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!
Gentle reminder Apple does actually take steps to protect you from tracking, the premium you pay comes with some protection from their need to sell you out.
It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternates by far.
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.
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 :)
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!
Gentle reminder Apple does actually take steps to protect you from tracking, the premium you pay comes with some protection from their need to sell you out.
It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternates by far.
1/1 mobile / OS security experts agree
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.
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 :)
No way, that is so smart. I’ll have to look for a guide.