Nvidia shield
Onn is just Walmart Roku, they will absolutely slather it in ads as soon as they figure out how. +1 on Nvidia shield.
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I think this happened to me last night with an ad for Moana 2 playing automatically. I just assumed I accidentally hit a button. I was on the home screen but it enlarged and played in the basically the top quarter of the screen. I hit Close and it closed.
Also, the Netflix app is absolute garbage on the TCL Roku TVs. Constantly freezes and crashes, sometimes while not even try to rewind or pause/resume. It just decides its had enough and causes the TV to restart lol.
I noticed the Moana background a couple days ago and thought it looked very nice. But to me it didn't seem like it was "playing" an add, in the sense that there wasn't a noticeable wait time before the remote worked. Checked again just now and it's gone back to a plain gray background.
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PiHole.
My friend doesn't understand this reference, could you elaborate, please?
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If this happens on my box I'll be taking them to small claims court and let you all know how it goes...
Just a heads up that you probably "agreed" to binding arbitration...
So glad I blocked my TVs access to the Internet at the router level. Never complainrd about not setting up a network if the network doesn't work.
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