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.
How are you going to self-host streaming hardware? A HTPC for every TV in the house along with a mouse and keyboard?
I was already thinking of upgrading my old Roku to a $20 Onn (Walmart brand) Google TV box (which I’m told is hackable), but this will only accelerate that decision.
I have one of these on every TV in my house and they’re great!
yes they are. you can put lineage and degoogle these
Small SBCs and keyboard/remote combos. That’s what we do.
No need for HTPC, just a small USB device with HDMI output and DLNA support. You use your phone as a DLNA controller, a server running Jellyfin as DLNA provider, and the device attached to the TV as DLNA renderer. And sometimes TVs have DLNA support built-in (my Toshiba does).
On Android there’s an amazing app called BubbleUPnP that can source media from a wide variety of places, make playlists, and cast to DLNA devices as well as proprietary protocols like Chromecast.
It works but it isn’t family friendly.
Jellyfin supports DLNA too, if you have a DLNA rendering device on the network it will just appear in the cast menu. Or if you want something that works with a remote directly on the TV you can install Kodi. There’s really no point nowadays in getting tied up into proprietary stuff.
Use Android TV with an alternate launcher like FLaunchee
Yes I have a thinclient attached to my TV running linux mint