Frog: “Hey, did any of you guys notice the water get a couple degrees hotter?”
Other Frogs: Already boiled alive
It’s why I’m struggling really, really hard not to feel to annoyed with the average consumers that still buy this trash instead of supporting less oppressive alternatives.
Like, yeah, people should just be able to buy what they like and not have to concern themselves with the overall market trends they’re helping to entrench… But holy shit is it becoming a serious problem. The customers are what drive the direction of the market, but the customers base isn’t just tech enthusiasts anymore, it’s literally everyone, and they are sleepwalking us all off a god damn cliff. By the time they wake up to start complaining about it, we will already be halfway down.
By the time they wake up to start complaining about it, we will already be halfway down.
They’ll be at the “too big to fail” point, where to try to reverse the trend would crash the economy that’s based on selling customer privacy and information.
I’m still alive.
But only because I ditched Amazon Prime at the end of the month.
Of course you are. Frogs jump out if the water gets too hot regardless how slowly the temperature is rising.
I left when they started charging $10-11 for whole food deliveries. It used to be included.
They also used to have Amazon fresh and Amazon pantry delivery, but they exited my suburban area, too.
So now Walmart+ gets my money.
deleted by creator
The EU seems to be the only major entity actually trying at this point.
God Bless the EU.
“Wow, I can’t believe these fire sticks are so cheap”
Bought an early one. Used it for less than a year.
I still have it. Can they be flashed with Lineage or something?
That one guy hacked a company with a fire stick lol
What? That’s crazy, I’ve never heard this story. Got anything I should search on?
Only old firmwares
Meh, could be fun to play with. Keep it on a DMZ lab segment.
I’m surprised it wasn’t showing ads before. The fire tablets are discounted if they show ads on the lock screen.
A great solution is just to stop buying from Amazon. Like, anything.
Chances are you did survive before Amazon was a thing. It’s possible.
I gave them 1 star and left a bad review for each of the fire tvs…they called me about the revie and then did nothing…buy a roku and throw out your $800 fire tv…it is worth it to take the loss for your own sanity
I recently bought a Roku and was surprised to find they force ads on their home screen. It’s obviously not as terrible as a fullscreen ad but its still very annoying.
Roku also does not work well with Crunchyroll at all.
You can’t get any dubs, and if you get subtitles - they only seem to be in the language the show is. E. G. Japanese subtitles only for Japanese Audio.
It’s so dumb that neither Crunchyroll nor Roku will budge
What do you mean they won’t budge? Is this a conscious decision they’re both making to spite one another?
Roku controls Subtitles/Language as a system level which means Crunchyroll can’t fix it. Other systems allow the language/subtitles to be within respective apps.
Roku won’t budge that subtitles must match language spoken and that each content should be in its primary language (Japanese).
Crunchyroll is “fixing” the issue by creating duplicate seasons - one for each language - but that is a very slow process and it only fixes the dub
Once again I’m reminded that piracy offers a better user experience than the paid options.
It does. But it’s difficult to obtain 1000+ episodes of One Piece.
Netflix doesn’t use Roku’s system level language / subtitle settings so I assume there’s a way around it for other apps as well.
Yeah, there’s definitely foreign language English subtitled content on Netflix that can be watched on Roku. I don’t think apps are required to use the Roku system subtitles. I’m more inclined to think Crunchyroll just isn’t supporting their Roku app properly.
what? i can’t speak specifically to crunchyroll (not willing to pay for it), but i watch a lot of movies in languages other than english with english subtitles on roku.
if roku is insisting on this (?), they aren’t insisting on it for other services like hbo.
The Roku does nothing at all better than the Nvidia Shield. Roku also has giant ads you can’t get rid of. They recently blocked the few workarounds people found.
Honestly, you could just flash the fire stick. That might be the cheapest and most effective option.
The Nvidia Shield is $200. You might as well buy a used laptop, a nuc, or an old desktop at that point.
It also already had End Of Life for one of its key features - Game Streaming. So I am convinced it will be supported for much longer.
Roku has done occasional full screen ads too.
buy a roku
Wait, what? A Roku has more ads than a fire TV. 1/3 of the screen is always an ad. For new releases they’ll sell the entire screen as an ad. ( Disney’s Seeing Red was a full screen splash ad on my Roku.)
