These are not "streaming boxes" in the sense you are talking about. Their appeal is that they come preloaded with chinese pirate streaming apps. Traditional streaming boxes - Apple TV, Fire stick, Roku - are not affected by this, though if you want privacy-focused Apple TV is the only remaining contender, and with Apple's continued descent into advertising vendor I'd guess that one is not long for this world, either.
replyMy understanding is that Roku bypasses DNS blocking with hardcoded tables so it can report back on various data they track on you.
replyCan you monitor its traffic and block by IP?
replyI’m sure you could. At what point do you just rip out the thing that is trying so hard to work around your control of your network? An Apple TV doesn’t cost that much.
replyThe door is slowly closing on all of these blocking schemes by moving ad content to the same domains as the primary content.
replyThis is already a common feature for analytics toolkits.
I probably could, but haven't done so yet.
replyApple TV is currently the best balance of privacy and convenience. The only way to get more private is using a PC, but that limits the resolution for most streaming services to 720p or 1080p.
replyIf you want actual privacy (rather than promises from Apple or Google), what you need is a mini-PC running Linux with the Plasma Bigscreen DE. You then use a Web browser rather than invasive "apps" for your streaming. For Youtube, there is VacuumTube (an improved Youtube Leanback client). The main limitation is capped resolution on some commercial streaming services. I believe Windows does not have that restriction, so a VM could presumably be used for streaming (I have not tried).
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replyBesides setting up your own device, Apple TV would be the best bet from any of the large manufacturers.
replyI assume apple TV doesn’t do malicious things like this, and we love the interface and it “just works” with HDR
replyI'm increasingly being convinced the only way to do that is you do a media pc nuc. The problem, of course, is you probably won't have the netflix app. It's painful to setup such a box to stream from various services.
replyWhat's wrong with Apple TV? It runs VLC if you want to stream something from your NAS.
replyI tried to look at setting up an stripped down privacy-focused Android based box for Netflix, but ran into issues. Seems like you need to be spied on to run Netflix.
replyI tried going that route, but most apps for streaming are Android. And that was only one of the issues.
replyIt was a rabbit hole and in the end I got back using my NVIDIA Shield. This is about 10 years now, but it’s actually still the best option.
The Onn TV devices from walmart seem fine, baseline google tracking not-withstanding... but no residential proxy or botnet participation without you knowing! You can just block them at the router and stream content locally.
replykodi on an rpi5?
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