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Blocking Roku ads on my pihole (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/pihole@sh.itjust.works
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I have a pihole server on my network. It used to block the ads on my roku's homescreen and only empty placeholders would show up.

I bought a new Roku player and it doesn't seem to have any of the ads on the homescreen blocked by the pihole. Configuring the "secret menus" doesn't really do anything, as far as I can tell.

Does anyone have any updated methods for blocking ads on the Roku homescreen?

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago (7 children)

All good! I'm glad it was that. Initially I thought they might be doing tricky stuff with hard coding their DNS server but apparently not, just needed the right block list 🙂

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Welp... Looks like whatever I saw last night was just temporary. It's back to showing ads. I tried adding a few other random lists to no avail. I can tell it's hitting my Pi for the DNS lookup. I'm going to try and go through the logs and manually block ad-related domain lookups.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)

    I can tell it’s hitting my Pi for the DNS lookup.

    This is a good sign!

    I don't have a Roku so can't help at that level, but this site mentions some domains to block and also a secret menu that lets you remove ads: https://appuals.com/block-ads-roku-tv/

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Alright, I went nuclear and blocked almost all DNS lookups by my roku. Almost any requests for a roku domain are now blocked. If something gets broken I'll undo it, but so far, so good.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Nice! You should also be able to use the pihole logs to check which domains it's hitting if you need to loosen it later.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, I've never had success with the secret menu configuration. Most of it is cryptic to me. I appreciate the support and I'm definitely going to keep trying. (I think I found some domains to block that seem promising but I'm not celebrating yet.)

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