OK open to any other options and I mean any…there has got to be someone who can wite hacks to fix issues like this…they are doing it for chrome?
Roku is more closed than Amazon fire. I’ve read about rooted Fires.
Apple TV seems the least intrusive right now but I’ve never used one personally.
I’ve had an AppleTV for about five years+ now and have yet to see an ad placed on the main screen.
the ads on roku do not impact my experience, they go away as soon as i open anything.
*do not yet
Only a matter of time
i will give you that one. 😮💨
Lol the Roku has far more invasive ads. Get a Chromecast, or best yet, an Nvidia Shield.
You pay the Amazon tax indirectly often enough regardless. Huge chunks of the Internet run on AWS. And if it’s not AWS, then it’s Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. Shareholders win again.
As for not buying shitty products, returning them when you realise how shitty they are, cancelling contracts when services turn shitty, etc. Yes, do that.
It’s true you can’t really control who uses AWS and you’ll end up on sites that use it. But it’s so easy to not buy anything from Amazon directly or from other stores.
Their shipping services aren’t even that good any more from what I hear (I haven’t bought from them in years).
I to this day have proudly never bought anything from Amazon (unless you count the one ebay purchase that was shipped from Amazon without my knowledge). However I have run into a couple of products, namely quality name brand USB4 cables (Plugable and Ugreen) that I for the life of me cannot find anywhere but Amazon in Australia.
So yes I have proudly survived without Amazon until very soon. I will try to continue to not use Amazon however with some sellers opting to exclusively sell on Amazon, I feel I am being left with no choice. It seems not enough boycotted Amazon when it mattered to the point that there are an increasing amount of items that are only available through them.
Facebook and Amazon are on my shit list due to their shear contempt for their customers/products and employees.
Before amazon existed all the companies they killed for their monopoly existed.
Naw, it didn’t stop any other company i boycotted, and thinking it does is actually a silly idea to consider if you give it a minute to be in the ol’ noggin.
If it did make a difference there’d be a bunch of astroturf campaigns against voting with your wallet, wouldn’t there?
The only thing that stops this is something we’re not ready for yet.
EDIT: wimps.
It doesn’t make a difference unless enough people boycott. The problem is not enough people care enough to actually stop going there to hurt their revenue.
Then there’s the problem with the current political division, at least in the US, where if something upsets one side, the other likes to dig in to stick it to them and often winds up giving the boycotted company more money than they’ll ever lose.
And what is that one thing?
The only thing that stops this is something we’re not ready for yet.
EDIT: wimps.
And what is that one thing?
“Viva la Revolucion!”, probably.
Hot take incoming, apologies in advance for the lecture…
What is it about the newer Generations that they’re so binary about everything, that it’s all or nothing, and nothing in between?
How about we try voting in the right people into office first?
And before you reply saying what a waste of time it is, only bother replying if you actually have the Congress app installed on your phone, if you watch the votes that are held and passed, and you can name your Representative and your Senators.
Because they sure as hell not paying attention to you, and what you comment about here on Lemmy. You need to get more in their faces with your opinions, if you want them to treat you with respect and seriously.
And yes, it might all fail anyways, because money talks and bullshit walks, but at least you can look in the mirror and say you tried.
What app do you use?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sunlightlabs.android.congress
Edit: If that app does not work for you, then I’d suggest the govtrack.us web site.
I can see why a lot of people wouldn’t use that. I found two other apps, one of which was riddled with ads and one of which was paid. It’s hard to complain about people not doing something when there’s no practical and free way
It’s hard to complain about people not doing something when there’s no practical and free way
If it doesn’t work for you, there are alternatives to an Android app to get the same information, via the web.
If you are a programmer, the API being used is from ProPublica.
I can’t wait to find out either!
I would but at that point it would be very difficult to get some of the specialty tools I use. I have a whole catalog and it takes ages to get anything from it. Granted I don’t use their fire TV or whatever and so I’m not actually seeing these shitty ads.
