Cord-Cutting, Or How to Stream your Way to Success

Void

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On the topic of Prime ads, that Blokada program sort of works, but it makes it lag a ton, so sometimes the ad would have already finished playing by the time it actually starts the video. And just the login page for Prime takes 15+ seconds now. So not ideal.

I have a Raspberry Pi coming from Amazon today, and what looks like a fantastic video for setting up a Pihole all ready to go, so we'll see how that goes. I figure even just saving the $3 a month for Prime will allow me to pay off the Pi stuff in under two years, and give me other benefits, so now was the time to dive into it.
 
Void

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Slight delay! I didn't realize I would need an SD card reader to put the image onto the card. It mentions it in the tutorial I skimmed, but obviously I wasn't actually doing it at the time so I didn't realize. I sort of just figured you'd do it in the Pi itself via network. Oh well, the reader should be here today, so hopefully nothing prevents me from finishing it this weekend.
 
Void

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Not sure anyone cares, but just to conclude my saga, the Pihole was super easy to set up with the video I watched and actually having an SD card reader. Works perfectly. Except it doesn't block Prime ads. Because I'm an idiot and didn't read further and discover that it can't because they are served directly from Amazon URLs, so if you block those you block all of Prime.

So it doesn't do what I specifically bought it for, but after playing around with it I still feel it is worth having, as seeing the number of things it blocks is kind of eye-opening. For example, Netflix calls home CONSTANTLY from my Nvidia Shield. From reading up on it, it seems that it calls more frequently if it gets no response, so the number of calls is artificially boosted due to that reason, but it still calls home all the time, just not as often.

There are a bunch of other things it blocks that I am happy to have blocked, and once it is set up it basically just does its job while you forget about it, but for anyone else that was hoping for it to block Amazon Prime ads like I was, it seems this isn't the solution. Hopefully something else will work in the near future, as those ads really piss me off.

Here is the video, just in case anyone feels like setting one up. I can link the stuff I bought from Amazon too if anyone cares.
 
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Intrinsic

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Void said:
Not sure anyone cares, but just to conclude my saga, the Pihole was super easy to set up with the video I watched and actually having an SD card reader. Works perfectly. Except it doesn't block Prime ads. Because I'm an idiot and didn't read further and discover that it can't because they are served directly from Amazon URLs, so if you block those you block all of Prime.

So it doesn't do what I specifically bought it for, but after playing around with it I still feel it is worth having, as seeing the number of things it blocks is kind of eye-opening. For example, Netflix calls home CONSTANTLY from my Nvidia Shield. From reading up on it, it seems that it calls more frequently if it gets no response, so the number of calls is artificially boosted due to that reason, but it still calls home all the time, just not as often.

There are a bunch of other things it blocks that I am happy to have blocked, and once it is set up it basically just does its job while you forget about it, but for anyone else that was hoping for it to block Amazon Prime ads like I was, it seems this isn't the solution. Hopefully something else will work in the near future, as those ads really piss me off.

Here is the video, just in case anyone feels like setting one up. I can link the stuff I bought from Amazon too if anyone cares.
Click to expand...

I think Samsung TVs had that issue as well, if I remember from a few years ago setting up mine. A day later and the TV had about a billion blocked comms.
 
Burns

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Void said:
Not sure anyone cares, but just to conclude my saga, the Pihole was super easy to set up with the video I watched and actually having an SD card reader. Works perfectly. Except it doesn't block Prime ads. Because I'm an idiot and didn't read further and discover that it can't because they are served directly from Amazon URLs, so if you block those you block all of Prime.

So it doesn't do what I specifically bought it for, but after playing around with it I still feel it is worth having, as seeing the number of things it blocks is kind of eye-opening. For example, Netflix calls home CONSTANTLY from my Nvidia Shield. From reading up on it, it seems that it calls more frequently if it gets no response, so the number of calls is artificially boosted due to that reason, but it still calls home all the time, just not as often.

There are a bunch of other things it blocks that I am happy to have blocked, and once it is set up it basically just does its job while you forget about it, but for anyone else that was hoping for it to block Amazon Prime ads like I was, it seems this isn't the solution. Hopefully something else will work in the near future, as those ads really piss me off.

