Adguard Home is a Pi-Hole competitor. They work fine for ad servers, but the content I was trying to reduce couldn’t be blocked that way or the TV’s wouldn’t work. Menu changes were being loaded while the set was off and Roku was inserting some ad content along with menu changes.

To my surprise this setup has reduced menu additions and ads to almost nothing. It seems that these menus aren’t updated when my TV’s are actually in use and that’s now the only time they can connect to the Internet.

Dahua (professional side of Amcrest) still sells their video doorbell through B&H Photo. According to a Q&A answer on the site it will power a wired chime.

I have another wifi Dahua camera (also bought from B&H) and have been really impressed with it. It’s used with Frigate and Home Assistant. Be aware that B&H offers their own warranty for Dahua products. I looked at the fine print before my purchase and felt it was reasonable.

EmpireTech sells rebranded Dahua products and they have a different model. The seller gets great reviews on ipcamtalk.com. Detailed user reviews here. EmpireTech also sells through Amazon.

My TV continues to chatter to random servers on the internet long after it has turned off. It transmits to a telemetry server on every single button press.

What’s even more irritating to me are the random changes to the TV’s UI. Turn it off for a while and I come back to an entire new set of menu entries and ads!

Home Assistant, OpenWRT and Adguard Home mostly fix those problems.

When my TVs are powered off a Home Assistant automation enables a couple of OpenWRT firewall rules. Those rules block all TV Internet access. When the TVs are powered on the firewall rules are automatically disabled and the TVs work normally. That along with Adguard Home’s blocking of all UI ads makes my TVs almost user friendly.