Experienced this for the first time yesterday. It’s my dad paying for Amazon, and we mutually discovered we couldn’t skip the ad. Asked him, “aren’t you gonna boycott it now?”, and he told me no. “Not too much of an issue”, he said. This is the attitude that enables enshittification.
Fuck that. High seas it is, they can kiss my ass. I will not pay to watch advertisements.
Probably because one ad is like nothing compared to what we used to have to deal with on broadcast TV. Sadly the general public who have only just recently gotten into streaming in the last few years still have those kinds of ad breaks fresh in memory.
I was halfway through reading and thinking that it would be a wholesome ending. I guess not.
You can update the TVs settings to block these new large video ads. However, Amazon is getting more and more intrusive with its ads. I imagine that, similar to the Alexa Shows that I also use, every few weeks they’ll tweak the ads, making your previous “disable this” settings no longer applicable. It’s technically a new ad type, so they can auto enable it again. Super frustrating.
Largely in response to these new autoplay ads, I replaced my Fire TV with an LG TV. I’ve got another LG TV from only a few years ago that doesn’t really have ads. This one… does. Damn it. Don’t get me wrong, they’re much less in-your-face when compared to Amazon’s ads. But, damn, does everything just have to be ads now?
For all of Apple’s faults, their Apple TV is pretty decent. A home screen with apps on them; no ads. It’s great
God, if I could just install SmartTube and Kodi/Stremio on an Apple TV, I’d convert in a heartbeat. Until then, I’ll keep my Shield TV Pro.
Install libreelec onto a raspberry pi 4. Its a Linux OS that automatically boots into Kodi.
Kodi has an ad free youtube addon, which you can augment with a sponsorblock addon to skip in video ads.
If you have plex or jellyfin they intergrate really well with kodi. For plex, use plexkodiconnect, for jellyfin, use the jellyfin kodi app.
Flirc has a great remote if you go with the above called the skip.
I used to be into that sort of tinkering and custom install/configuring of all sorts of software. I probably still have 2-3 flircs in a drawer somewhere.
These days I just want to be able to buy something, plug it in, and have it work. The idea of installing a plex/jellyfin server and a custom OS on a pi might as well be the same as getting a 4 year degree at this point. I’m sure it works out great for loads of people, but it’s definitely not something I’m interested in.
Id say youre a handful of YouTube videos away from getting the above done, but if you aren’t interested that’s no problem.
It’s not the knowledge that I need, it’s mostly the time and desire to set up all that stuff and maintain it and keep it working and constantly needing to track what the latest and greatest version of whatever platform or software that is out there. It’s the same reason I don’t jailbreak my phone or hack my consoles anymore. Sometimes it’s nice to just buy a thing that works out of the box and use it as its intended.
What about the remote?
Flirc has a great remote if you go with the above called the skip.
I used Kodi for almost a decade and switched to firetv because add-ons were breaking constantly. Netflix worked maybe 20% of the time.
Chromecast with stremio is still the perfect streaming setup for me, now if only the voice recognition on the remote was a bit less shit.
Chromecast with stremio
Just so that people are aware, from stremio’s privacy policy…
The analytics technology we use is Google Analytics. To learn more about Google Analytics and your privacy, visit https://www.google.com/analytics/learn/privacy.html. To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics you can use various browser addons such as https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout or https://www.ghostery.com/ .
If only it didn’t require me to buy a newer iPhone or iPad to validate my account.
Pretty sure you don’t need one. I’ll look into it later tonight and get back to you though
Edit: tried resetting my Apple TV with a throw away account not linked to other Apple devices. Worked fine
In order to update my Apple TV, they tell me I have to have a newer phone.
Similar to: https://www.reddit.com/r/appletv/comments/ys4z35/apple_tv_is_now_unusable_without_an_iphone/
Now you can use it, but guess what is required for future app updates? Later OS updates. It’s a trap.
I don’t know how to fix your problem but I am curious about it.
I assume you have an old iPhone tied to your iCloud account. What happens if you untie that phone and wait like a day (some iCloud stuff is weird and can take about 24 hours to update server side info)
You can enter the credentials manually. I just did it few weeks ago.
