My dog tore up the remote so we were forced to use the roku app to control the tv.
They’re showing ads on the remote app. It feels like we can never escape this dystopian hellacape.
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the screenshot appears to be from an iphone
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Enshittification marches on
RoMote (Turns your Android Device into a control center for Roku)
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/wseemann.media.romote/
This is not new
Are you on Android?
If so: RoMote is pretty good. Here’s the releases page for the APK. It’s also F-Droid.
Force your dog to watch ads as a punishment
What Ads? I don’t have Ads in the interface nor in the app. Okay the reason could be my openwrt router is set up with Stubby DoT and blocklists from AdguardHome.
Roku to me has always seemed like a bogged down, spammy platform. I’ve always been surprised at how often it gets recommended in cord cutting and self hosting sort of forums.
I have a fire stick and a roku device. The Firestick is a slow, ad ridden POS, the Roku UI is much more straightforward forward to me.
Every Roku thing I’ve used was slow and had a bad remote and UI and I recall seeing ads of some kind in at least some of them.
Are you using the actual official remote app? It looks different from mine and doesn’t have the “featured” tab shown
Yeah, they updated it. Just opened my app and it has the Featured section.
Damn, thanks I just turned off auto update for it so I can stay on this version as long as possible lmao 😂
Apparently, they also worsened the UI
Could be A/B testing that Roku is doing.
I recently stopped using my firestick. Even though I only used it for Jellyfin, the ads on the home screen were too much for me. So I swapped it out for a Raspberry Pi with LibreElec as the OS, and there have been literally no downsides.
Does Jellyfin save your watched history using that set-up? That’s my main hangup to using Kodi.
Yes, Jellyfin’s Kodi add-on sends watch info back to Jellyfin which keeps track of the watch history. Just remember to install the Kodi Sync Queue add-on in Jellyfin too.
How much it cost?
It was a Raspberry Pi 4 model B. I got it for $60 and a 25ft Ethernet cable for $10 on Amazon just because I had a gift card. You can probably find it somewhere else for cheaper. You also need a small micro SD card for the Pi. Maybe only 8 or 16 gigs because it doesn’t store the media locally.
I would love to give this a try. Did you follow any guides? Which Pi?
Pi 4B with 4 gigs of RAM. You might be able to get away with 2gigs because of how well it runs for me, but idk. I didn’t follow any guides for setting up the Pi or LibreElec. It’s honestly super intuitive. Like I said, everything is set up through the GUI. The only slightly technical part is flashing the LibreElec image to the SD card, and even that is super easy. I did follow the Jellyfin documentation for setting up my Jellyfin server, but that’s a whole other thing.
Pardon what might be an obvious question, but can you watch paid services using this set up? (Netflix/HBO/prime etc)
Not easily. There are a few 3rd-party add-ons by random people which technically allow you to watch these services if you enter your account details, but the UI is generally just a list of movie and show titles with no or small thumbnails and no other info. It’s worth doing this if you already have your own media server but not really otherwise.
Jellyfin is for watching locally stored media so no. Why would you want to even use those
Because family or friends are always going to have them and share with you. In terms of effort, it’s still a lot easier to use free-to-you streaming services (even with ads) than set up your own Jellyfin, Radarr, Sonarr, and Jellyseerr stack. I can definitely see the appeal of a streaming stick that let’s you do that, is fast, and isn’t riddled with ads on the home screen. Hell, I might’ve paid for one if I knew it existed and had less free time.
What kind of Pi? Can you watch UHD without issues on it?
Pi 4B with 4 gigs of RAM. And yes! I was surprised, but it had absolutely no trouble with playing 4k, especially after using a wired connection.
I was thinking about moving pihole off onto a docker container, and converting my pi to a streaming box. Thanks for posting this.
Yeah I think an RPi is the best streaming box setup going forward unless you want to go ham and run an actual Mac Mini or PC.
The Apple TV is decent and runs well and doesn’t hit you with ads, but they’re a bit pricey, they’re in the Apple ecosystem (could be a pro or con) and doesn’t support as many apps.
The Nvidia shield is starting to cram in ads so that’s a non starter as far as I’m concerned, especially for the price. The Amazon stuff is Amazon and is getting more aggressive with ads. Roku is getting worse every year and all their devices I’ve used sucked. Etc, etc.
Every one of these made-for-purpose streaming sticks/boxes/etc are all gonna go down in enshittification flames. Mark my words.
Edit: come to think of it, I’d say it’s a safe bet that corporate America/etc is coming for any digital device or platform or service that feels nonabrasive and like a good value for the money/investment of your time. They’re gonna make it more annoying, more ad filled, more data harvesting, and more privacy invading until they can’t anymore.
Gross.
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To be fair the physical remote has had ads in it since the beginning.
I’m not getting this, at least not yet.
Maybe it’s because I run Pi-hole; I know it filters out a TON of Roku’s telemetry and other traffic. Might be worth setting up Pi-hole on your network and see if stuff like that goes away?
How did you set your roku to use your pihole? I have no router access so i have to change each client’s dns. Roku doesnt allow changing their dns
He probably had router access.
It requires your pihole to act as DHCP server as well. From what I can tell, Roku is hard-coded to use whatever address is handed out. It’s easily responsible for 60% of the blocked domains on my pihole.
If you don’t have admin access to the ISP router, your only recourse is to put a consumer router behind it (You’d just hook up the consumer router’s internet port to one of the LAN ports on the ISP router) and connect all of your devices to that. That way you can disable the DHCP server on the router and enable it on the pihole.
Can’t you just tell your current dhcp to use the pihole as dns? That’s how I set it up.
My router, (a TP-Link, can’t remember the exact model) will still list itself in the list of nameservers even if I just specify the pihole. Since I can’t seem to find anywhere in the router’s interface to turn that behavior off, I’ve resorted to using the pihole as DHCP as well.
But yeah, usually you can just use whatever DHCP server you have already
Use RoMote Roku remote: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/wseemann.media.romote/
I was sent down a rabbit hole of iOS roku apps. Fuck the iOS ecosystem dude, I am not paying $20 a year subscription for a remote app.
I did find a decent one for free, no ads (i have a pihole so it may show ads for people, idk yet) and only asks for donations from time to time. I had to scroll a bit far to find it
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rocky-roku-remote-control/id1598795880
Probably the biggest shock to getting a Mac for work is how all the basic QoL apps want $20+ a year subscriptions. I’m not paying a subscription to reverse my scrollwheel for my mouse.
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There’s an ad on that page
Oof. My pihole adblocker caught that. I’ll delete these comments
Thank you!
You bet! I use it all the time, plus you can enter channels, which for the life of me, I cannot understand why Roku never allowed a long press on their reomte in order to enter a channel number with the arrows. 🎶Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb!🎶
Although, theoretically if a FOSS Android app can act as a remote, could there also be a way to self-host a Roku remote? 🤔
There’s code you can download from github that would let you control your Roku device from terminal on a PC. I’ve used it to facilitate the design of my own Roku GUI applications. I think there might also be a TUI you can install. A lot of this is going to be easier on Linux, if that’s something you’re familiar with.
Yes! (arch user btw) Github link?
Well in that case, you could look into Plasma Big screen, which you could control from your phone with KDE Connect
https://github.com/jcarbaugh/python-roku <- for a python code API
https://github.com/benthetechguy/controku <- also comes as an AUR package
I’ve used the first one. Never used the second, but I just happen to know about it.
Oh that’s cool! Unfortunately I am on iOS.
Hopefully sideloading becomes a thing for iOS users. Used to have an iPhone, can’t say I miss it.