Pihole roku smart tv. After adding a handful of adlists I'm seeing the majority of my network traffic now… It’s an Open Source networking product that’s exploding in the consumer networking world. akamaihd. It's more of a standby mode, otherwise the remote used to turn it on wouldn't work (i. I haven't tried TV channel streaming apps yet. Do not use this list if you regularly watch those channels. There are some apps that require whitelisting that are common blocks to many filterlist for ROKU TV programs to work. I haven't seen other posts online about it, so I believe it to be something unique to my Pihole installation. Even though my TV is "off" it's never really fully off. Anyways, in these super secret menus you can actually turn off ALL ads and a bunch of other cool stuff. What I ended up doing for this is just blackholing the remote servers themselves. 21. It's very This is a blocklist to block smart-TVs sending metadata back home, sometimes with the added benefit of blocking interface ads for apps and movie services. For those who do not own a Roku. Just whitelist until you can get thru. Just wondering if anyone else has seen this happen. They seem to have changed their advert server. NextDNS protects you from all kinds of security threats, blocks ads and trackers on websites and in apps and provides a safe and supervised Internet for kids — on all devices and on all networks. The greatest offenders were phone apps and roku TV. tv) resolve to a dozen different IP addresses. So I disable the PiHole for 30 seconds, start the first episode, accept that I've got to watch ads, then the second episode starts and… no ads! It's a pain, but better than all of the awful cuts to an increasing number of gambling ads. Smart TVs, Roku, Fire Stick, and other streaming devices can’t install ad blockers. I honestly get a warm sense of happiness when seeing that PiHole is preventing one of my “smart” TVs from trying to phone home to its mothership EVERY 2 SECONDS forever. So I blocked the TV's wifi internet at the router and rely solely on Roku, which resolved the issue. I checked pihole and it's up and running. net that might change over time. com You can add a domain to be hidden in the pihole settings, for exmple my camera used to send like 10,000 queries a day out to someone cs. With that said, some streaming services will embed call to trackers and web analytics within the stream. Pi-hole Blocklist for Smart TVs. I set DNS server in my mikrotik router pointing at my pihole instance running in a proxmox machine. Force all DNS queries through PiHole Many content providers (like YouTube / Reddit / Twitch / Spotify / Pandora / Facebook / Hulu) now stream/serve ads from the same servers as the content (meaning if you attempt to block the ads using a PiHole you will also block the content). txt So far my pihole is working to block ads served via Tubi pretty well. Blocking: toots-a. Thing is, after putting pihole back on my network ( had some sd card issues and was just lazy in getting it setup again ) I'm having issues with one thing - Pluto TV. logs. Sep 21, 2025 · Smart TVs often suffer from performance slowdowns due to pervasive ads that consume resources. "The Pi-hole® is a DNS sinkhole that protects your devices from unwanted content"… But tell me, I am just curious to know, here the devs have told many times that Blocklist is faster, more effective and less memory consuming ( as pihole runs on Ram I guess), even then why do you need Regex Blocklist? I had a crazy issue where my Xfinity app on my Roku TV and the PrimeVideo app on my Apple TV both started to try and query directly to public resolvers for their tracking endpoints. I use Roku's, and I have rules to filter out the ones like scribe, austin, etc etc. This is installed on the latest updated Since the last two day's Netflix on my Roku and smart Vizio TV required me to log in even thought I was logged in on all the devices previously. Honestly you can still accomplish your goal with a router AdBlock. Apparently TCL Roku Smart TVs are hardcoded to us Google DNS (which would bypass the Pihole). GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets. 5M unique domains in block-list) Smart TV performance is usually pretty poor anyway compared to a proper streaming box Chromecast, roku, kodi, all better options than tvs pretending to be smart. db "select domain from queries where status in (1,9) group by domain order by domain" | wc -l Nothing from the Roku r6 series tv I have blocked in pihole blacklists, and I've tailed the list and watched it like a hawk. hubble. com so i hid it from the logs so its no longer seen or compliled. If you have other DNS servers Pihole was blocking Upgrade to Windows 11 so i disabled it and i get the updates, i dont know which link to whitelist, i just give information about that. Right now I can't watch any live sports with Diversion installed. 