Ive been pretty happy so far with roku and blocking stuff with pihole, but every day I am more and more tempted to build a media pc…
Comment on Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.
DirkMcCallahan@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I pity the poor fool who sets up their smart TV instead of just grabbing an HDMI cable and plugging in their computer.
ChillPill@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
MagicShel@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
This is the way to go. I tried pihole using Samsung smart features, but if you block so the telemetry eventually your apps stop working and you can’t get them working again without doing a factory reset with blocking down. It’s prohibitively a pain in the ass, taking hours every time YouTube stops working.
Never had any issues with Roku on pihole.
henfredemars@infosec.pub 4 weeks ago
I believe one reason maybe that the software is so garbage it can’t handle not being able to submit all its logging information when otherwise the system thinks it’s online.
yggstyle@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
This is the case with Rokus as well. If you also redirect or block the hard coded DNS (Google) from bypassing your local DNS it starts to get extremely sluggish over time… presumably from background processes repeatedly resending requests out.
MagicShel@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
That makes perfect sense and explains why you can’t fix it just by bypassing blocking temporarily and reinstalling the app.
yggstyle@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Depends on your blocklist. It would freak out every so often on me when I was preventing it from bypassing my DNS with its hard coded ones until I added in a forced redirect instead.
yggstyle@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Currently trying that for the same reasons you are tempted. Roku was passable and even a good choice years ago and it’s on a precipitous race to the bottom now.
Problem for me currently is finding a non windows solution that is navigable from a controller or remote is … tough. Steam, emulation station, Kodi all have reasonable interfaces but there seems to be a gap in a unified launcher solution (as well as a decent ‘app’ for accessing YouTube.) I really don’t want to spin up a single VM for each activity when they all in theory should play nice together.
TrenchcoatFullofBats@belfry.rip 4 weeks ago
My solution to this problem is Jellyfin, fed by usenet-backed sonarr/radar and Tubesync to pull in YouTube channel subscriptions. Those are added to a Jellyfin library which is accessible right next to movies and tv shows.
This is all through the Jellyfin app on a 2019 Nvidia Shield Pro. It’s a perfect couch-friendly setup. For just regular YouTube browsing, SmartTube can be installed on the Shield and on your phone. You can then cast to the SmartTube app on the Shield instead of to the YouTube app.
yggstyle@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It seems we have similar backend setups 🏴☠️
I’ll need to dig into an android solution a bit - smarttube seems pretty nice but has no Linux version unfortunately.
lemmy_get_my_coat@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Exactly what I’ve been looking for too, and have come up wanting. I got excited recently about finding KDE Plasma Big Screen, but then it falls at the last hurdle on the app selection.
yggstyle@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
That gave me abandoned vibes when I looked into it. Maybe they just didn’t update anything on their site but I struggled to find any recent info or reviews on it. A shame honestly. I loved the idea.
eatCasserole@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yeh, if I ever see my TV’s OS I’m like “fuck off! HDMI4!”
ripcord@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Ew.
natebluehooves@pawb.social 4 weeks ago
We had a samsung 4k curved tv that has ads on the input menu, and the ad space is filled with a samsung ad if the set has never connected to the internet.
It also harasses you with a pop up about connecting occasionally on startup.
It’s bearable but absurd. We returned it on principle
toynbee@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
That is my preference, but my wife says she prefers only one step (turning on and using the TV) over multiple (turning on the TV, turning on the secondary system and using multiple controllers) so we go with the simpler setup per her request.
I did put my TVs on a Wi-Fi network separate from my main one so, while they do show ads as much as my pihole allows, at least they’re theoretically only spying on each other.
asap@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
With HDMI-CEC you can achieve what your wife wants. I have one remote to turn on my Nvidia Shield (with Plex, Jellyfin, Netflix, etc), and that same remote also controls all TV functions.
cRazi_man@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
That is beyond the capabilities of normies.
My wife would agree with this:
Media PC
And I’ve got Plex running on an always on NAS.
BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
Lmao that greentext was literally me before I finally set up arrstack. One of the best investments of my time, it has definitely paid off over many years of just having things automatically download.
cRazi_man@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
My Arr’s are unreliable. The trackers they search keep becoming unavailable for some reason. Flaresolver doesn’t seem to work with my VPN setup. Sometimes the file it finds to download turns out to be 54GB for a 1080p movie and I can’t figure out what the hell is going on there either. I haven’t got the time to look into Usenet any time soon. If I try to deploy something and it doesn’t work 100% right off the bat then the “wife acceptance factor” drops to zero, so I’ve got to be damn certain before I start tinkering.
This comes off the back of a device on my network causing router issues and making Plex unreliable for a couple of weeks. By the time I diagnosed and fixed the issue, the damage was done and wife acceptance factor was lost.
BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
Man that sucks. I must have gotten lucky or something with my setup. I also have trackers go unavailable all the time but I enabled 8 different ones and usually multiple will have the same torrent so it usually has no problem finding something even if 1 or 2 are down. I also don’t VPN tracker searches, just my BitTorrent client so flaresolverr seems to work fine for me (I only have it enabled for 2 of my trackers since most of the ones I use don’t seem to require it).
If you end up trying it out again I would look into the quality settings and make sure you’re not using the remux quality profile. By default most of the quality profiles seem to limit at 100MB/min, so a 2 hr movie shouldn’t allow anything over like 12GB. Whenever I tweak quality or custom formats I refer to trash guides which has a lot of battle-tested rules you can copy. I have my main profile set to only download qualities between hdtv720 and br1080 with custom formats set to prefer hevc with surround sound since I have 5.1.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
It seems like way more stuff than I want though
BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml 4 weeks ago
I mean yeah, but it also depends on what you want. You don’t have to use the full automation. I started just by using it as a read-only way to see what movies I had and in what qualities and keep things organized. You can use it as a manual interface to do one-off downloads - basically just as an interface to search 5 torrent sites in 1 place. You can use it only to rename files to a consistent format. So there are a lot of ways to use the various features of sonarr/radarr besides automatic downloads. You’re not forced to go all-in and out of the box it doesn’t start automatically downloading until you enable that.
Cl1nk@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
This is the way