Recently got a Google Smart TV for the first time, instead of Roku, and I hate it so much. Roku interestingly I think folded in ads in the most non-obtrusive way (except for the full screen ads which I think were quickly abandoned). But Google Smart TV is a completely intentional bid for sticky integration that fosters Google dependence (google login, google telemetry tracking what you watch inside of other apps, other streamers are google apps), which is not how I want to experience my streaming. It's also slow and sometimes glitchy. I had never had a TV capable of crashing before.
Roku at least felt non-evil or non-evil adjacent in its notional neutrality.
Interesting, I've got a Sony Google TV and it's been the best smart TV experience I've had in a long time. Prior to that was Samsung TVs and a Roku TV (forget which manufacturer) and they all had massive decay in performance over time.
There is a setting on my Google TV (I think it is 'Disable Personalization' or similar) that gets rid of most of the ad-space and turns the home screen into just a list of apps that I actually have installed.
It is easy to sideload apps like SmartTubeNext, and the Plex client works well, so that covers 100% of my needs.
Google and Apple seem like the best competition and they do have streaming services, although Google's is just their bad YouTube tv thing and very ignorable. I'm not sure Amazon is even in the running now.
The Nvidia shield used to be a decent streaming box?
They (ETA nvidia shield) added ads many years ago. Really left a bitter taste in my mouth after paying for an ad-free "premium" device to have them shoved out there.
horsawlarway is correct regarding the nvidia shield. I'm not sure how much is nvidia, and how much is google in the "they". I kinda blame nvidia more than google (if I bought a google device I would expect google ads as part of the purchase), but it's hard for me to say. "they" the people who actually own the streaming device (nvidia shield) I "purchased" updated the software and added a lot of ads.
The ads showed up when the launcher got a major redesign, and the Google TV (or whatever they call it this week) launcher is a Google product. I seem to remember that nVidia delayed shipping the new enshittified version for quite a long time, so I'm pretty confident Google gets the blame here.
I'll also echo my general disappointment with the direction of these devices. A decade ago, they were one of the best streaming devices you could buy.
then a couple years back it was "there's a new discover tab, filled with ads! Don't you love it?"
then it was "not enough people are viewing the discover tab, so we're merging the discover tab with the home tab! Don't you love it?"
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They're still decent hardware for a streaming device (although somewhat dated at this point), but now you have to go out of your way to make the software not shitty.
Removing the stock launcher helps a lot, but requires ADB access. (easy enough, and [insert llm of choice] can both generate a minimal replacement launcher and install it for you for about $10 worth of tokens, so technical users are fine, but I can't really recommend them to non-technical family anymore.)
Are there solid existing launchers that can be swapped in? Changing the launcher is one of the first things I do when I get a new Pixel phone and highly recommend it, but I don't really want to have to maintain a vibe coded one.
I've used Projectivy for years on every Google TV stick I own (Google/Onn). Works perfectly with full customization/zero ads on the free version and has a workaround to take over the Home navigation to bypass the built-in launcher without ADB or rooting. I chip in for the premium version to help out the dev since I get so much value out of it but the freemium features are mostly just cosmetic and the free version has everything you need.
At this point if I'm dealing with that level of hassle I'm much happier running linux on a computer. The value add of these devices was plug and play, and if it's not that why bother.
ADB is rarely actually a requirement unless you really want to do it the "right" way and fully remove the launcher.
I always use a custom launcher (Projectivy) on my Google TV devices, lately typically the $20 Onn stick and intercept the Home navigation to open the launcher either using the option built into Projectivy or with a free app from the Play Store/Fdroid.
Takes <5 minutes to setup everything once and then I basically forget the native Google TV launcher exists. Pretty much unbeatable value for a $20 ad-free Jellyfin/Plex/Kodi/Stremio setup. YMMV with different models but I also had no issues remapping the remote buttons from Netflix/etc to my own apps (including the "Free TV" button to launch Stremio which I always enjoy).
Also (somewhat ironically) the best smart TV OS to look for on cheap/subsidized TVs is built-in Google TV. Since they can easily be configured as 100% "dumb" on startup without any ads/nags/etc (it's the first question you're asked). The TV never hits Wifi to update and the remote/menus just do normal TV stuff without any "smart" features. Otherwise, it's luck of the draw how miserable/impossible the manufacturer makes avoiding Wifi/updates.
(Or you could do the same process installing the custom launcher on the TV's built-in Googe TV, but then you're at the mercy of the CPU/RAM the OEM included in BoM some # of years ago and lose the clean seperation between dumb TV/replaceable stick).
