Ugh. Roku was one of the platforms with fewer ads.
- Roku will be adding more ads to the home screens of its devices and TVs in the near future.
- The ads will be interactive and ‘shoppable’ and will cover a range of industries, including restaurants and cars.
- Roku already has a significant amount of ads on its home screen, and it is unclear if users will be able to change their preferences for the new ads.
I just recently started using my Samsung TVs as dumb screens because they’re slow as shit, but a nice side effect is zero ads.
ONN 4k streaming box for $20 at Walmart.
Install a custom launcher.
Install a button remapper for the remote.
Install SmartTubeNext for YouTube (no ads, SponsorBlock).
Install whatever other apps you need (Plex, etc).
FAR better experience. Turn the TV on and it’s ready to go in a few seconds, not the ~60-90 seconds it takes the Tizen nonsense to “warm up.”
It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better. Can recommend, especially for only $20.
Just get started on the move to Jellyfin now.
Seriously, people, use some pattern recognition here. Plex is already on its way down the enshitification pipeline, you’ll be sick of it in a couple years too, just like Roku. Why wait?
Jellyfin is definitely on my radar, and I’d love to make the switch. One thing that’s important to me and my family, however, is the library sharing between accounts. To my knowledge, Jellyfin doesn’t support this.
Just picked up the Onn box and did all that. Also installed RetroArch and so far the SNES era stuff all plays good with my bluetooth controller though there is a slight input lag or i just need to adjust lol.
Bluetooth does have latency issues, but setting your TV to Game mode (if available) will provide extremely noticeable improvement.
Ah at the moment its connected to a 144hz portabble monitor via usbc.
Any guides/links on setting up my Onn box like that? It’s been great for the $20 but removing ads and deeper customization sounds amazing
Directly from the play store, you can install alternative launchers. Some people like FLauncher; I did not. I went with Projectivy. Highly customizable, very clean.
You can also grab a button re-mapper there. I went with tvQuickActions Pro - it’s paid, but quite powerful.
For SmartTubeNext, I followed this guide.
Much appreciated!
SmartTubeNext might be the greatest thing about AndroidTV just for the sponsor block. It’s so amazing.
Your comment inspired me, so I picked one up today for my Roku TV, and I had it running in under an hour! We really don’t know how many ads we’d been seeing until we stop seeing them. I already had a PiHole on my network, but getting SmartTube running is so nice.
I’m glad you’re having a better time with it! Honestly, if you watch any amount of YouTube on your TV, it’s well worth the $20 just for SmartTubeNext. Such a massive improvement to skip all the sponsor, promotion, intro, etc segments.
Thank you! For me, that’s half of it. The other half is removing everything that’s not my subscriptions on the home page so I’m not seeing a bunch of “the algorithm”. And then being able to boot to the subscriptions page too is so nice.