My projector setup: no ads, a faster boot, game streaming and British TV from abroad
A projector running Android TV, tidied up over ADB: a replacement launcher, a boot that's twice as fast, Google's ads and bloat removed, Moonlight for streaming games, and a home-made VPN through my dad's Raspberry Pi in London.
The projector is the best screen in the flat, and out of the box it was the worst-behaved. It runs Android TV 11 on a locked bootloader, so there’s no root and no custom firmware. Everything below is done with ADB and settings, and all of it can be undone.
1. A launcher that isn’t a billboard
The stock Google TV home screen is mostly a shop window: rows of “recommended” shows, sponsored tiles and apps I’ll never install. I replaced it with Projectivy Launcher: just my apps, big and clean.
Once Projectivy was the default home, the Google TV launcher could be disabled entirely. One catch: the remote’s settings button used to open a quick picture menu that lived inside Google’s launcher. The projector’s own picture panel still exists underneath, so I mapped the button straight to it.
2. Twice as fast to get going
I profiled the boot and found the slow part wasn’t the projector, it was about 40 apps waking up at once and starving the CPU. An accessibility service nobody had asked for was also making the remote press every button four times. The full debugging write-up is here.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Launcher visible after the boot animation | 18.3 s | 10.3 s |
| Keystone and focus done | ~30 s | 16.6 s |
3. Removing Google’s ads and bloat
Fifteen packages are now disabled for the user. That isn’t uninstalling, and a revert.sh puts them all back. Highlights:
- Google Assistant and voice search. I never talk to the projector.
- Chromecast’s built-in service, Play Games, YouTube Music, Prime Video. All unused, and all woke up on every boot.
- The “auto-installs” config that quietly pushes promoted apps onto the device.
- Feedback, calendar sync, print spooler, the in-store demo app. Nothing a projector needs.
- TalkBack and the text-to-speech engine behind the four-presses bug.
Netflix stays, but it’s no longer allowed to run in the background, which was costing about 22 seconds of CPU on every boot without ever being opened.
4. Moonlight: the projector as a games console
Moonlight streams games from my computer to the projector over the home network: the big screen and a controller in front, the computer doing the heavy lifting in another room. It turns the projector into a games console without buying one.
5. A home-made VPN to London
This is my favourite part. My dad has a Raspberry Pi at his home in London, and it’s on my Tailscale network as an exit node. When the projector routes through it, the internet sees a normal UK home connection, so BBC iPlayer and the other British catch-up apps work as if I were sitting on his sofa.
- No commercial VPN subscription, and no shared VPN address that streaming services have learned to block.
- Tailscale sets up the encrypted connection between the two homes, so nothing needs opening on either router.
- A Raspberry Pi uses only a few watts, so leaving it on all the time costs next to nothing.
(The usual caveat: iPlayer needs a UK TV licence.)
The result
Power on, and within about 10 seconds I’m on a clean home screen with my apps, no adverts. From there it’s one click to a film, a game streamed from the other room, or live BBC from London. The total extra cost was a free launcher, a free Tailscale account and a Raspberry Pi at my dad’s.