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?
Protip: Do not connect your TV to the Internet.
I ended up giving up and just putting a Linux PC attached to my TV as a media center. I host plex on it.
This is the way (Jellyfin here)
I’m new to all this. Got any recommendations how to learn about Jellyfin?
while often outdated, there are youtube tutorials. you could buy a cheap thinkcentre or set up a virtual machine to try it out.
personally, i run truenas scale with jellyfin as an “app” on my old PC.
So here’s how I’m running things: At the top level it’s a Raspberry pi 5 running raspbian, then everything else (jellyfin, prowlarr, radarr, sonarr, Usenet download software, etc) is a docker container. If that sounds like how you want to do it feel free to message me and I can try to get you on your feet
I’m not who you replied to but I’ve been looking to set up something like this (I have a year old dedicated tower for hosting)
But I don’t know anything about docker, and it seems like a pretty big learn - is it required for the sonarr radarr and overseerr stuff, or just a nice to have thing?
It’s not required it’s just a lot smoother to update and sort things out. I recommend it but you don’t need it.
Fair enough, thanks!
I’m using OMV headless and have zero luck with Docker or Portainer.
Is it going to be easier to set up Docker using Raspbian with a GUI?
I used CLI for setup, the GUI is just for ease of file management and checking libraries. I recommend hotio for super easy images to just fire and forget. Links I hope will help you: https://hotio.dev/containers/jellyfin/ https://wiki.servarr.com/
Step 1. Get docker up and running (Portainer helps with other containers) Step 2. Use prowlarr to set up all the search engines you’ll use on other *arr apps Step 3. Set up your libraries with Jellyfin
You’re wonderful, thank you! I’m going to leave my local OMV PI4 setup alone and when my pi5 arrives, I’ll try this!
Honestly you can just run the app on your computer and tv connected devices. You don’t have to get fancy. I had trouble getting it setup to recognize and remember my library server address at first, but somehow I got it to work. I don’t like the UI though, and just use PLEX instead.
Of use jellyfin, but I have too many friends with only consoles that rely on my server. Sigh
I don’t see how this is giving up though. Been doing this to close to two decades in one form of another and I wouldn’t consider any other way. Except kodi instead of plexus here.
I mean, steam made it work with games, you telling me that 6-7 of these giant media companies can’t get it to work for video? The giving up part is that you have to embrace piracy (again?) to get to acceptable levels of service per dollar
I still watch TV through a Laptop running Windows Media Centre. MS have given up on trying to kill it. The Microsoft remote has seen better days but is still functioning.
Until Plex gets unbearable as well. They have been getting a lot shittier lately.
Other server software are available of course. The concept stays the same though. Very much recommend doing this. I’m halfway there, running Plex on my desktop PC and watching on my TV and other devices at home. Very comfortable setup. But I wish I had a small computer like a Pi or something, and a NAS to hold my drives. That way my desktop PC could rest.
Personally I was a fan of buying something like a Dell optiplex as my my NAS and Pihole but I do wish I had a better enclosure for the drives as any truly good one seems to be hundreds of dollars and mildly defeats the idea of self hosting being cheaper.
I just use an old crappy hand-me-down mid-tower gaming case I stuffed some drives into. As long as you can keep them cool, dusted, and away from vibrations (with HDDs), plenty of (used?)cases will have enough HDD slots to get you started.
Also old rackmount servers on ebay have plenty of slots I hear, but rackmount fans are waaaaay louder.
Room is my main issue. Living in an apartment I can’t have large boxes/computers just standing anywhere. So it has to be very small and quiet. 😅 Pi should be perfect. Maybe mount it underneath my desk where my desktop PC is or something. 👍
Right on, that makes sense!
If you’re not planning on storing absolutely tons of data at first, you can also squeeze a lot into so-called “1 liter PCs”. Traditional platform, a little more power and room than a Pi, and you can neatly tuck them away!
I hear they float around eBay quite readily these days.
Sadly haven’t been hearing the very best things about the Pi 5, but earlier ones can do well as little servers.
I’ve been learning a lot from the self hosted podcast lately haha. Also one of the hosts runs this site (which I happened to find first) that can be pretty helpful!
https://perfectmediaserver.com/
I remember some folks on reddit saying USB isn’t the most reliable connection for long-term drives, but I’m not 100% sure what that was about. Maybe the connectors wear out?
Perhaps someone who knows more can enlighten me.
Best of luck! I hope you have a lot of fun. 😁
There’s always Kodi! You don’t have to update your media server software.
Nah, I’ll just switch to Jellyfin.