Here is the video, just in case anyone feels like setting one up. I can link the stuff I bought from Amazon too if anyone cares.
Click to expand...
Back 5+ years ago, I had one running for a few years, but it seemed to get less and less effective over time. Plus I had to keep whitelisting sites, like various shopping and social media websites, that other people wanted to use.

I've read that it can still work fairly well for various tablet and phone apps on your network, so been thinking of setting it up again, but keep putting it off.
 
Void

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Burns said:
Back 5+ years ago, I had one running for a few years, but it seemed to get less and less effective over time. Plus I had to keep whitelisting sites, like various shopping and social media websites, that other people wanted to use.

I've read that it can still work fairly well for various tablet and phone apps on your network, so been thinking of setting it up again, but keep putting it off.
Click to expand...
I don't know what it was like 5 years ago, but the place that video sends you to get the block lists seems pretty thorough about monitoring how well those lists are updated and perform. So far I haven't had to whitelist a single thing, although it is only me and I don't have all that diverse of an internet footprint I suppose. Even the autist's TikTok shit shows for me, which was sort of surprising. But I think as long as you stick to the green lists on that site and update them periodically, your need to whitelist stuff should be pretty minimal. I'm sure something will come up one of these days, but so far I haven't noticed any negatives.
 
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LiquidDeath

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I have been running my PiHole with Unbound DNS for a long time now, and going outside my home network is like being in a sewer. It blocks all sorts of things you don't even notice until you don't have to deal with them daily.
 
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Kharzette

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Hmm so I set up kodi with a hd homerun and antenna for my mum a year or two ago on a libre le potato. It has been ok.

I spent a ton of time getting discovery + to work so she could watch all the cooking and house stuff shows she likes, but then she just never used it. I cancelled it and she hasn't even noticed. I think because it required 2 or 3 extra steps, and then you had to pick what show you wanted, it was just too much effort.

The live TV is not the greatest, and any channel changes have to go through the guide. If you manually channel change and hit a channel with bad reception it crashes the whole box and it has to be unplugged/replugged.

There's also quite a bit of button latency. When you hit the back button it often takes a second or two to kick in, and my mum is impatient and starts mashing it and it ends up queing up a bunch of presses and she ends up at the main menu and has no idea what to do.

That and the mashing eventually caused the buttons to degrade and eventually I caught her jabbing a pen into the button to try to press it harder. This has completely destroyed the remote and so now I've got to get her something new.

Any recommendations? I want a dedicated guide button, seperate dedicated volume buttons (the current one shares volume up down with general up / down which caused all kinds of problems with kodi), and something very rugged that can survive the "push the button harder to make it work" types.
 
Burns

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Kharzette said:
Hmm so I set up kodi with a hd homerun and antenna for my mum a year or two ago on a libre le potato. It has been ok.

I spent a ton of time getting discovery + to work so she could watch all the cooking and house stuff shows she likes, but then she just never used it. I cancelled it and she hasn't even noticed. I think because it required 2 or 3 extra steps, and then you had to pick what show you wanted, it was just too much effort.

The live TV is not the greatest, and any channel changes have to go through the guide. If you manually channel change and hit a channel with bad reception it crashes the whole box and it has to be unplugged/replugged.

There's also quite a bit of button latency. When you hit the back button it often takes a second or two to kick in, and my mum is impatient and starts mashing it and it ends up queing up a bunch of presses and she ends up at the main menu and has no idea what to do.

That and the mashing eventually caused the buttons to degrade and eventually I caught her jabbing a pen into the button to try to press it harder. This has completely destroyed the remote and so now I've got to get her something new.

Any recommendations? I want a dedicated guide button, seperate dedicated volume buttons (the current one shares volume up down with general up / down which caused all kinds of problems with kodi), and something very rugged that can survive the "push the button harder to make it work" types.
Click to expand...
I mucked about with the IPTV free side for a short time and didn't think my parents could handle it (I didn't play around with the top guide app though), so no idea if this works, but you could see if some of the IPTV guide apps work with Kodi. Some of them may be able to be linked on a tablet as a control source, instead of a remote. Other than that, maybe there is a universal remote you can get that can be custom programed through a USB or Bluetooth connection?

