I just finished setting up a custom router with dns ad blocking. Next comes a media player so I can purge this smart TV filth from my household.
Huge shout out to Louis Rossmann and the FUTO communuty contributors, check out the wiki on self-hosted software if you haven’t already.
A cheap computer/laptop. HDMI cable. Ublock origin (sprinkle some sponserblock and privacy badger in there). A TV that is never connected to the internet. Voila. No ads. None. Zilch. Zero. Ad free.
Streaming platforms that have gone to ad supported formats make me laugh because it’s just a 3-5 second black screen, not the ad, and it’s back to the content. Been doing it for decades. Don’t sit there and get reamed by their bullshit.
What do we do when they come with 5G modems built in?
Don’t buy a TV anymore. Seriously though with the direction things have been going in the “tech world” for the last couple years (maybe even decade) it is probably better to start adjusting to some level of digital minimalism. For some of us it will become a necessity for financial reasons anyway…
hah, there’s nowhere near enough infrastructure to handle that.
Razor blade to specific pcb traces?
Detailed instructions for things like this will need to documented. It starts with ads… does it evolve into 1984? Who knows, but it seems more likely in light of recent events.
I agree. I could see manufacturers add anti tamper features that could brick the device if opened if people started doing this anyway.
That’s unlikely, the additional R&D cost probably won’t weigh up to the costs incurred by the small minority that removes it.
AFAIK this will only get you 720p to 1080p depending on the streaming service. No 4K, no HDR.
It’ll be 4k if you install the windows app for the service or watch in Edge.
HDMI 2.1 can support 4k. Find a ship that doesn’t sink. Voila. No ads. Zilch. Zero. Nada. No HDR? Better than a single second of an ad.
Buy a smart TV box like Apple TV or Nvidia Shield. You can get full quality streaming with some ads but not nearly as bad as the software that’s built into some of these TVs.
I know, I was just letting people know that this guys solution comes with downsides.
Plenty of 4k with HDR on Real Debrid. Or even better quality and bitrate ripped from BRs, in the open waters.
It will be a dark day indeed when I allow my TV to connect to the internet. These things are glorified monitors.
You’re right, we should start putting ads on all monitors
Somewhere, an ad exec just stiff.
I bought a new TV last year after my Hisense kicked the bucket and had a similar experience.
Not sure if it applies to your situation, but I just factory reset my TV, never enabled wifi, and hooked up a smart device I had lying around (Nvidia Shield). Now it all works great and if the smart functions upset me I can throw just the smart TV part in the trash and go back to my VCR.
You have to reject smart TVs at the time of purchase, or manufacturers think this shit is okay and will keep escalating until even an Nvidia Shield won’t save you.
Unfortunately options are becoming increasingly limited. My guess is that they’re making more money cramming in ads for people that tolerate it than they are losing money from people who refuse it.
Is American football not merely a vehicle through which advertising can be pumped? You’d think the entire sport had been designed from the ground up for such a purpose.
Four seconds of action, six minutes of commercials….3.6 seconds of action, 47 replays, five minutes of commercials.
P.S. Smart TVs can eat shit and die.
I went to a game for the first time a few years ago. I recall the moment where everyone was sitting around and not doing anything because they were waiting for the commercials to finish. It felt like watching actors drop their characters the moment they step out of the spotlight.
This (and the ridiculous, eye gouging price) is why I’d never go to a UFC event. It’s bad enough when I’m home and I have to go clean the kitchen or fold my laundry for 30 minutes if a fight finishes even slightly early, but having to stand around waiting for ads to finish on a PPV card would turn me into Ted Kaczynski
Where can I pirate the ads instead of paying for your TV service?
It’s come full circle.
Back in the early 00s, I invited my buddy over to watch the super bowl commercials. Neither one of us gave a damn whatsoever about football, put the commercials were always lit.