They hit my threshold of shittiness some years back and I’ve been enjoying Jellyfin ever since. It’s a much better alternative for most!
Plex is a great example of how proprietary software will inevitably become exploitative, and only purely Free Software systems can ever be trustworthy in the long term.
The shark’s in the tank and they’re putting their waterskis on
I have my Steam Deck attached to my TV. It’s great for watching pirated sports streams via web browser.
I still get Roku recommendations on plex content from my Apple TV. They are doing content recognition off of the hdmi input
I use a dumb tv. Old 1080I tube tv.
Uff between ads and interlaced content?? I’d still try to find a dumb 1080p…
Interlacing only sucks on progressive TVs because they have to interpolate and scale the Missing information causing artifacting, watching interlaced content on an interlaced television is actually unnoticeable from a progressive display in my opinion, perhaps less sharp, but still.
Ok
Unhook your TV from the internet, it does not need the ability to talk to anyone on the planet just to show an HDMI input to you.
or just get a cheap-ass android box (like xiaomi or google)
Honestly, I’m just using a cheap Android TV box with stremio and smart tube. Those two apps pretty much cover everything I’d wanna watch. Those $20 Walmart ones are super easy to root/bootloader unlock too, so you can put lineageOS on it if you want
Protip: destroy your ‘smart’ TV.
Protip: burn your house
Protip: burn down the world
Protip: read Protips
The real protips are always in the comments
^This
Protip: tip the pros
You go ahead and destroy something that cost you hundreds of dollars. Be it a TV or cans of Bud Light, I’m not going to destroy something I already got out of some need for a moral victory.
I hate ‘smart’ TVs. I wish they didn’t exist. But telling someone to destroy the one they already had- meaning that if they want to watch TV, they’ll just have to buy another- doesn’t really make much sense to me.
That sounds actually reasonable, but I’m not taking any advice from a flying squid.
Or, if you must (cringe), use anonymous credentials, have a router level VPN, and maybe even run pihole. But much better to just hook up a PC to your TV and run all of your apps off of that.
What? Am i supposed to watch tv? Hell nah
Just get a cheap PS4 or Xbox and watch all your stuff on there. We have an LG “Smart TV” that just doesn’t need to be connected to the internet because our PS5 (formerly PS4) is fast and snappy, and has all the apps we could want to stream off. Plus, both have a Bluray player installed right off the bat, so we can even watch those if we’re up for it.
Don’t bother with sluggish performance on your Smart TV, it’s just not worth it.
What’s the practical difference between using a console and a smart TV? Aside from this one feature I mean, which I’ve never seen on mine.
The UI is better and not as slow as on smart TVs from what I’ve heard. Plus you can play games on the console and watch DVDs and Blurays if that’s your thing. Apart from that, not much.
This is true, because smart TVs have shitty processors, and consoles do not. Consoles are made for media, smart TVs have shitty embedded software on slow hardware, comparatively.
Sony famously pushed DVDs into the mainstream and won a generation of console wars by building a pretty good DVD player into the PS2 which also happened to cost not much more than most DVD players did at the time
PS2 is STILL my only DVD player. Why fix what ain’t broken?
They also track you less. They still track you, but it isn’t even close to what a smart TV does.
Good point, thanks
Consoles tend to have higher power draw than a lot of simple devices. Depends on how much you care about environmental power savings or power bills.
Who said that? There are lots of streaming devices you can connect to your display, from game consoles to streaming boxes like Apple TV, Nvidia shield, Android box or if you really want to tinker a PC connected to the TV. The point is, don’t connect the TV itself to the internet as it has the most access to the whole viewing experience to drop ads on you.
Why this escapes so many people on Lemmy is beyond me
Exactly. Streaming is so much better than TV. People complain about 5s skippable ads and the pripesed solution is 5 minutes of ads?
Also, so much more convenient than DVDs.
No, the solution is not going back to cable. The solution is the high seas
Aye!
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.
There’s a misconception here. Unless you can control what code is running on it, you are not the owner.
This is what the FSF warned us about.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.
Remember Bonzi Buddy? I bet lil’ purple monke sent less snoop data than big purple roku.
It’s the MOST blocked thing in Pi-Hole on my entire network!
or use the blocking feature of your firewall. Here’s Roku being persistent and ignoring my pihole. Firewalla for the win.
Firewalla’s are great. All the features of pfsense and then some, in a fine little hardware form factor.
Heads up if you have the purple though : they had a bad hardware batch that had a soldering flaw on the lan side nic that would eventually make your upload reduce to KB/s. I replaced far too many waps before I found a thread about it and realized it was the firewall.
Replacement was simple and free, but they should have been more proactive reaching out to purple buyers.