$20 Onn stick + $199 "smart" Google TV in dumb mode goes really far these days for a locally hosted setup without ads/annoyances.
Look into the TiVo Stream 4K. It’s an Android box but has been very reliable for me. Tivo does force some quirks so I used ADB to disable core services and the default launcher has ads so I switched to Projectivy launcher.
You can go to Walmart and buy a streaming box that is a Raspberry pi-sized board with custom Android installed and the package claims it has 700+ channels. But it just is an overlay for pirate streaming sites.
That's the spirit of the age here in America, no? When so many of our leading public figures are hyper-wealthy individuals who are where they're via various sorts of shuffling costs onto others and pocketing profits, is it any surprise when the public seeks to do the same?
It's ultimately utterly destructive, of course. Wish I had a good solution.
Ah, the choice content providers made a few years back that put us all in this situation to begin with - throw constant ads at us for marginal revenue.
Uh, it's a complete false dichotomy? There is literally no reason you need to participate in a botnet to stream content for free.
That's ... not a thing. Those sticks just glom on to free software maintained by other hardworking unpaid devs to steal residential IPs from unsuspecting buyers drawn to the "all-in-one" pitch for their sketchy VPNs and/or botnets. Then, eventually whatever API keys/endpoints they stole for streaming stop working and all you're left with is the botnet part of the deal.
This is like saying the included porn malware you got bundled with uTorrent from the first sponsored link on Google is a price worth paying to access The Pirate Bay and stick it to Netflix, lol.
Why earth would anyone voluntarily advocate for that/defend the malware authors instead of just downloading qBitorrent from Github like a normal person?!
You absolutely don't have to and I'd encourage people not to (I personally advocate for just using a desktop/pc that you have control over to make the experience more palatable. But I disagree with framing that solution as one where the customer is solely involved in making a bad decision. The old version of Roku, and even streaming sites within recent memory, offered a significantly less enshittified product.
The botnet you bring into your home is only an option people are willing to consider because of how poor the UX has gotten. It's disingenuous to frame this situation as a cavalier abrogation of duty at the sole discretion of the selfish consumer. The malware laiden set top box is a terrible solution, but it being even in the realm of consideration is due to how incredibly terrible set top boxes and streaming platforms have become. In the 2010s torrenting was something of an archaic habit done mostly by those with a strong idealogical bent - gone were the days of everyone installing napster or kazaa to have any access to digitized music that they could actually listen to without a binder of CDs.
Excessive enshittification brought on by the selfish actions of corporations is what is bringing these options back to the table for the mainstream. The consumer should be better and shouldn't bring a malware laden box into their home - but the platforms should also be better and offer reasonable pricing for their value and experience.
Or you buy a non-scammy Onn stick for $20-$30 from Walmart instead, install a launcher like Projectivy/ATV Launcher Pro from Play Store (or Aurora/F-Droid), and either choose your streaming app subscriptions ... or remove them all and install Stremio/Kodi/Plex/Jellyfin etc for your own preferred "alternative" streaming sources via Usenet/Debrid/Torrents/etc.
Not really. Apple TV seems to be the closest ive found to not being riddled with ads though. the home screen doesn't have ads at all, the closest which exists is the "top shelf" feature when you hover over the Apple TV app, and that can be turned off in settings. But it has some other issues
I do a lot of my streaming with Apple TV, but the worst parts about the Apple TV app are in my opinion are:
- Too many promos of other shows before watching a show. This is often for shows I've already watched and am watching. Apple knows which shows I watch. It shouldn't need to give me promos for shows I've watched or am actively watching.
- Poor UX for "Play Next Episode" functionality. If I just finished an episode of a show and I click to watch the next episode, I don't need to see the recap of the previous episode or the intro.
- Speaking of intro, when you click to skip, it usually leaves you somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds from the end of the into, not actually after it.
My one gripe is that I sometimes get notifications on my AppleTV that there is an offer for 3 months free of Apple’s streaming service. I didn’t even know the AppleTV had notifications before this. I hope insidious tactics like that end when Tim Cook steps down. While it’s better than full-on ads, like most others have, it still makes the experience feel cheap (in a bad way).
I'm pretty happy with AppleTV except for the walled garden. I want to run Kodi. I do run it via XCode and a dev account but because of the app restrictions it's a 2nd class experience. Looked for alternatives like Jellyfin but the only ones on the app store all appear to spy on what you view.
I'm not totally tracking what you're saying, Jellyfin isn't exactly Kodi, it's more like Plex, and Jellyfin does have an app in beta for AppleTV but the best way (arguably) to experience Jellyfin, Emby or possibly even Plex on any Apple product is the Infuse app.