Are you the OP in that post? This screen comes up when you add an Apple ID. I recently signed out of my Apple TV and got the same screen. I used the physical remote and entered my credentials. I didn’t need to use my phone, even though that was an option. Maybe this was an issue with iOS 16 as the post is a year old.
Well that’s destroyed any interest I may have had in them
That information is incorrect.
Agree 100% with this, and I’ve tried most all of them.
My LG TV updated to show ads in the input selection menu. I was pissed for a few months until someone showed me you can disable them in the settings. Maybe you can disable them on yours?
You switched from a system that is currently shitty (Fire TV) but easily replaceable (just an HDMI addon) to a system that is currently less shitty (LG TV) but now you are firmly locked in into the LG eco system.
As bad as FireTV currently is, at least you can easily ditch it. Just pull the plug and buy another brand of TV stick.
If you keep relying on your smart TV apps then you will have to endure the slow shittyfication for years to come.
What setting disables the current ones?
Currently using a Roku Streambar for all of our streaming needs but if they pull this crap, everything we consume will be downloaded, served on my Plex server and streamed using the gaming PC I have under our TV.
Getting beyond sick of these companies using every measure and device they can to shit ads into our eyes.
My Roku is pie holed, I don’t Even get the main screen ads anymore.
as soon as services and sites start doing the same thing yt does… delivering ads via the same servers and hostnames as the content… pihole and other dns-based solutions lose their effectiveness.
Oh I have my own content. I’ve also been doing this since we were recording off air broadcast TV breaking out commercials from a live stream is nothing but an inconvenience.
i just uncovered a box with over 100 vhs tapes from the days before i switched to pc-based recording. that’ll be a future project after i get done with de-duplicating and consolidating the files i already have.
Coming back from VHS is a bit painful, I’ve done quite a lot of it at this point. (I think I’m up to a few hundred tapes)
I used to use TiVo to record broadcast and cable, export as MPEG, strip the commercials and then turn that into DivX. There are options out there to automatically strip commercials they’re ‘mostly’ good and work way better with digital sources.
The problem with VHS is another layer of substantial loss. If someone recorded it as SLP (and that’s pretty much what we all did back in the day) you’re going to spend a very long time with AI video denoising to get something even remotely watchable. Analog CRT hid so many video sins.
Topaz Labs video AI does a reasonably good job under certain circumstances. When you go to rip your content don’t just rip it all and then worry about it later. Rip a couple of things and then mess with them until you’re happy enough with the results to continue.
Generally speaking the stuff you start with needs to be kind of watchable If you expect it to turn out into something truly watchable. AI is good at cleaning up artifacts in a little snowy grain and straightening out fuzzy edges. But if your source material is coming out as utter disappointment it’s not going to fix it.
Oh, that’s great to hear. I have a pi hole ready to set up, but I’m waiting on a card reader to come in the mail so I can finish it, but I was curious in how effective it would be.
I run a Piehole and don’t see any of the ads on my Fire TVs.
It’s that or because I’m still running the old gen2 firetv box that’s way out of OS support…
Did you order it on Amazon?
Naw, newegg
Noice!
Broke: PiHole and a Roku
Woke: PiHole and a regular-ass computer that doesn’t need to be PiHole just to not see ads they’re not even expensive and and can do EVERYTHING why would anyone use a Roku or Amazon stick this run on sentence does not understand
The run on nature of that sentence is unfortunately the least of its transgressions.
That said, I don’t have space or power in the location where my TV is located for anything larger than a Nintendo switch dock. It needs to be silent, low profile, low power.
Roku gives me all that plus it’s 60 frames UHD and HDR. It’s about the size of a slice of bread and capable of decoding most of the things I throw at it, unfortunately It’s a bit picky about 4K streams.
My grown ass PC is in the basement in a rack, It has a 2070 in it but it’s old enough that it can’t quite keep up with 4K live encoding.
So now to be woke I need a real, silent PC to fit in a tiny space. Then I still have to deal with some kind of remote. Most of the options out there honestly don’t look great.
edit: ur rong
Idk man my fam isn’t mad rich yet we have computers on every screen it’s not expensive or difficult app run on sentence also a fucking Roku isn’t doing 60FPS you need SVP for that nothing is recorded in 60 the hobbit shitty trilogy was 48 and people were like “aaaaa soap opera” shit like what the fuck no
Edot4: IS IT BETTER THAN AMAZON AD SERVER?
a: yee anything is, your Roku is trash
Do you know what you had to block to stop the Roku ads?
