God bless samsung
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I recently bought a new Samsung TV, with all the smart TV features. A random, but probably insignificant, thing that annoys me is when I choose to close an app I've had open to return back to regular TV or a games console, the app drawer at the bottom of the screen doesn't automatically close. It just sits there, open, staring me in the face, until I have to manually close it. There's no setting for this, and there's no simple timer to close it down after a little while. The other thing I've noticed are ads in those sorts of spaces. Ads for TV shows or services I'm not interested in, which is annoying as well. Fortunately I recently setup Pi-hole on my network and I'm seeing less of them now, but what you might not know is that if you connect these devices up to the web, they're constantly checking in Samsung's metric websites to report information like recent apps, time that the app was spent open, etc. That's blocked too, but accounts for several thousand requests per day.
Chris Copeland wrote:
f you connect these devices up to the web, they're constantly checking in Samsung's metric websites to report information like recent apps, time that the app was spent open, etc. That's blocked too, but accounts for several thousand requests per day.
Was that blocked in one of Pi-Hole's standard blocklists or did you add it manually?
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My TV goes fullscreen from the HDMI out of my video card without tweaking. However, for some reason when I watch netflix using netflix.com it seems like i don't get it in 4k, but going through my TV i do. I haven't verified or even investigated the problem. I just decided to use the TV's smart feature to use netflix and enjoy the quality bump. I'm not above using a well designed "smart" appliance to do things it does well. My TV is very good at doing netflix - for whatever reason, it's better than my browser in full screen mode. I guess I don't have to - i mean, i could find an alternative to using the TV's "smart" features - and i may yet because apparently the TV is a snitch and reports on me to samsung. But I haven't looked into the quality difference. Actually investigating it is non-trivial because it may involve some packet sniffing.
Real programmers use butterflies
honey the codewitch wrote:
However, for some reason when I watch netflix using netflix.com it seems like i don't get it in 4k, but going through my TV i do.
Like many streaming services, Netflix does realtime quality detection and will downgrade a stream to show what it thinks is the best that a particular device/bandwidth combination can reliably display. It's rather conservative from what I can see. I am not aware that you can force override it. It just does what it thinks is best. I suspect, but have not confirmed, that it might have a built in bias for Netflix's apps over generic web. One day services like this will drop their generic web interfaces entirely, I suspect.
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Chris Copeland wrote:
f you connect these devices up to the web, they're constantly checking in Samsung's metric websites to report information like recent apps, time that the app was spent open, etc. That's blocked too, but accounts for several thousand requests per day.
Was that blocked in one of Pi-Hole's standard blocklists or did you add it manually?
