Watching Roku steadily decline from a trusted brand has been something. For a time, they were the alternative to the other bigger more Ad driven companies. I’ve owned 2 and used to enjoy them overall. Now, they’ve slowly become just as bad or worse than their competitors in some regards. When history looks back on streaming boxes as a failed delivery method, Roku might just get to be the example in the forefront.
Ughhh just unsubscibe
Uh huh, but collecting Blurays is just silly I’ve been told.
- Disconnect from network
- Factory reset
- Use HDMI to plug into a device that actually respects your privacy and does what you want (Jellyfin, Plex, Pihole for even more goodness, and simply run other streaming services via privacy enhanced browser)
- Enjoy life without enshittified asshole OS no one asked for by going back to a time that was better.
EDIT: I haven’t tested this as of yet, but it seems like a decent option for converting and old PC (or if you have a RaspPi) into a media platform with comparable functionality: https://arcadian.cloud/pi/2023/04/27/easily-turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-smart-tv/
Get to the endgame. Just strap us to a chair and make us watch your crap ads Clockwork Orange style.
This kind of garbage is why I’ve never connected my tcl tv with bulit in roku to the internet.
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 use an Nividia shield that I’ve had for about 5 years. Have an alternate ad free launcher enabled. Still works really well. I use it mostly with Kodi streaming from SMB, some Jellyfin though I have Jellyfin hosted on a Pi4 so video quality is somewhat lacking. The 4k upscaling still works very well and is somewhat unique among streaming boxes
Cabernet with daddylive plugin, this can emulate hdhomerun on your network, add this to plex/Jellyfin for live tv. https://thedaddy/ . to Check the list and see if these 24/7 channel streams work for you.
I integrated these into plex and are able to watch live tv the way I want. Cabernet is a docker container on my network, ensure you set the ip address to the server vs the docker IP, in the Cabernet web ui settings.If you want to just watch streams off that site, I recommend using brave browser, turn on all the ad block capability and set it to strict and even import the hagezi multi pro blocklist in brave. The amount of pop ups on that site is horrible. But brave smooths them out and streams are fairly reliable. Plenty of sports.
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
It also works with Jellyfin through a plugin, but I haven’t tried it yet so idk how good it is
You can connect your HDHomeRun with Plex too. It’s really a nice setup. Plex can work like a DVR to record live channels and even has some capability to remove commercials. I’ve started letting NFL games be DVR’d and commercials stripped before watching the game. It’s a much better experience if you can tolerate the delay.
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?
DRM. They don’t like how open Linux can be so to combat people using it for pirating their content the companies restrict it.
For instance, Netflix is capped at 720p on Linux unless you are on Opera, apparently.
oh, you’re not sailing the high seas. got it.
Anyone successfully installed LineageOS on Nvidia Shield or Onn devices? I ran the Konstakang AndroidTV build of Lineage on a Raspberry Pi 4 a couple years ago, and it was nice in how uncluttered and non-spywarey it was, but I ended up buying a Shield because hardware decoding never worked well and the frame rate drops were unbearable.
Libreelec on raspberry pi 4 (Kodi) works for me but it really needs a new YouTube app. That’s the only issue really
Roku box: Bye, bitch!
Can i pleace find a decent TV without smart-capabilitys? I just want HDMI thats it
Don’t give your TV wifi access, use a separate device to watch stuff (Chromecast, FireTV, Android box, etc…)
Wish it had more apps, but Apple TV is pretty solid. With the Steam link app, it’s also good for couch gaming on your pc.
We use Moonlight instead of Steam Link. It requires a little more setting up at the PC end, but overall seems to be a more smooth result.
I’ll take a look, but I haven’t noticed any performance issues with Steam link.
Moonlight blows steam out of the water. I can’t even tell I’m streaming when I use it.
Can you give me some examples for what’s really all that noticeable?
With steam for me it took longer to connect, it was harder to set up and the stream itself had noticeable artifacts and lag.
With sunshine & moonlight my lag is 1 ms, it connects instantly and I can stream in 4K HDR. Like I said it’s so high quality that I often forget I’m streaming the game.
Plus moonlight is free and open source. Takes maybe 5-10 mins to set up. I was skeptical because it’s FOSS, but it’s easily the streaming solution I’ve tried for gaming.
This is on Windows over LAN, I haven’t tried it over the internet.
Witch brands have moonlight available natively? I think I remember Samsung. Anything else? LG doesn’t…
I can only speak for Apple TV, I’m afraid.
Anything that runs android, but still, just get an old laptop with a broken screen and duct tape it to the back of the screen
Can we install stuff outside of the play store? Like NewPipe?
I just dock my steam deck
Yeah, that was my approach, but the forced ads are also on the roku stick :(
Yeah about time for me to switch to something else :/
Is there anything that’s a better alternative?
