After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
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Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#2Amazon's FireTV experience is pretty bad. Even as someone who pays for Prime, it's hard to escape the "ad carousel" interface when you just want to watch TV.
That being said, I still use mine regularly for one reason; sideloading. You can install YouTube clients with SponsorBlock and ad-skipping built in. You can download Steam's streaming client and connect a controller, or load up Kodi with SFTP streaming from your local network. The quality of third-party apps is so good that I just ignore the FireTV experience as a whole and skip straight to the apps.
Hopefully someone makes/has made a launcher app that bypasses Amazon's stuff. The underlying hardware is perfect for my needs; the first-party software is the crutch.
Edit: prayers answered? https://gitlab.com/flauncher/flauncher
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#3My wife and I bought a Fire TV for a particular use case:
- The hot tub room in the winter
- The outdoor patio in the summer
It was so cheap, we don't mind the ads on the home screen. If it dies from the moisture, we'll just buy another one. The apps are the key anyways, as I use a few totally ad-free apps to stream stuff:
- JellyFin
- VLC
- HDHomeRun (for my antenna on the roof)
PlutoTV is not ad-free, but has so much amazing shit, I don't mind it much.
Meanwhile, the big LG OLED we bought, I have been on a crusade to neuter all the ads without causing issues with downloading apps/updates/streaming. The RootMyTV exploit no longer works:
https://github.com/RootMyTV/RootMyTV.github.io
I have found blocking the IP of the local Akamai peer works for blocking some ads and the OS update check, but at the cost of other things which also use the CDN. It seems to use internal DNS, which complicates things.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#4Well don't worry. You buy a premium "lifestyle tv" like a Samsung Frame, and the moment you connect it to the internet, it too slams every user interface panel full of advertising. This amazon is shit egregious, but par for the course. They're hardly the only ones. TVs are enshittified pretty badly.
Thankfully my Samsung forgot those ads after wiping it to factory defaults. So now it is only connected to the apple tv, and not the rest of the internet. No network at all, never, seems to be the only winning move right now.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#5My wife and I bought a Fire TV for a particular use case: - The hot tub room in the winter - The outdoor patio in the summer It was so cheap, we don't mind the ads on the home screen. If it dies from the moisture, we'll just buy another one. The apps are the key anyways, as I use a few totally ad-free apps to stream stuff: - JellyFin - VLC - HDHomeRun (for my antenna on the roof) PlutoTV is not ad-free, but has so mu…
I love how you think that TV can be throw away when used You're like a Environmental Hero to me.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#6My wife and I bought a Fire TV for a particular use case: - The hot tub room in the winter - The outdoor patio in the summer It was so cheap, we don't mind the ads on the home screen. If it dies from the moisture, we'll just buy another one. The apps are the key anyways, as I use a few totally ad-free apps to stream stuff: - JellyFin - VLC - HDHomeRun (for my antenna on the roof) PlutoTV is not ad-free, but has so mu…
> It seems to use internal DNS, which complicates things.
I have the same TVs I resolved this with my router utilizing a firewall rule that redirects all udp port 53 traffic back to my pihole.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#7The trick is to never give your TV access to the internet and to pair it with an Apple TV. If you buy a TV and it won't even boot or work without an internet connection - return it and get a different one.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#8My wife and I bought a Fire TV for a particular use case: - The hot tub room in the winter - The outdoor patio in the summer It was so cheap, we don't mind the ads on the home screen. If it dies from the moisture, we'll just buy another one. The apps are the key anyways, as I use a few totally ad-free apps to stream stuff: - JellyFin - VLC - HDHomeRun (for my antenna on the roof) PlutoTV is not ad-free, but has so mu…
I love how you think that TV can be throw away when used You're like a Environmental Hero to me.
You'll notice I did not mention what we do with it when done with it.
Point of fact, we use the (many, free) electronics recycling programs available to us in our area.
Thanks for making dumb and uncharitable assumptions.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#9My wife and I bought a Fire TV for a particular use case: - The hot tub room in the winter - The outdoor patio in the summer It was so cheap, we don't mind the ads on the home screen. If it dies from the moisture, we'll just buy another one. The apps are the key anyways, as I use a few totally ad-free apps to stream stuff: - JellyFin - VLC - HDHomeRun (for my antenna on the roof) PlutoTV is not ad-free, but has so mu…
> It seems to use internal DNS, which complicates things. I have the same TVs I resolved this with my router utilizing a firewall rule that redirects all udp port 53 traffic back to my pihole.
See - that would work if our TV was sending out DNS requests. It doesn't though!
Like, it seems like it has its own truly internal DNS resolver, which gets updated I presume via OS updates.
Re: After luring customers with low prices, Amazon stuffs Fire TVs with ads
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It seems to use internal DNS, which complicates things. I have the same TVs I resolved this with my router utilizing a firewall rule that redirects all udp port 53 traffic back to my pihole.
See - that would work if our TV was sending out DNS requests. It doesn't though! Like, it seems like it has its own truly internal DNS resolver, which gets updated I presume via OS updates.
It could be doing dns over https (DoH).