Ok, here’s what I found. I first tried playing a movie with their stock player. My Express VPN is active. No ad blockers enabled.
I select a fairly current movie and played in 4K. I let it play for a couple minutes and tried to back out of the movie. I got a bunch of Tik Toc ads.
I next selected the identical movie and stream and played it using MX Pro with HW+. I let it play for the same time period as before. When I exited the movie a grey screen was displayed for about 7-10 seconds and then it went back to the Cinema home screen. No ads played at all.
So, I guess it is NOT necessary to use an ad blocker or Surfshark’s “CleanWeb”.
Btw, the movie at first would not play (it stalled) until I switched from HW to HW+. Then it played as normal. Also, this was a RD link for both tests.,
What @Powerfader is asking is, when using your cinema apk, are you running behind a VPN program (e.g. Surf shark, ipvanish, ExpressVPN, etc)?
And… If you’re running surf shark (VPN), do you enable it’s cleanweb ad-blocker feature?
Troy’s method of preventing ads from popping, using a non-modded cinema apk, is to use surf shark VPN, enable it’s cleanweb ad-blocker feature in VPN settings, then run cinema and make sure you have MX Player installed and enabled as the default video player in cinema settings.
What was unclear in this thread was whether or not you’re using a VPN with an ad-blocker feature along with your cinema apk, playing with the MX player.
The question still lies, however, whether or not the characteristics remain the same when adding the element of CleanWeb into the recipe?
Would it produce a third alternate result aside from ads or a 7+ second grey screen? It would surprise me if Troy overlooked the potential unnecessary ad-blocker in his article.
If I could convince myself to motivate a test of my own - I’d detail what adding CleanWeb does, if anything different.
However, I’d have to check on a different device that has an ad-supported version of cinema installed and ensure shark is on there also for testing.
I still have SS on my devices. So, I guess I could test it, but right I got interested in the movies I was testing with. So further testing is on pause for at least the next 2 hours 10 minutes and 15 seconds. lol
Another noteworthy comparison could have been scraper quality results between 2.4.0 and 2.5.2?
While 2.4.0 still maintained many unbroken scraper links, it would be interesting to see if current support, wherever it may be coming from, fixed or added scraper(s).
Again - when I can motivate myself, I can conduct this test myself. All my motivation went to sweating a bunch of new copper this weekend, cleaning HVAC coils, and fixing the wife’s garden boxes.
Motivation is at your level now - a chair, a tv program, and a trusty glass of bourbon.
Ok, couldn’t resist. I enabled SS with Clean web and played the same movie and link. When exited the movie the same grey screen appeared for about 15 seconds and then went back to the home screen. No ads
I next tried the same movie and link with SS and Clean Web but this time use VLC player. When I exited the movie, it went immediately back to the home screen. No ads
My 3rd test was with using Express VPN with no ad blockers using the VLC player. When I exited the movie, it went immediately back to the home screen. The 1st time it played the tic toc ads. The 2nd & 3rd time it did not play any ads and went straight to the home screen.
Conclusion: The app will play with either MX or VLC and display no ads. VLC is better in that when exiting it goes immediately back to the home screen showing no ads or a grey screen. SS is not needed as the proprietary vpn.
FYI: No bad blockers were harmed during the making of these tests.
Update: Not certain about the effectiveness of using the VLC player. Sometimes it will do the ad thing, but I was able to just click the back button a couple more times and it went to the home screen.
I got different, inconsistent results while using shark and cleanweb enabled.
When exiting show or movie, grey screen like you observed, however, the duration of each instance (I tried several) would vary from 8+ seconds to 15+ seconds to just hanging on the grey screen until I click to shield’s android home screen.
Honestly, I think the ads are still running, but the method cloaks it with a grey veil so we don’t have to see or hear any of it.
I’ll test more but not sure if I need to invest more time in something I’d rarely use.
I downloaded it the day you posted. I think it’s way better than the previous, it doesn’t buffer as much and the are more streams to choose and it automatically goes to the next stream of the first doesn’t connect. The picture seems to be better as well. Just fyi, i don’t use real debrid or mecool. Just firestick.
I can confirm your findings. I think I will just stick with my solution to avoid the ads using my Nvidia Shield Pro.
When exiting the movie or app itself. I just double click the home button to bring up the “Recents” page on my Shield and then Dismiss the Cinema App. Works every time and only takes a couple of seconds.
All the other tests I’ve done are sporadic at best and deliver varying effectiveness. I don’t know if the SS + MX is consistent or not, but I am going on a week now with using Express and have not experienced ANY issues whatsoever. So, I am very hesitant to go back to the issue ladened Surfshark just for the Cinema app.
Interesting that, with BeeTV and Filmplus, the ads just aren’t there at all if you use SS and CleanWeb. They must be doing something different with Cinema.
Either way, not for me!
I erased my old Cinema version and reinstalled to Cinema 2.5.2
Used MX Player
Connected to Real-Debrid
All Real-Debrid links show Error 503 Having issue with Premium server.
Anyone have any ideas?
The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 503 Service Unavailable server error response code indicates that the server is not ready to handle the request. Common causes are a server that is down for maintenance or that is overloaded .
That is what I had to do. You have to delete the older version then install the new. So you also have to redo your favorites and add any premiums like Real debid or track.
But the new version seems really stable. And better than Bee TV because no adds
Hey I was wondering about streamo. I trust ed to use it but it wouldn’t let me watch a movie without a provider package. I tried the free on and it didn’t work. I was a big tvzion fan so I really wanna give it a try
Instead of streamio try stremio. Great free app that is secure and with addons being in the cloud you just configure it on say a mobile phone or a computer, and then you never have to redo the config. Simply install and log in on any device and your setup and history are all available to you without any extra effort.
