we live in hell
I don’t even understand the pitch? you have the disc playing, in your hands, your ownership, no buffering, no subscription required. and they’re saying…hey do you want a worse experience?
we live in hell
I don’t even understand the pitch? you have the disc playing, in your hands, your ownership, no buffering, no subscription required. and they’re saying…hey do you want a worse experience?
See the problem is that you let a display device connect to the internet
Connected a Samsung smart TV to my network when we first got it. The thing damn-near crashed my pi-hole asking for so many ad/tracking domains. Factory reset it later that same day. I think my % of requests blocked went from 15% to 68% in just the 3 hours or so the Smart TV was connected.
They started to wisen up and hard-coded dns requests to 8.8.8.8 to bypass dns ad blockers now. Heck, some apps like Netflix already do it for years now. If your router can transparently redirect all dns requests to your pi-hole, you should use that feature.
So they recognize that the owner of the product is trying to prevent them from collecting data, and actively try to circumvent the owner’s security measures? This shit should be illegal, and carry a huge fine. You paid for the device, and it’s connected to your network, which you control. I’m sick and tired of corporations thinking it’s totally okay to be straight-up spyware and adware. Some supposedly legitimate companies these days make old-school computer viruses look down right respectful.
Not only that, I have the entire Roku domain blocked on my network, and even though there’s no reason for it, as evidenced by the fact that there’s no problem running it for a month, and it doesn’t happen to all TVs, depending when it was last handled, it breaks my Plex app every 30 days in such a way that it needs to be fully reinstalled, which requires unblocking Roku, allowing phone home of the prior month’s data. Old, but not obsolete, app versions should still work fine - have a kodi Plex app that hasn’t been updated in years and that works without issue. So this is absolutely an intentional choice to force users to at least cough up their viewing data, even if they can’t give you their ads. And they can collect a surprising amount of information through those apps.
Took me a couple months to figure out what was happening (by waiting 2 months and doing the reinstall on the same day for all of them and checking the next time one broke, then staggering them the next time) but I’m no longer using the apps and will probably just factory reset all three of them, leave them off the network entirely.
The amount of work they do as a company to make my private experience complete shit because I don’t want them invasively collecting my info and shoving ads down my throat… is absolutely disgusting.
or use the blocking feature of your firewall. Here’s Roku being persistent and ignoring my pihole. Firewalla for the win.
Yep - this. I absolutely abhor “smart” TVs for just this reason.
But, even lack of internet sometimes isn’t enough. I recently, and inadvertently, left the wireless adapter on my TV enabled, after having to temporarily join it to my wireless for a firmware update (digital TV tuning needed updating for my region). After I was done, I cleared the wireless config, but I didn’t think to go into the other menu where you can entirely disable the wireless adapter.
Little did I realise that meant the TV started broadcasting its own SSID, for friggin’ Apple Airplay or some other shit. I found this out when my 9yo daughter was suddenly exposed to some adult content for about 10 seconds. Best guess is a nearby neighbour mistook my TV for theirs.
I’ve obviously disabled the wireless adapter again, but this has been a terribly difficult lesson I’ve had to learn.
For anyone concerned, my daughter is OK. My wife had a good chat with her about it. She had considerably more talking down to do with me - I was ready to start knocking on doors, to have my own chat.
I work in IT at a fitness center and we have TVs in front of the treadmills. They are not enterprise TVs, just standard Samsung TVs. Above the treadmills, we have a conference room. After setting up a conference room with wireless screen sharing, I found that all of the TV’s below show up when trying to cast. Obviously I tried to disable them, but there is no way to do so outside of physically ripping out the antenna. I called support and everything. Why the fuck was that decision made
All new Roku devices do that, even if it’s not a Roku tv. Roku went from one of the best video devices to the worst in one fell swoop. Literally the only good off the shelf device is the Apple TV.
My Roku TV will be in a landfill before I allow it to send 1s and 0s through anything but the HDMI cord
More like everything will be in a landfill before you allow it to send 1s and 0s through anything but the HDMI cord.
I let my Xbox send 1s and 0s through the ethernet cable
How does it stream things/what’s the point of a Roku if it’s not connected to the Internet?
It will still be connected to the Internet via the HDMI cord.
I’m unaware of any widely adopted use of HEC. Certainly none of the modern consoles use HEC, and I don’t think my smart TV is compatible with it either
I feel like I’m explaining how you use a screen without touching it. Is this what it’s like to be old?
You use HDMI. There are ports on the side of the device that allow video input from devices like computers and Xboxes. I use my computer and Xbox to watch Youtube and TV shows.
If you’re asking why I have a smart TV instead of a dumb TV, that’s because we live in 2023 and finding a TV without a wifi adapter is like finding a phone without a blighted notch
Ah, for some reason I thought you were referring to a Roku stick/box, not a smart TV, my mistake 👍.