Beginning to have thoughts now on just donating away my stream sticks and use my TV in the living room as a back up incase the one I have in my bedroom dies.
I got into streaming sticks about a few months ago, I have an ONN brand one and Amazon one that’s 4k. And I know the appeal of them and the appeal is nice. It makes you feel like you’re watching cable television without subscribing to an overpriced cable subscription. It was nice.
It was nice until everytime I go to have some sit down time in the living room than my bedroom to watch something there, I turn on the ONN stick, I try watching a single YouTube video.
30 second ad. Skipped it. 4 minutes into the video - another ad. And this will happen the longer the video is where it’s just ad, ad, ad.
Between the two, only the ONN stick has a chance of being rooted but I’m not sure I want to risk bricking or ruining it. The Amazon one cannot be rooted which is a shame.
So yeah, not really digging stream sticks as much as I like because of this. I immediately went back to my bedroom to watch on the PC since I have adblock.
You don’t need to root it to install other, more useful apps.
For example you can run your own Plex server on a spare PC, download movies and TV shows (I hear you can use torrents for this), and install the Plex app on your TV stick to watch them on the TV. Or, ask a friend for access to their Plex server :)
If you like cable TV, you can sign up to a much cheaper IPTV service and use the TiviMate app.
On the Onn one, I think you can just use Google Play to install other apps. On the Amazon Fire one, if it’s not in Amazon’s app store, you’ll have to download the APK file.
Smarttube is a third party youtube app for streaming sticks with built in sponsorblock and ad blocking. Installable without rooting, but it’s not on the play store.
Just look up how to sideload apps on your stick and get going. You don’t need root.
How is that a function of the streaming stick rather than YouTube itself? Have you looked into if your home router can rune some ad blocking software? Something like PiHole/AdGuard/Unbound.
I don’t think any of those services will block youtube ads since they’re coming from the same domain as the videos. Only UBlock can block them in a browser. There may be some other YouTube front-end available out there on streaming sticks but they’d likely require root access or some other way of installing unapproved apps.
Smarttube next doesn’t require rooting the device, it can be sideloaded. Sideloading is not very complicated. Google is not trying to block any sideloading (at the moment, at least).
Google is not trying to block any sideloading (at the moment, at least).
Google isn’t, and likely won’t since it’d very likely result in fines in the EU.
Amazon are working on a new Linux-based OS for their devices called Vega that won’t be able to sideload apps. Even if apps could be sideloaded, it wouldn’t be able to run Android apps since it’s not Android based.
