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Comment by soco | Hacker News Reader

What are other good options for smart TVs and/or streaming dongles? Are the offers with WebOS or Tizen able to keep up?

Roku is the best in my experience. I have Samsung, Google (Sony), and Roku devices between my primary home and a rental. The Roku devices are reliable, responsive, and continue to receive updates. In comparison the Samsung UI is laggy though usable.

Google TV is unusable for 10-30s of refresh depending on how long it has been since you’ve used the TV. It’s the worst part of an otherwise high end TV. The multiple user UX is odd across Google products. You can haplessly sign in to your account for YouTube TV on another family member’s Google (TV) account without it bringing up an account switcher. About five minutes into you wondering why your settings are off (or being annoyed because you realized what happened) you get Google’s suggestion to press the right combination of buttons on the remote to do so. Then you switch accounts and sit through the 30s of account refresh. It’s death by a thousand cuts.

Roku is great. It does what you ask. Settings are remembered. The Roku Ultra 4K upscaler produces a great image. I used it to replace the Samsung experience on one of their first Gen OLED TVs that still produces a great image in spite of its slowly failing software stack.

Samsung seems to simply give up on updating the software on the TV at some point. Things start failing over time as services move on past your TV’s software stack. My newer Frame TV is on the newest software stack (for now) and everything works fine in comparison. Probably my biggest annoyance is the laggy UI and that they try really hard to direct you to their free TV channel. You were watching YouTube the last time you watched the TV, but nevermind that. Samsung wants to show you a loud TV show from the 50s on their classic TV channel. Or KPop. Or Hells Kitchen. Not sure why but that is what my Samsung TVs cycle through.

Seems like a good place to ask... do people run explicit firewalls for their Roku devices?

Realize it's cat and mouse with an updatable controlled platform's data exfiltration, but curious if there are any low-maintenance solutions to do some good?

Agree that Rokus are a great solution, but I'm uncomfortable with a one-time-purchase device's long-term revenue priorities.

I have a few Roku devices around. All my IoT devices are relegated to a segmented VLAN. Beyond that DNS is locked down. I block all of the DoH/DoT providers that are commonly used and then run specific DNS block lists for manufacturers. I also leverage NextDNS [0] as it easily allows me to build profiles per use case. I know they also have Roku specific DNS blocking (for telemetry, ads, etc). I had used PiHole in the past but like that I can use NextDNS everywhere all the time much more easily than I can with PiHole. It also provides overrides so I can still resolve internal addresses where I might want to. This helps when using things like Tailscale and not having to rely on another subdomain to think about.

[0] https://www.nextdns.io

Apple TV or your own Kodi box is probably the best in that category. I used to use Apple TV and leave the Smart TV itself off the internet. The family wanted tighter google integration so that eventually went away.

Also remember that if you’re using cloud TV services, you’re just moving the data aggregation/ad network integrations/resale to that service.

I currently use ControlD to adblock my whole network: https://controld.com/ I constantly see Roku ads being blocked every 2 seconds.

Additionally, Roku allows users to disable ads in a secret settings menu: https://lifehacker.com/those-roku-ads-are-just-a-setting-act.... These instructions have worked for me twice in the last week.

One of my TVs has a Roku; I have them plugged into a powerstrip with control/switched outlets, so that power to the Roku gets cut when the TV is turned off.

Despite having no other Apple devices in our household, we've been using and loving AppleTV for years. It really "just works", and keeps getting updates etc.

> Despite having no other Apple devices in our household, we've been using and loving AppleTV

Does that work okay? I would worry that you needed an iOS app to configure it or something. It works as a totally stand-alone device?

Agreed, they actually are great

I believe LG has really good software and their OLED's are amazing. That will be my next purchase when the current TV gets too outdated.

I currently have a Sony one with Android TV that I bought in 2017 and software wise it's unusable. I have Apple TV setup for all the media apps and that works well enough though.

> I believe LG has really good software and their OLED's are amazing.

My flagship LG oled screen has modal ads that are pushed to my screen when it starts up.

The top 2 streaming boxes are AppleTV and NVIDIA Shield. AppleTV will respect your privacy more than the Shield.

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