Most smart TV OS are Cancer doesn’t matter how much you paid for it
LG TVs, at least three one I have, have a pretty good operating system. I’ve never seen an ad (yet)
LG is one of the worst. Only TVs with ROKU are worse for privacy concerns. ROKU, LG and Samsung make Google look good when it comes to invasion of privacy.
I’ve been against the idea of smart TVs from day one. A good panel will easily have a longer life than whatever smart box they shoe horn into TVs now. That’s reason enough to avoid that trap.
Mark my words on this: on top of the privacy invasion Future smart TVs will be designed to slow down to the point of being unusable well before their panels wear out to force upgrades and prevent third party repairs.
This feels like my Philips. It has gotten so damn slow lately. I thought I had partially cleaned the system and yesterday I did a check and removed 25 apps thanks to adb. 25. I could not remove them from the TV setttings. Most of it was co.uk.freeview shit… was it there on my previous cleanup? Doubt. Did I install that? No.
My TV has an even better operating system, Linux, because it’s a display panel with an old laptop connected to it. Imagine seeing advertisements on your television screen, couldn’t be me.
This might depend on the version the OS is. I have an LG that’s been great for years, then it got a ““fresh new look”” that featured a giant banner for “recommendations.”
I had auto-updates off, too. Thankfully, they still had an option to revert to the previous menu - but who knows how long that’d stay an option? It pissed me off enough to finally setup AdGaurd Home on my home server.
Fun Fact: It’s increased my phone’s battery life by ~48 hours (excluding the rare occasion where its being actively used all day).
I’d honestly return it as faulty. Preloaded adware shouldn’t be acceptable.
That is absolute cancer.
I have a Philips GoogleTV. I installed a different app launcher on it, now I don’t get any ads anywhere anymore.
Which one?
I use Projectivy at the moment. Pretty close to stock visually, just without the ads or apps you can’t hide. Enough for me to make it tolerable.
Thanks.
For now I have an androidTV but I guess that whent I have time, it will be HDMI only (androidTV is quite buggy on it) and after that, I will look for a dumbTV
To be fair, the super bowl ads are seen as part of the entertainment by many people and the companies generally do go out of their way to make the funniest or cutest ads of the year. Any other time I would fully agree with you.
This is insane.
USA really is a cyberpunk dystopia.
Yeah. Yeah it is. I was in Times Square recently and had the thought that this was the glitzy permanent neon lighting to go with all the other stuff.
cant one simple adb debloat any droid device? i mean adb list those packages, maybe even backup some and then remove the obvious ones?!
Not if they’re baked into the system. Although that may get into GPL violations, I forget. God knows a device can come with locked firmware though.
i dont know what you mean by baked in really. all services are packages i guess and a quick google search says stuff like that at least exist at some point, e.g.https://github.com/tutyamxx/androidtv-debloat-script
i wish op the best of luck to escape telemetry hell.
Adb is just an interface between computer and phone, the packages it lists may not be every system component, you can add anything in at kernel level, or also just not list it in that interface.
no. smart tvs are not phones.
Between computer and device running Android.
Congratulations! So, how does the TV work with the adblocker set up?
It’s absolutely no different! The TV is doing something weird to get around it, or these ads are just cached from earlier. I’m not sure yet. Good news is that the ad blockers definitely works, we’re getting 96/100 on https://adblock-tester.com/
Check for HTTPS traffic as well as the regular let 53. They could be doing DNS over HTTPS to get around the block, or a static IP for a nameserver.
DNS calls are definitely cached. You’ll have to wait a few days until your TV refreshes DNS entries.
what brand is it? just to know what to avoid
Hisense. Name and shame baby
*with Google’s TV OS
Google TV is the easiest to get rid of ads on. I have a Sony and a Hisense both no ads.
Look up and use the Projectivy Launcher.
You’ll also want to sideload an app that forces the default launcher to Projectivy (can’t recall the name) because they don’t allow changing it through the stock OS. Projectivy tries to use accessibility settings to take over on its own, but it breaks some other features so I don’t use them.
meta-ad-ception
Ads within an ad, about about ads.