I’ve been a Plex user since the early days. I currently run it on a Synology NAS in a container, using the Plex app on the AppleTV as my primary client device. I tried setting up a Jellyfin container a few months ago as I’ve been concerned about the direction of Plex. It went poorly.
I have a fairly large library, which Plex never seemed to care about. Jellyfin choked. It took forever to go through it all, and I seem to remember questioning of it was working; it wasn’t clear. Plex on the other hand makes it pretty entertaining to watch covers flip over as the metadata is loaded in to see the progress. Then every app I tried on the AppleTV also seemed to have trouble. The one that worked best had to create its own local cache of everything, which required I spend hours browsing to every screen and waiting before it became reasonably smooth. After that, the layout was still pretty strange. I think it would have worked just as well to point it at a file share. Actually playing videos was hit and miss in every app I tried.
I’m still using Plex. If I need to move to Jellyfin at some point, I feel like I’ll need to build a server with a lot more power than Plex requires. Of course that’s just a theory… a theory that will be expensive to test.
For all the fanfare Jellyfin gets online, I expected it to be better. It made me question how honest the people pushing it are. But maybe they have small libraries or only tested it with 5 movies for the review. I don’t think that’s a real-world experience.
> For all the fanfare Jellyfin gets online, I expected it to be better. It made me question how honest the people pushing it are. But maybe they have small libraries or only tested it with 5 movies for the review. I don’t think that’s a real-world experience.
I don't love crapping on open source software, but I had the same experience recently - installed Jellyfin because I wanted to test hardware-accelerated AV1 transcoding, and the whole app experience felt rough compared to Plex. The UI/UX really needs some TLC.
The software is probably fine for what it is. I mostly meant to crap on those pushing it and claiming it’s better than Plex, when, a least for large libraries, it isn’t. It’s important people have the right expectations going in.
Plex has almost a decade of development on Jellyfin, and Plex itself was born as an OS X fork for XBMC, so it got a big head start from open source itself.
Got a 7-year old QNAP NAS recently and wanted to try Jellyfin. Installed, running, indexing... 6 hours later NAS is no longer reachable. Nothing worked so had to hard reboot. Afterwards the Jellyfin service wouldn't start anymore. Installed Plex (via app store) and 2 weeks later everything is indexed and streams to multiple devices, though I did have to google a few times to fix things related to crashing while transcoding and playing subtitles. It was literally 2 toggles in the UI. The only irksome thing is it doesn't let me play audio files (which could be related to the crappy built-in Plex app on the cheap projector). I also wish there was a way to disable all the (paid) cloud offerings, I want it to be LAN-only.
To be fair, Jellyfin page doesn't list my NAS as being supported, so I had to "manually" install it (a couple commands and clicks).
Jellyfin's worst aspect is the opinionated file structure. You have to set up folders the way it wants, and then the resulting UI browser is what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Pretty sure it's done this way for automated metadata discovery.
Ideally, this would be designed in two parts: separate the file structure from the metadata discovery mechanism.
I personally want a file structure managed by the OS. Let me make folders and nested subfolders to whatever structure I prefer.
Then make the metadata discovery slightly more manual. Click a media file, click a hypothetical "add metadata" button, and then a simple search box with "is this your movie?" and click apply to import metadata from a search result. easy peasy.
The UI is clearly meant to resemble a typical media app but falls short if the end user prefers, for example, foobar2000's UI.
I'm OK with structuring file layouts however it wants. I'm even OK with giving Jellyfin a whole directory tree full of symlinks that are organized exactly how it desires, and then automating its ongoing maintenance.
The thing I'm not OK with about Jellyfin is that the common answer for remote access involves setting up a reverse proxy or a VPN or some other darned thing that I will never be able to talk my mom into configuring her Roku to be able to use.
Yeah that's the Number 1 issue I have with Jellyfin.
It seems to be tolerating whatever semi-organized structure I give it until it just faceplants on some specific show and I have to tediously reorganize the directory structure/names and manual refresh until the metadata lines up correctly.
I like that I don't feel I'm about to be rugpulled on Jellyfin and the client is pretty solid for me but the library scanning is pretty aggravating at times.
I really like the remote. It has mute and volume and like swiping on the top rather than clicking.
I like that it’s aluminum, doesn’t take batteries, and is bluetooth (or at least doesn’t require line of site). It’s the longest lasting of any remote in my house.
You’re probably thinking of earlier versions that were different.