I’m looking into alternatives. So far Kodi is the front runner for my use. I have not decided on whether to replace roku units with raspberri pi running kodi or try the jailbreaking roku route.
Some people have mentioned apple TV, for now that at least isn’t riddled with ads. Others have mentioned getting android sticks, but I’m not sure how smooth that process is (or how well they work with remotes).
Buy a commercial signage display. It’s just a TV without the smart garbage.
Or, get a projector :)
Technically you can get commercial TVs but many companies stopped selling them. They are literally the new screen tech with no “Smart” capabilities. They are also much cheaper than their smart counterparts.
I’ve had luck with just not giving a smart TV my wifi password.
I’m looking to upgrade the living room TV soon, and this is what I plan to do.
I have heard though that some TVs insist on an Internet connection, so do your research and/or be sure there is a good return policy.
Ah ok, good to know! Thanks!
That’s what I do
A buddy sent me this recently. I’m intrigues. https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=46513
Commercial displays
I must not be looking at the right thing. All I’m finding are expensive displays that have all this fancy scheduling, web surfing, etc. built into it.
Try this brand https://www.sceptre.com/
Are they actually any good though? I was looking at a 1440p Sceptre monitor for my PC, and a lot of reviews mentioned huge bezels, dead pixels, and other issues…
Oh, these are just Wide-screen Gaming monitors though?
LG and samdung make commercial displays, as well as monitors (no speakers or tv tuners generally)
Cheap computer monitor works well for me.
Just a heads up that the Smart Cancer has already begun infecting PC monitors. Samsung makes Smart Monitors.
It won’t be long before there are no longer Dumb Monitors.
A Sharp Aquos TV from the late 2000s, pre-Hisense days. We have a 42" model from ~2007. It’s only 1080p (which is honestly just fine for its size and our usage), but there’s plenty of I/O for modern and legacy equipment, and lots of configuration options. It is an absolute monster at 75 lbs, but an incredibly high quality unit nonetheless, especially considering it’s age. I’ve owned it since 2019 and it’s needed zero repairs or anything.
For comparison, we also have a much newer 55" curved Samsung TV (in our basement, wall-mounted up high) which has already needed a backlight driver board replacement. Luckily that was only $50, but still, I expect better.
the largest problem with older TV’s isnt the resolution. even on my 75" its hard to tell the difference between 4k and 1080p… But HDR is amazing, it really blows me away each time a scene lights up!
That’s a fair point. HDR is quite nice, I use it a lot on my Pixel. The TV I mentioned does have dynamic brightness, but that’s over the whole TV, not really equivalent to HDR.
They’re working hard to make sure piracy provides the best experience.
It’s approaching 1984 levels of BS control.
Sorry to inform you, but we are already in the Brave New World.
I seem to be lacking in Soma and orgies.
Ah crap. That means I’m an Epsilon.
Ugh I wanna be in Brand New Animal
This is already my experience but still use a Roku to access Plex. Looks like I’ll need to get something else or figure out if i can block them with Ad Guard Home
I use pi hole and the experience is not entirely smooth. I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this but my pi hole blocks ads but every few weeks Roku has an update and it locks up the entire operating system and I’m stuck in a loop of trying to get my update so I can return to normal. I for the hell of it disabled pi hole for 5 minutes and it wound up working but not until I dropped pi hole. So it’s as if it every so often decides to hold the operating system hostage if I don’t drop pi hole for updates. Makes me think they likely get all the telemetry they are trying to collect for selling data. I like not watching ads 90 percent of the time but it pisses me off that they are likely still spying on me by forcing me to communicate with their servers every now and then.
My brother in Christ, please just connect another device to your TV and disconnect your TV from the internet. No one should be using the built-in software for exactly this reason.
Interesting, I use PiHole as well and have no issues with any of my Roku devices. I wonder if you have more restrictive blocking or some particular rule that I don’t. What lists are you using in PiHole?
I can’t recall having that issue but I stopped using pi-hole because it was blocking certain functionalities on some websites. It required a more hands on approach than I wanted to dedicate at the time.
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.
Roku is the one that bricked peoples TVs unless they agreed to their new terms of service.
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.
Why even connect the tv to your local network?
Casting, using your phone for a remote, so the popup for connecting goes away
What a goofy thing to ask. You know exactly why people use smart TVs on the Internet.
Wake on LAN. At least that’s what I do. I can turn on the TV and adjust the volume from Home Assistant but the TV itself can’t reach the Internet.
I used Netflix on my TV but after the password sharing and other issues I choose to block network access.
Most of my Internet is done on my computer.
When my girlfriend moved in, she had a big TCL Roku TV its software absolutely sucks. But it would keep a blinking led on ALL THE TIME if it wasn’t connected to wifi.
I put it on my iot network, and I’m considering null routing it.
I actually had a Roku box plugged into it since it had a better experience, but I’m probably going to switch that to a Nvidia shield pro because of this ad bullshit.