I think TiVimate is the premiere guide for IPTV stuff, but it has a cost, monthly or lifetime. Per THIS reddit thread, there are some alternatives:
2024-03-23 15.42.45 www.reddit.com cff0f5bbd480.png
 
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Arative

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Kharzette said:
Hmm so I set up kodi with a hd homerun and antenna for my mum a year or two ago on a libre le potato. It has been ok.

I spent a ton of time getting discovery + to work so she could watch all the cooking and house stuff shows she likes, but then she just never used it. I cancelled it and she hasn't even noticed. I think because it required 2 or 3 extra steps, and then you had to pick what show you wanted, it was just too much effort.

The live TV is not the greatest, and any channel changes have to go through the guide. If you manually channel change and hit a channel with bad reception it crashes the whole box and it has to be unplugged/replugged.

There's also quite a bit of button latency. When you hit the back button it often takes a second or two to kick in, and my mum is impatient and starts mashing it and it ends up queing up a bunch of presses and she ends up at the main menu and has no idea what to do.

That and the mashing eventually caused the buttons to degrade and eventually I caught her jabbing a pen into the button to try to press it harder. This has completely destroyed the remote and so now I've got to get her something new.

Any recommendations? I want a dedicated guide button, seperate dedicated volume buttons (the current one shares volume up down with general up / down which caused all kinds of problems with kodi), and something very rugged that can survive the "push the button harder to make it work" types.
Click to expand...
Get a Nvidia shield. It will do everything you want with little effort. There would be no headaches

I switched my parents to it from a cable box and they haven't had any issues at all. They use YouTube tv though. It does have the live tv app that you could use with the hd homerun. You can set up Kodi on it, Plex on it. YouTube, discovery.

My only issue was with it was they Google put ads on the top third of the screen spamming lqbtq shit that wasn't appropriate for kids. Solved thst with a custom launcher that gets rid of that shit.
 
Arative

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It has a pretty standard remote. Has voice control and separate volume buttons.

Loading…

www.bestbuy.com

Pretty sure this will eliminate any headaches with your mom.
 
Kharzette

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That doesn't look like it has channel or volume. Is it a mode switch thing? Like press volume then use the circle thing at the top? That's far far beyond the mental capabilities of the old.

Her phone has a similar style navigate-with-outer-ring middle button to activate, and it is just this impossible foreign concept.

Haha I was looking at the super simple ones on amazon and one had this:

screen7.jpg


Seems like they are either too simple or too complex with no in between.

This one just might be ideal if I can reprogram that AV button to act as a guide or back button.

Hmm linking to amazon busted I guess, looks kinda like this one:
screen8.jpg
 
Last edited:
BrutulTM

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Kharzette said:
That doesn't look like it has channel or volume. Is it a mode switch thing? Like press volume then use the circle thing at the top? That's far far beyond the mental capabilities of the old.

Her phone has a similar style navigate-with-outer-ring middle button to activate, and it is just this impossible foreign concept.

Haha I was looking at the super simple ones on amazon and one had this:

View attachment 521325

Seems like they are either too simple or too complex with no in between.

This one just might be ideal if I can reprogram that AV button to act as a guide or back button.

That set button makes me nervous though. Maybe once it is programmed I can disable or remap it.
Click to expand...
I tried to do that for my grandmother when she was in the nursing home. She was often confused about what day of the week it was so I got her an LED screen that just showed "Sunday, March 24, 2024, 8:00 PM. I set it up and asked her if she could read it and she was like "Yeah I can read it but it's not Sunday, it's Tuesday". I was like "No grandma, it's actually Sunday" and she was like "Nope!". Then I tried to show her the simple remote control I got her for the TV and when I got done she said "Now how do you hang this up when you're finished talking?". It was a total fucking waste of time and money.
 
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Arative

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Kharzette said:
That doesn't look like it has channel or volume. Is it a mode switch thing? Like press volume then use the circle thing at the top? That's far far beyond the mental capabilities of the old.

