Client to run Kodi on: MeLE PCG02 Mini PC Stick a.co/d/1EGnekO
If you didn’t want to install LibreELEC to the PC and just want to keep Windows, you could run Kodi in Kiosk mode and it would boot directly to it just like LibreELEC.
I have not watched normal TV in years, let alone an ad on my TV. I spoke to my neighbors one day and figured out they were paying ~$60 a month for all their streaming services, and they’re STILL getting ads…
Stuff like this is unacceptable, and I refuse to partake in the lunacy and delusion that is modern television.
Since he mentions enshittification, I assume he means Plex.
However I am pretty sure both will have some bugs. I use jellyfin, so I can only speak about that. But one annoyance is that the androidTV app sometimes doesn’t have the best subtitle support. However it allows you to open movies in external players, which is a workaround.
I bought a lifetime plex pass once and have no issues since. HW encoding works out of the box, the scanners do their job and I can use their apps on every platform. I had to disable the Plex offered free movies once, the horror. Don’t act like Plex is some Google level shit of annoyance or ‘enshittification’.
Jellyfin on the other hand has atrocious UI that basically screams the absence of any sort of UI designer into your face, the HW encoding is a mess to set up and the apps are a jungle of different 3rd party apps…
Don’t act like Plex is some Google level shit of annoyance or ‘enshittification’.
Close enough for me.
The UI has always been pretty terrible to navigate but when they started trying to push all their streaming services I jumped ship. I don’t respect companies that don’t respect their customers. Jellyfin is better and is constantly improving where Plex is doing the opposite and wants to charge you for the privilege.
The number of people suggesting this shit as a replacement for streaming services is way too damn high.
The monetary cost of the hardware is insane if you want to have any sort of hardware to store your media. But the time investment to get something like this running is 10x more. And at the end of the day it’s all 100% illegal and liable to get you in tons of trouble.
This is the way to go. I tried pihole using Samsung smart features, but if you block the telemetry eventually your apps stop working and you can’t get them working again without doing a factory reset with blocking down. It’s prohibitively a pain in the ass, taking hours every time YouTube stops working.
I believe one reason maybe that the software is so garbage it can’t handle not being able to submit all its logging information when otherwise the system thinks it’s online.
This is the case with Rokus as well. If you also redirect or block the hard coded DNS (Google) from bypassing your local DNS it starts to get extremely sluggish over time… presumably from background processes repeatedly resending requests out.
Depends on your blocklist. It would freak out every so often on me when I was preventing it from bypassing my DNS with its hard coded ones until I added in a forced redirect instead.
Currently trying that for the same reasons you are tempted. Roku was passable and even a good choice years ago and it’s on a precipitous race to the bottom now.
Problem for me currently is finding a non windows solution that is navigable from a controller or remote is … tough. Steam, emulation station, Kodi all have reasonable interfaces but there seems to be a gap in a unified launcher solution (as well as a decent ‘app’ for accessing YouTube.) I really don’t want to spin up a single VM for each activity when they all in theory should play nice together.
Lmao that greentext was literally me before I finally set up arrstack. One of the best investments of my time, it has definitely paid off over many years of just having things automatically download.
My Arr’s are unreliable. The trackers they search keep becoming unavailable for some reason. Flaresolver doesn’t seem to work with my VPN setup. Sometimes the file it finds to download turns out to be 54GB for a 1080p movie and I can’t figure out what the hell is going on there either. I haven’t got the time to look into Usenet any time soon. If I try to deploy something and it doesn’t work 100% right off the bat then the “wife acceptance factor” drops to zero, so I’ve got to be damn certain before I start tinkering.
This comes off the back of a device on my network causing router issues and making Plex unreliable for a couple of weeks. By the time I diagnosed and fixed the issue, the damage was done and wife acceptance factor was lost.
Man that sucks. I must have gotten lucky or something with my setup. I also have trackers go unavailable all the time but I enabled 8 different ones and usually multiple will have the same torrent so it usually has no problem finding something even if 1 or 2 are down. I also don’t VPN tracker searches, just my BitTorrent client so flaresolverr seems to work fine for me (I only have it enabled for 2 of my trackers since most of the ones I use don’t seem to require it).
If you end up trying it out again I would look into the quality settings and make sure you’re not using the remux quality profile (edit: apparently the default 1080p quality profile has the 1080 remux quality enabled so this might have been the problem). By default most of the quality profiles seem to limit at 100MB/min, so a 2 hr movie shouldn’t allow anything over like 12GB. Whenever I tweak quality or custom formats I refer to trash guides which has a lot of battle-tested rules you can copy. I have my main quality profile set to only download qualities between hdtv720 and br1080 (which is just below remux) with custom formats copied from trash guides set to prefer hevc with surround sound since I have 5.1.
You may also want to look into Usenet instead of torrents when you’re researching. Sonarr/Radarr/Readarr etc all work (in my opinion) better with Usenet.
