I got this popup ad on my TV **while watching a DVD**

_number8_@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 1809 points –

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?

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The little asterisk symbol on the screen is leading me to believe it's a Roku.

I have two roku tvs. The day I see this is the day they get disconnected.

You can probably use a pi-hole to block those things.

The amount of Roku stuff my PiHole blocks is asinine. I just recently added a blocklist for smart TVs and it ballooned the query counts like mad.

+1 for PiHole. Worth the ~$40 for the Pi Zero W and accessories alone.

That's because they retry failed connections until they can phone home again. They aren't normally making tens of thousands of requests.

I fucking hate my Roku Tv. One of my roku TV became unusable after software update. Can’t be rolled back. I’m just stuck with a perfectly fine screen and shit software. And yes even connecting another device via HDMI is an issue because the TV restarts randomly for “updates” while watching external sources.

Hrm, that's a pretty good argument for buying a tv and leaving the built in smart features without internet access. Sorry about your issues.

I'd there no way to factory reset it?

I can factory reset but not downgrade the firmware. The newer firmware is too demanding for the crappy chip in the TV.

Shoutout to the PiHole team. Love you guys and the work you do.

I really need to get around to that on my pfsense

No, you can’t. I’m running pihole and have a TCL Roku tv connected via HDMI to an Apple TV, and the ROKU APP RECOGNIZES CONTENT FROM IT and makes the suggestion, overlaying it OVER THE HDMI STREAM.

It’s the worst

You can actually turn that off in the Roku settings. I did when I saw it demanding I watch my content from my PC on their shitty ad bloated sponsors.

I am now realizing it might be more work than it's worth for Roku even though I used to prefer their systems being a bit more stable.

Ew that's approaching dystopian levels of grossness. My tv should not be watching along with me.

You can, but don't forget to also block other outbound DNS connections in your firewall. Lots of "smart" devices are hard coded to use 8.8.8.8 regardless of what DHCP says. Pihole won't stop those, so you have to block it at the firewall.

Or redirect them to the PiHole.

And don’t forget to block/redirect secure DNS on port 853.

Or a private DNS service that allows filtering like nextdns

They put one too many ads on the home screen... then they made them larger...

fuck em. they get nothing now.

blocked their ad servers at the DNS level.

I have an old Roku Express or something similar and love it. It has an RF remote and a very responsive UI. But it is slowly becoming crappier with the infrequent updates.

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