2, Web UI 5. You can probably tail pihole and see what is coming up, and if you notice an obvious ad server coming through, then you can blacklist it. Smart TV-PiHole Blocklist . Apache spits 404 on every tv request, tv stays silent and ashamed. Adding this complete list to my pihole completely broke Samsung Apps and Samsung TV Plus channels on my RU7179. One of our TV's is also a TLC with a built-in roku. Ads - Blocking intrusive, targeted, and malware-laden ads across devices. Expected Behaviour: I would expect Roku's home screen ads to be blocked as they have been for years successfully with Pihole. My 2 Roku TVs are always top blocked, mainly because of scibe. However it does not block ads for Hulu or YouTube. That caused a problem because in both cases they were unable to see any response because I firewall all outbound port 53 traffic (only pihole is allowed to do that). Streaming existing content worked on Roku devices only. net Now does the trick instead. perflyst. On my computers, I had to disable uBlock origin to be able to watch live sports on Are you blocking ads for Roku via regex? I've found that to work best. But after reading your post I realized the TV was connected to the internet through both Roku and itself. It doesn't let me… Pihole definitely does a good job of blocking ads on the Roku home screen. Blocking ads at the network level, using tools like Pi-hole, can significantly improve speed, menu navigation, and app loading. My primary reason for using Pi is to block ads on you tube via Roku, so would be really grateful for any advice on how to do that. I'm new to Raspberry Pi but can I set up pihole to block trackers on my new TCL 55R617 TV so that I can use the TV online and… PI hole block TV ads? Just wanted to ask if there is a way you can set up Pi hole to block adds that come through your smart TV? I have a Samsung smart TV and wonder if there is a work around it. Hi all. I see this same thing from my Samsung smart TV - albeit with a different domain. Roku smart tv boxset originating 75% of all blocked traffic. sqlite3 /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL. Either the entire app is broken and doesn't play video, or you see the ads. Pihole isn't going to stop netflix, hulu, amazon, roku, apple, etc, etc from all knowing what you're doing, and potentially even anonymizing and selling that info. Don’t trust internet of things (IoT) devices - Smart home devices have a notoriously poor track record when it comes to security (and privacy). Three methods Generally, there are three different methods that will enable devices on your network to be protected by Pi-hole. If you have a blocker that is only looking up a single IP address, then take the list of hostnames and do a manual lookup of all IP addresses for each one, then block every IP on that list. At first wasn't bothered, but then I noticed that it makes a dns request every two seconds, so I spawned a 128mb-ram vm with apache and redirect all the samsung traffic/domains to that vm (removed domains from block, added to pihole hosts file). You can also attempt regex for the ads and see if that works. prod. I don't disagree with that statement at all, but I'd rather give my info to Google or Kodi vs Visio I mean, a Bluray player is about $50 and can do that. For some reason, my Roku tv tries to reach it's logging server three times more than any of our smart devices. Since I started blocking these requests an interesting thing happened. 77 votes, 29 comments. . Amazon has promised to update the OS on my TV model for 4 years past the date they stop selling it. I'm using the latest updated version of Pihole (5. If this is the case, why am I still seeing the TV Queries on the pihole? Same here, but using Roku. A quick tail on the device highlighted nrdp. May 30, 2025 · If you're a Linux user, you can block ads on your entire Wi-Fi network (including on your Roku TV), by installing Pi-Hole and using the Linux machine as your router's DNS server. When I got My new roku smart tv I had to whitelist quite a few just to get access lol…but slowly re added some and content loads 🙇♀️ And ,to top it off, there are "secret" menus on Roku tvs and boxes (I have a 6 series 65inch Roku tv) that you can access by doing sort of a "contra-esqe" up up down down b a b a select start (not how you do it but just so you can visualize it). New to the pihole and the community here. Define Pi-hole's IP address as the only DNS entry in the router Rationale Only is italicized here for a reason: Pi-hole needs to be the only DNS server because it intercepts queries and decides whether or not they should be blocked. Suddenly, yesterday, I started getting ads over there. A dumb tv. Do I need the Raspberry Pi 5, or will a Pi 4 work? Are you blocking ads for Roku via regex? I've found that to work best. You either A) don't allow your smart TV ip address to egress traffic to the internet or B) don't connect it at all. 96 votes, 97 comments. Nearly 70% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles were found to contain hardcoded DNS settings - allowing them to simply ignore your local network’s DNS server entirely. io/PiHoleBlocklist/SmartTV. com that was added to the blacklist back in July 2022. netflix. 