I currently use Stremio/RD/Surfshark on a Firestick 4k Max as my primary streaming setup and it works exceptionally well. However, some of my friends and family don’t want to be bothered with (or pay for) RD or a VPN with an ad blocker. The main issues they encounter is obnoxious and intrusive ads on BeeTV, FilmPlus, TeaTV, VivaTV, NovaTV, HDObox, etc, etc. These ads basically make the apps unusable. Blockada 4 free ad blocker used to work but the ad/app programmers soon developed a work around for its limited capabilities. Adguard 32bit v4.9.32(from APKtime) works great on any stick using FireTV OS8 (current Firesticks) but won’t install on anything older than that (eg Firestick 4k, 1st gen).
Anybody know of a free adblocker that works with these apps (ie one that you have tried successfully) on older sticks (specifically the 1st gen 4k)?
Thanks in advance on behalf of my cheap friends and family!
I don’t necessarily recommend this only because you really need to be careful but:
(1st method my name)
to disable private dns
adb shell settings put global private_dns_mode off
to enable private dns with hostname (example with dns.adguard.com)
adb shell settings put global private_dns_mode hostname
adb shell settings put global private_dns_specifier dns.adguard.com
Use the “get” to see the property, “put” to write, turning private_dns_mode off will cause the specifier property will not be used and private DNS will be turned off.
Now as it is a Firestick you need to run ADB shell remotely from another Android device.
ADB shell on another Android streamer if you have more than one of ATVtools from your phone.
If you use ATVtools: select you device then use the “shell” tool, when you type in the commands do not type “ADB shell” start with the word “settings” for each.
(2nd method)
Another way is to change the DNS server, this is from my Firestick, I used ADB to set the DNS servers to the IP addresses indicated, the first IP is mulvad.net ad blocking, the second is Google’s public server:
sheldon:/ $ settings put global “dns_servers” “194.242.2.4,8.8.4.4”
sheldon:/ $ settings get global dns_servers
194.242.2.4,8.8.4.4
sheldon:/ $
Thanks Timwort. I know a little about programming the various devices but all this is a little above me!
