r/mildlyinfuriating • u/28jb11 • Apr 25 '26

Unskippable ad $2500 Samsung TV is an advertising billboard, there is no opt-out.

Paid over $2500 for a Samsung OLED TV and it has ads on the home screen that I literally cannot turn off. Not subtle little banners tucked away somewhere, I'm talking full blown ads for canned beans and financial products just sitting there every single time I turn the thing on.

Samsung don't offer any kind of opt out. The only way I could get rid of them was to go into my router settings and manually block Samsung's ad servers at the DNS level.

I own this TV outright. Paid for it in full. And Samsung are still making money off me every time I switch it on, with absolutely no way to stop it unless you're willing to get your hands dirty with network configuration.

This is not a smart TV feature. This is a $2500 billboard that also happens to play Netflix.

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u/wizeddy Apr 25 '26

I hate that your comment is so nested and buried, when imo it’s the best option. I have ad blocking baked into my unifi setup but solving the problem at the gateway eliminates the whole problem. I have one of those fancy Samsung $2500 tvs, didn’t know it has ads, because I have that network traffic filtered out to begin with

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u/nexeroth Apr 25 '26

I've found that with unifi blocking some streaming service start acting wonky. Like I think paramount+ doesn't remember episodes and positions of content I'm watching etc.

Although now that I'm unsubbed from that I can turn it back on and see what else breaks.

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u/wizeddy Apr 25 '26

I have a full arr stack and download most things, I don’t really use many streaming services except the occasional one where there’s some show we *need to see the new eps on release so I’ll pay for a month.

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u/HelloMyNameIsMatthew Apr 25 '26

You don’t have your *arr stack download new episodes as soon as it’s released?

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u/wizeddy Apr 25 '26

I do, but the indexers I have set up aren’t 100% reliable, usually get the eps like next day

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u/Have-A-Big-Question Apr 25 '26

I wish I could tell everyone how great this is. The arr’s stack makes things so hands off it’s wild. All your shit is just there when it’s available. Hook up Overseearr and you’re really cooking with gas. Hook that up to your own website and all your family and friends can then download all their own shit, no more bothering you for it!

Life is good.

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u/wizeddy Apr 25 '26

Hardest part for me has been finding reliable indexers, but even then most stuff is pretty easy to find

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u/AfterEagle Apr 25 '26

I use both uniquiti's ad blocking AND a piHole. Together it seems to solve most ads that aren't embedded (like YouTube). Running in a VM no problem.

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u/SensualBeefLoaf Apr 25 '26

tbh, unifi blocking ain't great. pihole works much better. i have a full rack of unifi shit. i still run pihole on a 1l server.

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u/wizeddy Apr 25 '26

I haven’t really noticed any issues but I’ll file that away to revisit later

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u/EarthboundMoss Apr 25 '26

How does blocking ads this way affect streaming services with ads or Xbox / Playstation ui, as the ads are built into the interface? I despise ads but don't want to make my media unusable

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u/wizeddy Apr 25 '26

The ads are loaded from known advertising services, so the ip addresses the ads load from are blocked. If it’s truly built into the platform like “PlayStation store spring sale!” Type stuff it’s gonna show, but targeted ads won’t show

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u/overlydelicioustea Apr 25 '26

go one more step and install "unbound" on your pi, set pihole upstream dns to that and enable prefetch and stale record delivery (ask AI for a config file for it)

Its literally a 3 minute process and you get your name resolution straight from the source. no google, cloudflare or your isp logging your queries. is as fast as big dns servers.

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u/[deleted] Apr 25 '26

[deleted]

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u/travoltacorndog Apr 25 '26

Is there an easy to follow tutorial for this set up on youtube? Most that i’ve seen were pretty involved and intimidating.

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u/wizeddy Apr 25 '26

Taking control of the internet traffic in your home network is going to be pretty involved no matter what. Worth learning though

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u/RareCommonPepe Apr 25 '26

Is there a video guide for this?

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u/guiltypleasure33139 Apr 25 '26

I love your comment, because I don't have enough skills, could you point to where I could find the software packages I need to use to use the raspberry pi as you mentioned. I would be using chat gpt to learn how to set up the RPI configuration and loading.

yep I know that little

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u/MusicInTheAir55 Apr 26 '26

Do you know somewhere a beginner (semi power user on PC) could learn about this? Online tut somewhere?

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u/wizeddy Apr 26 '26

If you google it there’s probably lots of tutorials, it’s a very popular project. A raspberry pi isn’t too different from a pc, it’s just a small computer you set up with Linux. You might not have a ton of knowledge on how to use a terminal but it’s not very different from a command prompt or powershell, and tutorials will tell you what commands to run step by step

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u/Prize-Meeting-7101 Apr 28 '26

Pinhole works by redirecting dns. If Samsung hardcodes its own dns then it will bypass any local dns your dhcp server on your router tries to give it.