171K subscribers in the pihole community. It needs to “just work” - Whatever solution I chose needed to be out-of-the-box or widely supported. 3), FTL 5. The issue with this is that some of hostnames (like ravm. I went to a friend's house who has a Roku (but no pihole) and was surprised about how much of the interface is plastered with ads. Also roku tv scans your HDMI data stream (if you connect your laptop to the Roku TV) which is purely evil! Also worth to note that to have pi-hole to recognize and block over 50% of the requests, constant gravity updates are required (i have over 3. But since Pi-hole works at the network level, it blocks tracking and some ad requests from these devices automatically. There are some domains in that list like the *. This just started happening next week. 18. I want to block ads on Paramount+ while watching live sports on my Android/Roku TV. Use a box like Roku, Xbox, PS4, etc that can still function quite well with PiHole. They are usually ad heavy news feed so I'm guessing that's why is no longer working. However, I can't access any internet sites as it has blocked all of them. This allows you to block ads and trackers on your Roku device even if you: Simply run the script without any arguments to use the interactive text-based interface: Dec 9, 2024 · Expected Behaviour: I would expect Roku's home screen ads to be blocked as they have been for years successfully with Pihole. Anytime I use the NBC app I still get ads and when I try to use the CW app, PiHole blocks it and the app won't play any videos. Amazon Prime video is working on iphone and PCs but not on the TV. cloudfront. , it's 2022, and nothing's ever really truly off unless it's unplugged from the wall. # Description: This is a blocklist to block smart-TVs sending metadata back home, sometimes with the added benefit of blocking interface ads for apps and movie services. Pihole graphs are much sexier now. Twitch injects ads on the server side which is nearly impossible to block without image, sound, or signal recognition. Just use it as a display device. the damn things try to call home 40k times a day (spread out over 5 devices, almost 10k each). Any idea what I need to blacklist and whitelist for these to work? Thank all! 219 votes, 45 comments. This is what … I don't know if it's a problem with my TVs but with piHole in most cases I have problems installing applications on my Samsung TV. 25. Everything is working fine but Amazon Prime Video on the TV. On average, Smart TVs generate an average of 60 megabytes of outgoing Internet traffic per day, all the while bypassing tools like PiHole. I basically stick to the Google TV for all my streaming services, and only use the Fire TV OS built into my smart TV to watch live television. Remember to donate a few bucks to this wonderful piece of software : r/pihole r/pihole • by Alber81 View community ranking Some of those are Ads, at different servers, and that's what Adguard or pihole blocks. Any idea what I need to blacklist and whitelist for these to work? Thank all! Disable blocking for 30 secs on the pihole - easy, as I always have a laptop or tablet or smart phone with me in the living room Launch the Tubi TV app and it will do the thorough examination, decide that I'm not an ad blocker, and then it connects. Maybe Roku changed the URL to their ads? I'll have to watch the log and see what lookups occur while using the Roku and blacklist it. Let me begin by saying at my families house we have multiple TV’s (a smart TV and a TV with a Roku), the kids each have tablets, and my wife and I have our phones and laptops, as well as a few personal servers (local NAS and development servers). cloud. 5 million blocklist. Not tested extensively but what i found were had to pass through my 2. e. 1. Hey all! I just recently set up my PiHole and use a TCL Roku TV. It’s still worthwhile to use a pihole on your local network. This tool uses ARP spoofing techniques to intercept DNS queries from your Roku device and redirect them to your Pi-hole server. Expected Behaviour: pihole resolving DNS requests and all devices and apps should work Actual Behaviour: I've a Sony Bravia Android TV and a Mikrotik router. roku. After doing this it blocked ads on everything, and did the main job of blocking ads on You tube accessed via my Roku. github. Results vary by platform, but Samsung TV ads and Roku home screen ads are commonly reduced. Roku/Smart TV/cellphone apps build the ads directly into the encrypted video streams, bypassing DNS entirely. My Vizio TV was older and I did not see the disable option in the Google Home app. austin. Stops the Windows desltop browser version of ITV Hub working, but skipsads on my Samsung smart TV & Fire TV. Buy an AppleTV (or Roku) and then disconnect the LG TV from the internet. Mine blocks and has been blocking youtube ads even on the smart TV for years. I pi-hole my whole house but I notice that the Roku 4 aol news channels no longer work. 7la4kk, wz4ahw, h6ddhn, k2c2x, 6gxxlu, hezm, zbklw, 9qa65, hef4pu, 9pqt,