I basically gave up on finding a custom ROM for this TV so I’m looking for alternative TV apps to at least change the default app. Do you know if there is an app like this exist? It should work with satellite, I’m not looking for IPTV or streaming services, just something that supports plain satellite TV.
Edit: Currently experimenting with KODI, no luck yet though. If you also have suggestions regarding to it, I’m all ears.
Edit 2: KODI (and so Jellyfin, Plex etc.) needs a backend server for Live TV so add-ons alone won’t work. According to KODI Wiki, currently there are no backends that work on Android. I also tried Google’s older app called Live Channels but Google doesn’t let you to run it because it’s old more useful.
Edit 3: I at least blocked all of those ad streaming domains on pi-hole. Here is the regex I added to my blacklist. Maybe it will be useful for another poor soul who bought TCL TV.
^(.*\.)?(leiniao\.com|b-cdn\.net|now\.amagi\.tv|huan\.tv|rttv\.com|kaltura\.com|cloudfront\.net|plex\.tv|otteravision\.com|ads\.ottera\.tv|sofast\.tv|akamaized\.net|jwplayer\.com|fuelmedia\.io|molotov\.tv|mcncdndigital\.com|evrideo\.tv|aniview\.com|partytymestreaming\.com)$
What “TV app” is this exactly? I’ve never seen or heard of that before, and none of my google/android TVs or dongles have anything like that.
Also what make and model TV is this?
They basically hid the satellite tuner behind this with an app and it’s plagued with Google stuff. Now I have checked the app details and it says
com.tcl.tv. It didn’t occur to me before since I don’t know any other Android TV, so thanks for this. That’s nice to know. So what is the default TV app on standard Android TVs?The TV is TCL P635 by the way.
By satellite do you mean like a dish physically plugged in with a cable? I wasn’t aware of any “app” used for that on any TV… I just switch the input with the remote to like HDMI/component/RF/etc. and the normal android tv interface goes away completely.
Exactly. The DVB-S tuner is included in the TV. There is indeed input switch that includes HDMI 1,2,3 and AV and yet they made the TV input only accessible through an app.
Sounds like this might be specific to your brand of TV. I have a Sony and there’s a bunch of Sony junk on there that I disabled a long time ago. But my TV app doesn’t have any ads in it yet. I’m guessing your manufacturer added ads to their TV app and made a deal with Google to use them as the ad provider. Unfortunately, those apps are relatively proprietary since they are supposed to be primarily just a simple UI for the tuners and so mostly hardware specific. Not saying there aren’t replacements, but likely that would require someone to reverse engineer some of of the hardware firmware’s APIs rather than web APIs that most apps interface with and aren’t guaranteed to be the same across models. Those are only available if you own an actual TV, so it’s less likely to exist.
Anyway, my point is that your searching probably needs to focus on the TV rather than the Android/Google TV platform as a whole. Look on forums devoted to the TV brand. You may have more luck.
The other alternative might be to block the ads on your router, but that may or may not work or cause some unintended inconveniences. For example I have Google’s DNS blocked and my wifi constantly drops and reconnects even when I only want to watch locally hosted content because the TV thinks it’s offline and needs to fix the connection.
I actually checked XDA but there seems to be no ROMs currently. Maybe it’s possible to unlock the bootloader, I saw an OEM unlocking option while wandering developer options. But without a ROM it’s useless. Maybe someone will make a ROM but no idea.
Yeah, it’s most likely this. And that’s why vendor locked it as well it seems.
Heh, I actually did this and will edit the main post for what I did.