It came free with one of the standardized block lists. Let me go see what my pi hole is blocking.
I can’t tell exactly what it’s nixing without rebooting it and there’s somebody watching it right now.
Here are the obvious candidates from the Stephen Black block list
Interesting. I’m using nextdns on my router, I had manually blocked ads.roku.com and now have the Stephen Black block list enabled too but I’m still getting ads.
Now that I look through my nextdns logs, I don’t see my roku at all so something seems to be up with my config. Thanks for the help!
If you can’t get it straightened out Hit me up again here and I’ll restart my Roku and see if I can figure out what else it’s hitting
Its sad so many people seem to lack pattern recognition and don’t appreciate that Plex is no different than any of these companies, they’re just not as far along on the enshitification cycle.
They’re for-profit, providing a “free” service. They will fuck you and the platform. It’s not an if, it’s a when. They’re already moving in that direction. They’ve made many decisions in recent years that are very obviously stepped in trying warp the product into something more profitable. That will not stop, it only gets worse.
Why not get started on the move to Jellyfin now? You will have to in a few years to avoid bullshit, I promise you.
That’s this weekends project, moving to Jellyfin with all the discover together fuckery they’re pulling. Fuck Plex.
What OS are you using for the gaming pc under your TV? Wanted to do something alike but don’t know what would be the best OS for something like that
The best OS for your HTPC is whatever OS you’re comfortable with
I don’t think Windows 3.1 supports .MP4
As I wrote on the other comment, I was looking for something easy and fast to use even if I’m on the couch. Something that i could set to almost look like a smart tv but that could also work with steam link/moonlight. So honestly I’m comfortable with windows but don’t think it would be the best OS to use for my case
Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 4 is pretty good, and you can run moonlight from within Kodi. Of course, you have to find a reasonably priced Pi…
EDIT: Also, I use this setup in a spare room, but use an Apple TV in my living room for identical purposes. Though I use Infuse and the actual Steam remote play application.
OH! I didn’t know i could use moonlight from within Kodi! Thanks!
i mostly use windows on the tv, an old laptop and a wireless kb/trackpad. runs cool, even with the lid closed all the time. reliably wakes up outputting to the external ‘monitor’ as long as it hasn’t ‘lost’ its connection to the tv (can’t unplug that input temporarily for another device–would have to flip open the laptop lid later to re-enable the external-only setting), and it’s new enough (skylake) to have decoding in hardware for the formats i’ve been using.
the other hdmi is a linux sff desktop set up similarly, but i haven’t got all the kinks worked out yet.
use firefox (with addons and some userscripts|styles) for online sites, and usb externals or lan connection for ‘saved’ content. shortcuts on the desktop (to web sites, playlists, lan shares) function as the ‘home screen’ or ‘launch’ page.
i do have the tv ‘online’ atm, though, because a lot of pluto ‘live’ tv get watched here, and the tv ‘app’ is faster and more reliable than their web site. the remote has a hotkey for it, too, which goes directly to the last ‘channel’ it was on.
Thanks for the thorough explanation! So you just use windows on the old laptop, no Kodi or anything else?
yup. just windows (or linux) desktop applications and networking. i don’t need a ‘10-foot’ ui; and don’t (atm, anyway) need the remote streaming capabilities or other features of a jellyfin or plex.
the keyboard i have is an original logitech k400. it’s really the piece that makes my setup usable, otherwise i’d have a full-sized separate kb and mouse sitting on the ‘coffee table’ (it’s really just a low-standing tv shelf on wheels) instead.
Yeah that’s a nice keyboard, maybe i’ll think about it because it seems really useful and compact at the same time! Thank you again for everything :)
My HTPC is on windows 11, set to auto log-in and launch steam big picture. Disabled as much of the Microsoft BS as I can, including the nags to use Onedrive or sub to Office 365 every major update.
Using Unified Remote to control things with my phone and also Parsec/Moonlight for game streaming to other devices.
