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"Awful": Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen

arstechnica.com

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Re: "Awful": Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen

#31

Post by IPTN »

akurtzhs wrote: post #25
archon wrote: post #7

I switched from the Roku ecosystem to Nvidia Shield about a year ago because of Roku’s increasingly user hostile ad and tracking decisions and have been pretty happy with it. Android TV gives me enough control with a custom launcher that I can prevent ads.

I’ve tried custom launchers but never found anything as good as the Nvidia Shield interface before Google fucked it over with ads.

I really can't recommend this launcher enough:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spocky.pro...

https://github.com/spocky/miproja1/releases/

Re: "Awful": Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen

#33

Post by tweetle_beetle »

lsh0 wrote: post #22

The Vero 4 and Vero V by the OSMC team are amazing: https://osmc.tv They do a terrible job of marketing themselves though, so quite underrated.

Don't all the XBMC/Kodi-likes suffer from having poor support for mainstream content providers. I've looked a few times over the years, and add-ons for Netflix, YouTube, iPlayer, etc. were slow and terrible for discovery. If you knew the exact name of what you wanted to watch they were just about ok, but beyond that they just didn't fit the paradigm of something that was designed for browsing static libraries of content.

Isn't the whole premise of Roku that it does this well with cheap hardware?

Re: "Awful": Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen

#35

Post by kalekold »

archon wrote: post #7

I switched from the Roku ecosystem to Nvidia Shield about a year ago because of Roku’s increasingly user hostile ad and tracking decisions and have been pretty happy with it. Android TV gives me enough control with a custom launcher that I can prevent ads.

The Nvidia Shield is the best thing I've ever bought. I love it. I hope Nvidia make a new one, because i'd buy it immediately.

Re: "Awful": Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen

#37

Post by fxtentacle »

This is what happens when consumer protection government offices get trimmed down to save money. Everyone else got the Trump memo much earlier and already finished making their products a bit more user hostile... Roku is just late to the party.

Re: "Awful": Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen

#38

Post by chuckadams »

Roku has been gradually and constantly adding tiny little annoyances, like adding things to my home screen and changing the wallpaper. Nothing that's been a deal breaker, but the disrespect for my preferences shows, and eventually it'll be something like this that pops up. At which point I guess I'm going back to Apple TV. I want one for a tailscale exit node anyway.

Re: "Awful": Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen

#39

Post by chuckadams »

anon373839 wrote: post #28
boredatoms wrote: post #16

Just buy an Apple TV and move on

Apple TV definitely offers the best “streaming portal” experience. But it’s still kind of janky. For one thing, different streaming apps implement playback controls totally differently - why did Apple not impose a standard interface?? And for another thing, the remote control is just senselessly terrible.

There isn't a device out there with a single unified player UI: the behavior of Netflix, Max, and Prime are all different on every device I've owned. Apple TV is probably as consistent as it's going to get, which is not very. I wasn't a fan of the touchpad remotes, but afaik they got rid of them, the only touchpad left is the iPod-like shuttle control now.

Re: "Awful": Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen

#40

Post by Saris »

Havoc wrote: post #14
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #12

Is AdGuard Home a solution for this, will a Roku still work with DNS ad blocking?

Some TV boxes now have hardcoded dns to prevent this

That can be blocked on your outgoing firewall, or if it's standard DNS on 53 use a NAT rule to force it to your DNS server.
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