this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
54 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
68306 readers
4380 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Watched something on YouTube on my TV for the first time last week. Never again. 12 minute video had like 6 or 8 ads, 2-3 were 30 seconds. Fuck. That.
plug in $20 laptop from craigslist and disable internet on your tvs
Or some cheap Raspberry Pi box or those sail the high seas streaming sticks or a Nvidia shield, so many better options than giving the Spyware and adware filled TV OS from getting access to your internet
yea I used to use a raspberry pi but it is way too slow with a massive library. and for youtube even the 4 performance is dwarfed by some random half broken laptop. I haven't tried the pi 5 but doesn't really matter
Yeah, normal YouTube is totally unwatchable. If you have a Roku device, the Playlet app can let you watch without ads. There are probably methods for other devices too.
Sure, after you've waded through the swamp of Roku ads, you could get an adfree youtube experience with that
Holy shit this is the first I've heard of Playlet. Giving it a go now and it's already impressive.
SmartTube
I can’t find it on my Roku or AppleTV or TIZEN or WebOS.
plug in $20 laptop from craigslist and disable internet on your tvs
DV is difficult to get working properly on PC, and last time I tried to set up an HTPC I ran into tons of remote control issues and it wasn't simple enough that I could just hand the remote over to a guest (or my spouse).
2019 Shield has plenty of issues sure, but it still seems like the best option for me, personally.
Agree about disable network on the TV itself.
Not sure when the last time you tried doing this is, but it's pretty easy these days. KDE connect can pretty much handle most of the HTPC necessities. Alternatively, a debloated Onn box will do the trick quite easily
onn 4k googletv box is amazing. $20 and a launcher swap and it's like ads don't exist any more
Just checked, sounds like that program isn't working anymore.
I love SmartTube. Every time someone comes over and they want to play something via YouTube, they're like: "holy fuck, no ads? skipping straight to music part? this is divine technology"
Right! Why is an adblocker such a foreign concept to the bulk of humanity.
SmartTube is the best. There was a small period of time recently where it stopped working and it was so bad going back to regular YT that I just stopped watching entirely.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be designed to work without an account.