You’ll need to pay some, but the reliability is amazing, which is extremely helpful for the partner acceptance factor. I pay for two providers (newsdemon is primary and eweka is a backup) and two indexers (drunkenslug and nzbfinder), and everything has been rock solid reliable for years. Download speeds are also MUCH faster than torrents.
Combine this setup with overseerr (or jellyseerr) so your partner can find their own things to download and you might be able to get them back on board.
I mean yeah there’s a lot of stuff it does, but you can pick and choose what you want to use it for so it depends on what you would find useful - you don’t have to use the full automation. I started just by using it as a read-only way to see what movies I had and in what qualities and keep things organized. You can use it as a manual interface to do one-off downloads - basically just as an interface to search 5 torrent sites in 1 place where you are still picking exactly what you want it to download. You can use it only to rename files to a consistent format. So there are a lot of ways to use the various features of sonarr/radarr besides automatic downloads. You’re not forced to go all-in and out of the box it doesn’t start automatically downloading until you enable that.
I think it’s a common misconception that if you use sonarr/radarr you have to use download automation and set up trackers but it’s not the case. It’s a useful library organization tool even if you don’t ever have it download anything.
I’m glad to clear it up! It’s a super powerful tool, and I still occasionally skip the automation and just use it for manual searches since it reduces that process to a single click to search all configured torrent sites and a single click to download and have the rest automatically handled.
Before when I was visiting friends and wanted to quickly add something to plex, I used to need remote access to my torrent client and separate remote access to my NAS filesystem to move/rename files when downloads finish which was a really manual process. Now all I need is the reverse-proxied sonarr/radarr UI since it handles moving/copying/renaming on download completion - and while the UI isn’t mobile-first, it’s very usable and feels less error-prone than moving/renaming files remotely using a file explorer app.
That is my preference, but my wife says she prefers only one step (turning on and using the TV) over multiple (turning on the TV, turning on the secondary system and using multiple controllers) so we go with the simpler setup per her request.
I did put my TVs on a Wi-Fi network separate from my main one so, while they do show ads as much as my pihole allows, at least they’re theoretically only spying on each other.
With HDMI-CEC you can achieve what your wife wants. I have one remote to turn on my Nvidia Shield (with Plex, Jellyfin, Netflix, etc), and that same remote also controls all TV functions.
Some of the brands have been reported to not allow you to do anything until it has an internet connection to do its “initial setup” (or some such excuse).
I hope I can find a list of which ones to avoid when I have to eventually replace my old dumb TV.
Pihole on your network… And block Internet access to the TV…
Tho… a while back the wife and I bought a dirt cheap 32 inch TV from bestbuy… it will literally turn itself on to deliver an advertisement if you power it off while in an app. (Skipping the home page)
Pihole crashes it.
We bought it for watching football outside so it’s unplugged for the majority of the year… but that’s still absolutely unacceptable. Imho
But if your display has no digital output, you may need to plug it into the analog output of the computer you’re using to drive the display. That’s not optimal.
Yeah that’s well put. All this advocacy for adblockers and not accepting the awful state of things fall on deaf ears, most people don’t care, they accept the state of things as it is, and technology as magic.
Imo, the larger problem seems to be the majority of users appear to be fine with ads and data collection a lax and ineffective regulation.
“Voting with your wallets” is a false premise dreamed up by corporate to avoid govt regulation and has not and will never be a real thing that works in this world of monopoly and lack of option.
It only works in competition which we don’t have for the most part.
Instead we have the illusion of choice through multiple brand product names. There’s a couple choices, sure, but few enough to function as an effective monopoly.
You can either vote with your wallet or do nothing
I don’t want to fight here, we agree. In fact i bet we agree on a lot. But VWYW is, i can not stress this enough, not a thing. If it ever was in our lifetimes, it ain’t now. Its time the phrase was dropped outta everyone’s mouth.
You can purchase something that thru your effort does not do most of the awful things you are trying to avoid, that’s being a smart customer. It’s not like I’m dismissing the entire idea behind VWYW, just that it is simply that now, it’s an idea that doesn’t work with the facts on the ground.
The power of our “wallet ballots” gets lower when Monopoly power gets higher. Monopoly power is very high. VWYW power is in this world, in this moment, not a thing.
My point, is a simple but strident one. VWYW is not voting! It just isn’t.
It has absolutely no effect on the world around us. Puts no pressure on companies. Is not a thing except in our heads. It is time to let go of the idea.
And yeah…working people like you and me have no power period. “Voting with your wallet” is now simply a power fantasy pushed by capitalists to keep regulations at bay and held by the powerless clinging to an illusion of agency.
I don't agree but you can either vote with your wallet or mindlessly consume.
One is better than the other but yeah 80% of spending is not really discretionary... Gonna need to get a rental, gonna need healthcare, transports education etc
But you can stop drinking soda for example... It ain't much but it is something.
I … think i understand what you’re saying. You don’t agree with my definition of VWYW? I don’t wanna assume, but i think maybe you define it as reckless vs thoughtful spending?
Mine has to do with the effectiveness of our purchases in driving market trends. They do not.
You don’t have to buy a subscription to Netflix, but deciding not to isn’t changing anything for anyone (besides saving you 15 bux).