Her phone has a similar style navigate-with-outer-ring middle button to activate, and it is just this impossible foreign concept.

Haha I was looking at the super simple ones on amazon and one had this:

View attachment 521325

Seems like they are either too simple or too complex with no in between.

This one just might be ideal if I can reprogram that AV button to act as a guide or back button.

Hmm linking to amazon busted I guess, looks kinda like this one:View attachment 521326
Click to expand...
The remote does have a volume up and down button.

The channel up and down is the large circle at the top with the enter button being in the center

The remote connects via Bluetooth so any Bluetooth remote should work if you go that route.
 
Void

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Other than the cost, is there a reason not to just give her cable again? Because for all of its faults, cable is pretty brainless.
 
Kharzette

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It was mainly a cost thing yea. There is no cable here but dish/dtv are both a huge ripoff at 110 bucks with like 1 or 2 local channels and only 6 channels she actually watched.

I've got that supersimple remote ordered. I think it will do the trick. I figured out that I really don't even need a back button anymore since I got rid of discovery plus (it was down under addons in the main menu). So I remapped the back button and all the number buttons to the tv guide. That one is nice because it stays put nomatter how many times you hit the button.

Really now that I think about it, the main reason we switched is that her fave show was a Rachael Ray cooking show. Gradually over time whichever dish was losing the local channels because they would get in a fight about money so the channel would just get dropped.

So after I got all that tv stuff working, Rachael announced that she was quitting :emoji_laughing:

There's alot of other stuff that she likes on the locals though. Total garbage tv like the view 🤮, and dr phil and game shows with washed up no-name celebrities. I feel my intelligence draining away whenever I'm near.
 
Kajiimagi

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Kharzette said:
It was mainly a cost thing yea. There is no cable here but dish/dtv are both a huge ripoff at 110 bucks with like 1 or 2 local channels and only 6 channels she actually watched.

I've got that supersimple remote ordered. I think it will do the trick. I figured out that I really don't even need a back button anymore since I got rid of discovery plus (it was down under addons in the main menu). So I remapped the back button and all the number buttons to the tv guide. That one is nice because it stays put nomatter how many times you hit the button.

Really now that I think about it, the main reason we switched is that her fave show was a Rachael Ray cooking show. Gradually over time whichever dish was losing the local channels because they would get in a fight about money so the channel would just get dropped.

So after I got all that tv stuff working, Rachael announced that she was quitting :emoji_laughing:

There's alot of other stuff that she likes on the locals though. Total garbage tv like the view 🤮, and dr phil and game shows with washed up no-name celebrities. I feel my intelligence draining away whenever I'm near.
Click to expand...
so something like YoutubeTV wouldn't help? It's pretty brainless and it makes the wife happy. Has local channels and DVR. I will say it's not much cheaper than Cable/Sat though.
 
Kharzette

Kharzette

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Nah she wouldn't use even a fraction of it. I had discovery + on there with loads of great stuff and she's just not the type to dig around and find something.

I've also got plex/composite on there hooked to friends with thousands of movies and shows and it is just too much of a bother to push a few extra buttons.
 
Blitz

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BrutulTM said:
I tried to do that for my grandmother when she was in the nursing home. She was often confused about what day of the week it was so I got her an LED screen that just showed "Sunday, March 24, 2024, 8:00 PM. I set it up and asked her if she could read it and she was like "Yeah I can read it but it's not Sunday, it's Tuesday". I was like "No grandma, it's actually Sunday" and she was like "Nope!". Then I tried to show her the simple remote control I got her for the TV and when I got done she said "Now how do you hang this up when you're finished talking?". It was a total fucking waste of time and money.
Click to expand...
I have constantly tried to help my family save money on cable, and on spending so much fucking money on apps ($100+ a month, easy). Every time I do it becomes more and more apparent that's it's just not worth the hassle to manage it or fix a simple issue they clearly want to put zero effort into fixing.

Enjoy your $150 /month of apps, you ungrateful shits.
Ps. I also helped my mother setup a sound bar. God, what I headache.
 
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