The countries listed there are really peculiar to me (I know that’s not the part of the image you were referring to).
Like obviously U.S. is up top because presumably you live there but either way lots of internet traffic goes in/out of the country even for those that don’t… but I wonder why Germany and France? Russia and China can be sort of assumed I guess a lot of malware spawns from there. Especially China imho even though Russia is on the hot seat rn and it’s common to think of the country when thinking of hackers they just don’t have China’s huge internet/tech infrastructure to send out as much… manure I guess overall, everywhere. Russia seems to try to target malware whereas China just spews it indiscriminately. Feel free to correct if I’m wrong I’m no security expert.
I use ControlD for DNS filtering and I don’t think I can view analytics like that by country? Wish I could though it seems really interesting now what my blocked connections would look like by country/region.
Easy enough to do with NAT unless it uses DNS over https. Then you have to block a lot more than just DNS.
Is DNS over https distinguishable from other https traffic?
In theory, no, but you can always block known DoH dns providers (both their ip address and their domain). It’s pain in the ass though.
I deny all DNS traffic except traffic going to my router IP so my pfBlocker will always work.
There’s always DNS over HTTPS. It’s really hard to nab that shit out if it’s going upstream to the same server that’s hosting the content.
That’s my next project now that I have my pihole set up. My basic ass router from my ISP does not support that though.
Side question: do you know of any openWRT supported routers in the $100-150 range with external antennas? Everything I’ve taken a look at is either an internal antenna, or like $400.
What do you mean with internal/external antenna? Does something like asus rt-ax53u ($85) counts as having external antennas? https://openwrt.org/toh/asus/rt-ax53u
Yeah. That’s perfect. Thanks!
I recall having similar issues with Chrome. Instead of checking in with the pihole, it just went ahead and bypassed it by using a different DNS.
goolag dns
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
Sounds like the next conference you are going to have in that room is with the Supervisor or the CEO about either downgrading that shit and have everything wired instead, or physically ripping out the antenna is going to happen.
Lol it’s a nonprofit, shit ain’t gonna happen
Yeah - I had to dig around in my Samsung to find it. Under Settings | Network | Expert there’s a radio button labelled Wireless. Disabling that turns wireless off completely. Mine’s a 65" Q60A QLED 4K bought in 2021. Same on my Samsung 43" in the bedroom, so seems fairly common across the models, at least in the Q range.
honestly, whoever connected to your TV is probably used to their device being the first one to show up. i would blame the streaming protocol for not requiring one of those one-time pin thingys.
Yeah, that’s absolutely a good point.
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
How does it stream things/what’s the point of a Roku if it’s not connected to the Internet?
roku tv
roku manufacturers 🤓 📺 in addition to streaming devices
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 👍.
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
You can get mini PCs for solo cheap now and just load Linux up on it. Check out Beelink brand. I have a couple and they’ve been great.
Edit: so, not solo
I prefer the Nvidia shield over Apple TV. It supports direct streaming of Dolby Vision/Atmos on Plex. Pretty sure the Apple TV is missing some key codecs.
Infuse fills in the gaps. Don’t even need a plex server anymore (it works better imho)
No, the fault is with the people who make the TV. It’s not the customers fault that other people are evil.
It’s kinda both. Like, if I walk up to someone on the street who says they’re gonna stab me, and I get stabbed, the fault is obviously on them for stabbing me, but at the same time I got exactly what he said I’d get
My TV is connected to the Internet and doesn’t do this. There’s a setting to turn it off.
Mine doesn’t have anything like this and is connected to the internet, no settings to change either. LG Oled
I have an LG OLED too. There’s a setting for recommended content, or something like that. I turned anything off that looked like it meant ads or tracking.
Anytime you see the word “smart” in the name of the product, remember to mentally replace the word “smart” with “tracking”.
“Ad enabled”
Same with IoT
The S in IoT stands for security, and the P stands for privacy.
😂😂😂
This is called Automatic Content Recognition and it can be disabled in the settings, highly recommend doing that. It should have asked you whether you wanted it enabled when you set up the TV, as it’s legally required to be opt-in in the US opposed to opt-out. Since you’re using a Roku Smart TV, it specifically is taking two full resolution “video snapshots” every second.
"To disable ACR on a Roku TV, the privacy policy says to “visit your Roku TV’s Settings menu (Settings > Privacy > Smart TV Experience) and de-select 'Use Info from TV Inputs.”
'Use Info from TV Inputs.”
Well that is an incredibly misleading name that sounds like something I would want to keep enabled.
Since you’re using a Roku Smart TV, it specifically is taking two full resolution “video snapshots” every second.
