A patent application from the company spotted by Lowpass describes a system for displaying ads over any device connected over HDMI, a list that could include cable boxes, game consoles, DVD or Blu-ray players, PCs, or even other video streaming devices. Roku filed for the patent in August 2023 and it was published in November 2023, though it hasn’t yet been granted.
The technology described would detect whether content was paused in multiple ways—if the video being displayed is static, if there’s no audio being played, if a pause symbol is shown anywhere on screen, or if (on a TV with HDMI-CEC enabled) a pause signal has been received from some passthrough remote control. The system would analyze the paused image and use metadata “to identify one or more objects” in the video frame, transmit that identification information to a network, and receive and display a “relevant ad” over top of whatever the paused content is.
Aight. So it’s time for me to start taking this seriously. Has anyone tried using like a GrapheneOS or LineageOS as a Roku or FireTV replacement? Is there anything like that which will support an experience with a regular remote control and have apps like Netflix and Hulu work?
The problem with those TV apps is DRM. All the major streaming services require that you either use a locked down platform (probably checking SafetyNet and more on Android TV) or settle for their browser UI which lacks dpad support and gets quality throttled to 1080p or lower.
Circumventing that DRM is possible, but no project at the scale of a platform like those would dare the both legal risk and support headache of making those circumventions (which are very liable to break) a core part of the OS.
Kodi (and distros using it like LibreELEC) exist for people who want a FOSS platform for using non DRM encumbered media with a TV remote interface.
Kodi. But it’s a mess compared to roku.
Hopefully this will enlarge the user base of kodi
Kodi is not suitable for the average user. Some streaming apps like Disney+ require a full chromeOS download just for extracting the DRM part. Roku instead offers for a few bucks a ready-to-go system.
I always wonder why some products just simply have all these DRM features and others don’t. Is DRM just a monopol for the chosen ones?
It’s exactly a monopoly for the chosen ones, gate keeping at its worst. Anything that isn’t blessed is going to be a bit more effort to get working, but I wouldn’t say Kodi is unsuitable for the average user on the grounds of the widevine module though, the DRM module extraction is automated when installing a plugin that requires it.
Maybe not the solution you were asking for, but the Nvidia Shield on the stock code has been a fair compromise for me. The ads on the main screen are relatively unobtrusive, and sometimes even vaguely relevant to our viewing preferences. We largely watch Hulu, Prime and YouTube+ (with free access to AppleTV and Netflix, but I haven’t set those up yet). For ads, we pretty much only deal with Amazon’s new advertising in included Prime content. We’ll probably stop viewing that content once the series we’re currently watching wraps.
For context, my daily driver phone is LineageOS which is rooted all to heck to smack down intrusive advertising and tracking (Magisk, AdAway, AppManager to disable in-app trackers, uBlock on the browser, etc…), and my home network uses a pihole for DNS and malware blocking. I really hate advertisers.
On the pihole, the Shield is actually only the #3 top offender of blocked requests, behind my wife’s work laptop and my kid’s Steam rig. The main offender on the Shield was the ESPN app, which I removed because I never really watch sports outside of tye idd division game, which most of the time I meet friends out at the local pub anyway. Otherwise the Shield has been a well behaved appliance.
So it’s not the perfect ad-free experience, but its hardly the advertising dystopia of broadcast TV.
you could install Android on a raspberry pi with a usb remote.
I’d use a used laptop/desktop on Linux, e.g. something like steamOS, and then use jellyfin to stream stuff to this laptop. The media i watch is pirated, because it is more convenient and better quality than if I stream it through streaming service, even tho I pay for “4k” on these services.
But this displays over HDMI, correct?
Oh, I have read it wrong, upsii, yea it’s over HDMI Well, I guess Roku TV owner have to hope that there comes a way to flash a custom rom on that TV, indeed. But unlocking a bootloader and to find/make drivers for all that proprietary hardware seems like a hard job to me…
Actually you may have had the correct interpretation, they said as a Roku TV replacement. I read it as a way to fix their existing Roku TV.