My media is served from my Unraid server to my devices both locally and remotely.
All working well so far. 👍
I think I can try your setup ! Thank you very much :)
I can’t believe there isn’t a good HTPC OS that can handle launching Netflix, prime, plex, whatever.
I haven’t used Kodi in a few year but at least then Kodi and the big apps didn’t play well together.
awesome! i love unskippable ads! especially when i pay monthly to even use the service! bezos always getting W’s!!!
No end to the greed of these corporations.
You can skip them. It’s more like a screen saver than anything.
Didn’t know they made CRTs that support a FireTV stick.
Well, you get what you pay for. It’s very cheap for a reason: you are the product.
I got an Apple TV in 2018 and it’s still working perfectly. Yes, it was expensive, but it has no ads, it’s still fast and responsive, and it still gets updates.
Ditto, I caved and got an Apple TV around 2020 after getting fed up with Android TV OS being complete garbage and constantly crashing. I’m not even an Apple fan, but the user experience was a night and day difference. Siri ended up actually being really useful in a TV remote, no more typing in passwords manually or typing in search bars.
I bought an Apple TV recently for a secondary TV and it’s a real pleasure to use. Also have a Shield Pro in the theater which is getting annoying with ads and silly UX changes. I used to sing the praises of the Shield and encouraged many friends/family to buy it in the past (even over Apple TV). But not anymore.
Sadly that’s mostly a google issue. They can turn a lot of stuff on and off server side. Nvidia would have to build a new Home Screen and I’m not sure they want to do that.
I have an Nvidia Shield and recently learned about alternative launchers to replace the stock android TV launcher and remove all the ads. I just installed ProjectIvy and it’s amazing. Clean and simple and now there are no ads or banners or anything. Highly recommend it.
I still have one of the Apple TV HDs from 2015 on one tv and it’s still fast compared to the built in smart tv on TVs I got last year. I had 2 more that I upgraded to 4K units last year but gave the HDs away and they’re still being used. They really weren’t expensive for me because directv had launched their streaming service and were giving Apple TVs away when paying for a certain amount of months.
This is the way.
Apple TV is an amazing device and I hope it’ll be even better in 1-2 years. Put an M3 inside the Apple TV and you get a console on PS4 level and a multimedia device.
I really hope Apple will do this.
this is just a smidgen of the first-world’s self-inflicted punishment. very excited to see what happens next.
The day nvidia shield start doing that shit i’m going straight for Kodi in a mini-pc
To late.
Nvidia Shield is getting Auro 3D audio support, full-screen ads
Source: https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1700478955
The simplest solution right now is to uninstall the upgrade to the Google TV Launcher application under the my apps section in settings for the Nvidia Sheild.
At the same time disable automatic updates in the playstore app, this way the specific TV Launcher app won’t update.
Currently this is the app responsible for showing you ads on your homescreen and playing you full screen ads.
My recommendation is to also downgrade your Nvidia Sheild to 8.2.3, here is a excellent guide below.
I recently installed ProjectIvy launcher and I’ve been happy with it so far and there are no ads now.
You can easily change launchers on the Shield, unlike the Fire TV for instance, which actively blocks it, to get rid of the advertising and garbage.
Don’t give them ideas!! But I’ve blocked any update for my shield maybe two years ago, so it’s locked in a older version of Android, it works fine and I hope this doesn’t change 😬
They don’t need me to get that idea. I might block their update too good tip
Don’t forget about the playstore app updates, these should be set to not autoupdate.
Currently the android TV Launcher app is what shows you the ads on the homescreen. You can easily uninstall this apps update if you upgrade it accidentally.
Kodi in a mini-pc
That’s the way to go. You can even use something like a Raspberry Pi running LibreELEC, a very lightweight Linux distro which does nothing more than run Kodi.
I wonder if the pi 5s are up to the task
Even the Pi 4 runs Kodi just fine.
I need something capable of decoding 4K hevc. I want to try to stay away from my server and needing to transcode army’s despecialized edition of starwars
Fair enough. I use an Apple TV and Infuse in my living room on my main TV, so I didn’t even think about how the 4 needed to have things transcoded for it. Infuse natively decodes almost everything I throw at it. How do Harmy’s despecialized compare to 4k77?
