For those (like me) who bought a TCL tv at a stupidly cheap price on Black Friday, you have options.
buy an AppleTV (even second hand) and don’t connect the tv to the internet. You won’t see any adverts on your Home Screen and be done with all this bullshit. What’s that? What’s the point in buying a £200 TV if you need to buy a £150 accessory? I hear you, read on…
if you’re broke like me, you can disable the stock launcher with adb and install projectivy launcher. I needed to use some software called launcher manager from xdaforums to replace the stock launcher. I also used adb to uninstall the pre-installed apps I had no intention of using.
Hopefully there are enough key words in there for you to google / research what you need to get going. Good luck!
Note about the second bullet: Not all TCL TVs are Google TV, which can be switched to Protectivity - Roku TVs at this point, as far as I know, cannot disable ads if connected to the Internet.
If this is the case for you (I have both in my house), I recommend putting your RokuTV behind a Pi Hole DNS. It will block the TV ad requests at a DNS level while letting content and video go through.
The only problem I found with this is that Roku knows it’s being blocked so it’ll kill some apps over time (like the Plex app) in a way that forces you to fully reinstall the app. Which means unblocking their domain and allowing them to phone home (or disabling/bypassing pihole), because the app downloads go through that domain as well.
Before I just factory reset them and denied them any internet at all, Plex would break and need to be reinstalled about every 2 months like clockwork, and it wasn’t due to app updates or anything. I know this because I did a test once; reset on one tv, and 2 weeks later on another one. The first called for an update at roughly the 2 month mark, and the other exactly two weeks later. Meanwhile an absolutely ancient Samsung tv still has a copy of the Plex app that hasn’t been updated in like 5 years (it’s a fully obsolete tv)… works fine.
My speculation is that it records the data for that period, and then breaks things you use so it can phone home when you are forced to connect it to fix it.
Yeah, this is the answer. My wife does a lot of arduino/pi stuff so this is on our to-do list, but we just can’t find the time (building in cushion for inevitable network and setup troubleshooting).
You can spin the pinhole up in a docker image and have it run as a secondary DNS server. The rest of your network can use the existing DNS and only point the TV at the pi. If you sit down to watch something and it requires tweaking, just flick back to regular DNS :)
I remember when the Google launcher just worked fine. Suddenly, one update later, there’s now ads for shows on services I don’t even use taking up the entire top 2/3rds of the home screen. WTF google.
Not the OP, but connect a computer to it and set it to turn on to the last input. I’ve had one for a year and can’t even remember what their interface looks like.
For those (like me) who bought a TCL tv at a stupidly cheap price on Black Friday, you have options.
Hopefully there are enough key words in there for you to google / research what you need to get going. Good luck!
Note about the second bullet: Not all TCL TVs are Google TV, which can be switched to Protectivity - Roku TVs at this point, as far as I know, cannot disable ads if connected to the Internet.
If this is the case for you (I have both in my house), I recommend putting your RokuTV behind a Pi Hole DNS. It will block the TV ad requests at a DNS level while letting content and video go through.
The only problem I found with this is that Roku knows it’s being blocked so it’ll kill some apps over time (like the Plex app) in a way that forces you to fully reinstall the app. Which means unblocking their domain and allowing them to phone home (or disabling/bypassing pihole), because the app downloads go through that domain as well.
Before I just factory reset them and denied them any internet at all, Plex would break and need to be reinstalled about every 2 months like clockwork, and it wasn’t due to app updates or anything. I know this because I did a test once; reset on one tv, and 2 weeks later on another one. The first called for an update at roughly the 2 month mark, and the other exactly two weeks later. Meanwhile an absolutely ancient Samsung tv still has a copy of the Plex app that hasn’t been updated in like 5 years (it’s a fully obsolete tv)… works fine.
My speculation is that it records the data for that period, and then breaks things you use so it can phone home when you are forced to connect it to fix it.
Yeah, this is the answer. My wife does a lot of arduino/pi stuff so this is on our to-do list, but we just can’t find the time (building in cushion for inevitable network and setup troubleshooting).
You can spin the pinhole up in a docker image and have it run as a secondary DNS server. The rest of your network can use the existing DNS and only point the TV at the pi. If you sit down to watch something and it requires tweaking, just flick back to regular DNS :)
I recommend to replace the default launcher on every Android TV, replaced the default Google Launcher on my Sony TV and it feels faster and has no ads
I remember when the Google launcher just worked fine. Suddenly, one update later, there’s now ads for shows on services I don’t even use taking up the entire top 2/3rds of the home screen. WTF google.
You got any recommendations for an lg webos tv?
Not the OP, but connect a computer to it and set it to turn on to the last input. I’ve had one for a year and can’t even remember what their interface looks like.
Dope thanks
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