After nearly three years of price increases, signs that buyers have had enough are starting to mount. On Thursday, the food and beverage giant PepsiCo reported a 0.5 percent decline in revenues in the second quarter in its Frito-Lay snack business from year-ago levels, a result of a 4 percent drop in volumes in the category.
I think maybe we voted with our wallets against $6 chips but you could probably convince me otherwise in a paragraph :)
A quick check online says that Samsung–which has about 25% of the global market–sold at least 1M OLED televisions and 8.3M QLED televisions in 2023. So, let’s say that they sell 9.5M televisions annually (I’m not sure if the numbers are global or US-only); that’s $190M in pure profit from advertising alone. For a billion-dollar plus corporation, that might seem small, but it’s certainly enough to get them to take notice.
That deserves to be its own headline. Something like “consumer electronics companies now conspiring with credit rating companies to surveil the public even more invasively.”
Experian has a program where you connect your bank account and they monitor transactions for things that could improve your credit by a couple points. I’m sure they’re not also harvesting the rest of your data to use in their analytics, right?
It’s even better for them: those $190M are per-year for the lifetime of that TV.
So if for simplification we said they also sold 9.5M TVs in 2021 and again in 2022, in the year of 2024 the will be making $570M from the TVs they sold in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
If Samsung TVs are used in average for 10 years, in 2033 they will still be making money from TVs sold in 2024 and all the years in between. If their rate of sales remains 9.5M per year and how much they generate per quarter in data and advertising revenue from those TVs remains $5 (true, all big simplifications), by 2033 they will be making $1.90 BILLIONS from just this in addition to what they make from selling TVs.
No wonder they’re full in on this monetization of users even whilst making user experience significantly worse - they would need to lose a huge number of sales due to this for it to not be worth it for them.
If a company could pay $5 a customer for a competitive edge in customer satisfaction over their competitors, they would. Either they are getting way more than that or there is some cartel/monopoly action going on in the market. Maybe they are playing the long game to introduce an ad free model at a premium.
Still don’t see how nobody is undercutting existing players with ad free, smart tvs.
In a made up scenario let’s start with a dumb 50"ish TV. That cost them around $100 to build. Add in another $50 for shipping and distribution fees. It’s at the store for $150 cost. If they set the price at $400. There is $250 dollars of profit to share between the store and the manufacturer. The manufactuerer likely gets under $100.
Now for a smart TV the revenue stream looks different. First their costs only go up by a few dollars for adding the “smart” chips. So let’s say $155 cost. Then they collect revenue from the streaming providers to be supported by their smart TV say $30 per set. Then they collect the $20 per set per year in user data collected. So if they price the smart TV the same as the dumb one they generate $95 from the sale of the set.
So the profit from a dumb TV is $100 at he point of sale.
The profit from a smart TV is $225+ in a constant revenue stream over 5 years.
And this is why we see so much advertising for smart TV’s as being the best thing.
That was the sentence that stuck out to me the most in the whole article as well. Incredible how much is lost for so little. I imagine it’s like drug dealers though, maybe $5 for the first seller, then gets chopped up and cut again and sold for less and chopped up again…
My question is, what are the alternatives? Other than finder older TVs without so much junkware and spyware, Are there open OS ROMs that can be loaded? Cracked firmware or debloated ROMs? I was very into Android’s launch 15 years ago and rode a train of options away from terrible stock ROMs from various OEMs; eventually privacy and simplicity becomes a selling point for OS after companies get through enshittifying it.
My question is, what are the alternatives? Other than finder older TVs without so much junkware and spyware, Are there open OS ROMs that can be loaded? Cracked firmware or debloated ROMs? I was very into Android’s launch 15 years ago and rode a train of options away from terrible stock ROMs from various OEMs; eventually privacy and simplicity becomes a selling point for OS after companies get through enshittifying it.
My best purchase in the last couple of years was a 4k Sceptre TV from Walmart. Super cheap, good enough video quality and is dumb, just turns on to 4hdmi ports. That way I can just plug in whatever I want, or get a $30 roku and replace it whenever they update it to the point where it lags on basic menu navigation like my previous tvs.
Next time I have to get a new TV I think I’ll just get a large computer monitor and stream content via an old mini PC with Linux installed on it. Not an ideal solution, but I’m so tired of this invasive bullshit. At least that will cut out some of its vectors.
After the recent Roku TOS fiasco I’m done with them. If manufacturers won’t give us a viable situation we will make one ourselves.
Anyone know a good OS setup for reduced ad streaming? I know about Pi-Holes, but I’m talking about a way of actually streaming content (in addition to blocking ads at our near the router level).
I use my PS5, TBH. I still get ads on Amazon Prime, but I’m not seeing Netflix ads. (I also don’t have Hulu, etc.) I pay for a VPN for my desktop–I’m using Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC–and with Firefox and uBlockOrigin I see pretty minimal ads online; if you’re able to open your streaming service in a browser rather than needing to download their application, then a VPN an uBlockOrigin might be sufficient.