4K77 is kind of like a preservation project. They’re trying to make it look as close to as it did in the original theater. Harmy is more about trying to make modern high-res copy without all the “enhancements”.
They’re both fantastic and they both have their place in the world.
All my screens just have computer hooked up. Even a debloated windows 10 install is better than any other stick solution. I don’t even need to do special rules on my PiHole lawl
Also, can’t find the thing I need? I’ll just pop onto AR, OR, IPT, whatever and get it. Can’t do that on a shitty stick or shield
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This is so annoying. It goes into a full screen ad as soon as you turn it on, so I babysit the remote and navigate to an app as soon as it turns on, in order to avoid ads. It also does this if you let the TV idle, which I also hate. I might just throw it away and go back to hooking up a laptop to the TV instead. I paid $70-ish bucks for this stupid thing.
Edit: I just remembered that you can hack these fire sticks, so i’ll probably try that first.
Isn’t there some consumer protection law against this, I mean this is really invasive and not doing what you expected it to do when you bought it.
We stopped getting consumer protection laws in the 50s when they were deemed communism.
Anything less than allowing every corporation to plunge their tentacles into the inner depths of your anus is 100% communism.
Chromecast 2. Very cheap and no hassle. Just stream from your phone or computer. Virtually every video streaming app I have ever seen is compatible. There’s a remote app you can use on your phone if you want one of those too.
Does that include the Ultra?
No idea, sorry.
Essentially yes, the Chromecast ultra is basically a more powerful Chromecast 2 that supports 4K (maybe other differences too but idk). I’ve stuck with the ultra because the next upgrade is one of the Chromecast “with Google TV”, which while is nice that you can install / side load apps like SmartTubeNext it also means you get a dedicated remote (I hate having more remotes) and it also has a launcher, which I think is more likely to get ads added to it (not sure if it already does by default or not) compared to the older CC2 / CCUltra which just has a “backdrop” photo slideshow and no launcher UI.
These devices were annoying a decade ago. Comical that people still buy these when Roku and Android TV are so much nicer.
I have an nvidia shield (android TV) and it had 3/4 of my screen dedicated to ads. I was able to swap my launcher, but still frustrating
OK what the hell. This is the platform I was considering jumping into. Is nothing sacred anymore? That thing costs a fortune by TV stick standards.
Yep, everything is fucked. You can put kodi on a raspberry pi though I guess
You honestly got me thinking about the viability of throwing android TV on an RP4. I have one that I was going to use for a magic mirror, but I never got around to building it. I’m guessing I could find a remote and an IR module for the RP4, then just load android TV to it? Time to go down the rabbit hole…
I wouldn’t put android TV. Kodi has plex and jellyfin addon and definitely won’t have ads ever, or if it does it’ll quickly be forked
In case anybody sees this, you can use your normal TV remote with a pi
What Android TV device do you recommend?
They all have ads now… But I like our Chromecast with Google TV and our Nvidia Shield TV. Both super easy to use and can side load apps
Xiaomi TV Stick 4k. I got an Amazon Fire TV stick, hated it very much, but luckily for me it malfunctioned after a month, and i managed to get a “refund” that was limited to the amazon store. I spent the money on the xiaomi alternative that came with android tv, as it was about the same price, but you can install (and keep installed) a custom loader without ads, and never have to update anything it if you don’t want it. But be careful, some newer models from xiaomi come with google tv instead, which is probably harder to have control over privacy/ads.
Our household completely ditched all Amazon products and services 4 or so years ago and never looked back. I shop local and on alternative sites for everything, it took a little adjusting at first. I think we have had to buy something from Amazon maybe once or twice in the last 4 years because I we couldn’t get it anywhere else. A few months ago I switched the 1 Amazon product we had owned forever, a Fire Stick to a Roku the first company I had ever used a streaming device from 10-15 years ago, I thought briefly about wiping the Fire Stick and donating it, but decided to toss it with the thought of adding someone else’s user data to the Bezos empire.
Can you still hack the shit out of fire sticks or did they clamp down on that?