“Got a data cap? Ha ha, fuck you.” – Roku
I haven’t done any research into what’s actually being transmitted, but I assume ACR feeds the snapshots into an ASIC that does something akin to perceptual hashing, then sends a chain of hashes collected over something like a 2-4sec window to an edge server for matching. So perhaps around 24kbps is actually being transmitted.
Since you’re using a Roku Smart TV
That link also works for other TV brands. Just scroll to the top of the article to find your TV section.
Where I live, it’s usual practice to get the vendor to send a team to your house to do the unboxing and installation of expensive TVs so it’s easier to deal with doa products and whatnot. When the guys came in to set up my LG oled, I watched in horror as they speed ran the setup wizard, checking all the boxes and giving my consent to every single tracking feature without even telling me anything. I had to go back and redo everything once they’d fucked off.
Part of me can’t believe that I’m saying this, but I really hope you filed a complaint just so the installation service provider can be informed that this is an issue and hopefully advise the installers that they should always seek customer input on that kind of thing, it shouldn’t add much time to the installation.
I get that they’re just trying to get it done quickly, but customer service is paramount.
They’re taking pictures of what you’re watching on the screen and sending it to random 3rd party data collectors to analyze and then harass you with ads.
Or just reading the file name on the DVD lol
Sure but this is actually Automatic Content Recognition, specifically Roku’s video ACR that takes snapshots twice a second.
Would it be possible to argue that this is copyright infringement? They’re basically screencapping copyrighted content at a shitty framerate and distributing it over the internet.
Whooops! You accidentally thought that companies have to follow the same rules as civies, silly you!
They’re not distributing it. They’re taking a screenshot, identifying the content, and transmitting hashed and aggregated data. Even if they were transmitting screenshots, they’d be transmitting it to their own systems to be hashed and analyzed, not watched.
You agreed to it when you set up the device. It should be illegal to have incredibly obtuse and impossible to read T&C, they should make it abundantly clear exactly how much of your personal information is being given away, but unfortunately it’s legal to just have a little checkbox that lets you lie about reading them.
No, see my comment to FlyingSquid about how I assume things work under the hood. The only logical design choice I can imagine is that a hash of the content snapshot is being computed locally, and only the hash is transmitted.
to be technically correct, they are not “distributing” it. They are doing the same thing shazam does for music.
Sure, but they do take snaps of the screen and send it to advertisers. Almost all “smart” TVs do this.
Only if the DVD player is built into the tv
And then someone gets the idea to find a way to play a VHS instead and be like “Let’s see you read that, you fucking spying idiots!”
This is why my TV does not have internet access.
And this is why we buy dumb TVs
Dumb tv with the latest panel tech is too much to ask for these days too.
this is one major reason i switched to a projector. The “smart” malware trend has not caught up to home cinema projectors
Almost every TV is a perfectly good dumb TV when it doesn’t know your wifi password.
Seriously… Like just don’t connect it to the Internet? I dont know how it works when you don’t have a PC though, it’s easy for me to say don’t connect it because my PC is what gets the data im watching. Maybe these people only have a smart TV so that they can watch streaming services with it.
Don’t look for TVs, look for PC monitors or industrial displays
Absolutely this. I’m lucky enough to have access to commercial & hospitality displays. Great picture quality and longevity with none of the forced online nonsense.
is there a retailer I can buy gently used ones you know of?
While I agree with you these practices do bring prices down for consumers. I just have the TV off internet and use an AppleTV.
But the prices being so low is exactly what makes people care less about things like privacy, so not great either
Now that is some serious privacy invading.
You like this episode of Futurama. Would you also like to watch this episode of Futurama?
We need a Lemmy community dedicated to find, repair and exchange dumb TV. These are become increasingly rare and increasingly needed.
The comments suggesting the system sends 2 screenshots a second is truly worrying.
It might take 2 screenshots a second, but I suspect that will be hashed in some way, even if just to save their on incoming bandwidth rather than for privacy reasons.
It’s still fucking absolute bullshit though, and has at least told me that anything with Roku written on it is well worth avoiding.
See this shit. They’re fucking proud of it.
Well I guess that explains why my Roku TV is the worst culprit for hammering my pihole… Holy shit.
on my TV
good joke
On your Roku TV go to Settings > Privacy > Select Smart TV Experience and disable “Use Info from TV Inputs”
Crazy but expected it isn’t off by default
Because who would willingly turn that on? Lol
The SMART thing to do is to buy a DUMB TV. Pay a little more and get a real TV- you know. A display, with speakers and HDMI inputs. Nothing else.
