Roku Faces Criticism Over Controversial TV Update (theverge.com) 28
Roku's recent update has sparked controversy among TV owners, particularly those with TCL and Hisense models. The update, version 13.0.0 released on June 6, introduced a feature called "Roku Smart Picture" that has led to numerous complaints about unwanted motion smoothing effects. The Verge adds: While Roku doesn't explicitly mention motion smoothing, or what Roku calls "action smoothing," the update has made it so that I and many others with Roku TVs see motion smoothing, regardless of whether the picture setting is Roku Smart Picture or not. My TV didn't even support motion smoothing before this. Now, I can't make it go away.
Several years ago (Score:1, Troll)
The best way to get Roku's attention was to blow up the CEO's personal cell phone. He's a registered voter and you can get his number of his registration or one of the numerous people finding websites. You can also go after the product managers at Roku on linkedin. They deserve to know how they're adding to the enshittification of modern technology.
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Re: Several years ago (Score:2)
It was until the did their agree to arbitration or else. I choose else and completely disconnected it from Internet.
Consequently, no update to this annoying feature. Yay!
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The best way to get Roku's attention was to blow up the CEO's personal cell phone.
Not sure how things are on the iOS side, but the normal Android Phone app has had the ability to use whitelisting for incoming calls (from the device contacts) for some time. Turn on blocking of Private, Pay Phone, and Anonymous Callers as well and very few of those nuisance calls are going to get through. Then just need to turn off the voicemail box or leave an outgoing message to "contact me on $privatemessagingplatform"
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On iOS there's a toggle - "silence unknown callers" - that sends anyone who's not in your address book directly to voicemail. There's also a "silence junk callers" toggle available.
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Wow.
iPhones have unexpectedly gained a few notches up in my book.
Good to know, thanks.
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...Turn on blocking of Private, Pay Phone, and Anonymous Callers as well ...
Man, if there is someone out there actually using a payphone I don't want to block that call, I want to talk to them and find out where they are. Every time I see one (very rarely) I pick up the handset to see if it actually works, and of course it doesn't. I don't know what I'd do if I actually found a live one in the wild. Faint?
good (Score:2, Interesting)
People spend thousands of dollars on 4090 graphics cards and the fastest gaming CPUs so they can play video games at up to 540 Hz (that is the framerate of the new ASUS gaming monitor) -- anything below 144 Hz is seen as peasant-grade. And yet somehow watching TV at anything more than 24 Hz is an affront to god or something. 24 Hz being the minimum rate that moviemakers could get away with to save on film stock costs.
Except for sports, of course, 60 Hz is the ideal for sports for some reason.
Re:good (Score:4, Interesting)
But mostly, change is hard.
As to the actual topic, well they bought a Roku... And to your topic, smearing frames together just gets you blurry interstitial frames, but no more usable frames; that is to say it just inserts faked frames which some people can very well detect and should at least have the ability to choose to see a video in it's original format on their own hardware.
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>And yet somehow watching TV at anything more than 24 Hz
Uhm, no. Watching movies shot at 24 Hz at higher than 24Hz IS the problem.
What you don't understand is that shooting with analog 24Hz film produces an effect on the brain that is lost by interpolating at higher frequencies.
Which is an entirely different thing than computer generated graphics (or animation) where each image is perfectly crisp, and benefits from higher framerate.
Saying that as a 144Hz monitor owner, and having interpolated anime for h
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I like high fps video, but only if the source was recorded at that high fps (50i, 50p or whatever). Motion smoothing (as in, interpolation to convert 24fps source material into 48fps or whatever) can range from almost passable to complete crap and should definitely be possible to turn off.
I do not understand why some people prefer 24fps over 50fps (assuming it was actually filmed at that fps), but I guess some people would probably like a feature where the TV drops every second frame from a 50fps video.
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I do not understand why some people prefer 24fps over 50fps (assuming it was actually filmed at that fps)
I prefer at 24 fps because, for some reason, at 48 fps my brain notices so much detail that every prop looks like a prop, not as whatever it's intended to look like. For example, a mage's wand or a witch's broom look like wood to me at 24 fps, but like cheap plastic at 48 fps.
For example, when the first Hobbit movie was released in theaters at both 24 and 48 fps, I watched the 48 fps version and everything looked like plastic. Gandalf's staff? Plastic. Bilbo's sword? Plastic. Armors, bows, etc.? Plastic. It
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Weird, I have not noticed that effect and I always prefer high fps (if the source has it, of course), it just looks better to me. That's why, if given a choice I'll take 50i over 25p, since I can use yadifx2 on 50i and turn it into 50p (or just watch it on a CRT TV) and I'll usually take SD 50fps over HD 25fps (of course HD 50fps would be best).
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I attribute this to having grown watching low-fps TV and movies and my brain ending up "wired" in such a way it cannot untangle anymore. I have some other associated visual quirks, probably a very light form of synesthesia, such as perceiving blue-tinted lights as "low relief" compared to surrounding lights, even though they're on the same plane.
I imagine many other people who grew like me don't have such an effect, and that had I grown watching high-fps content it might look natural to me. Same thing could
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Those extra frames from motion smoothing are interpolated and look like ass though. It's not like that 30 year old sitcom was shot at 60fps. It also absolutely destroys animation.
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People spend thousands of dollars on 4090 graphics cards
The Steam hardware survey shows that 1% of all Steam users have a 4090. More people use a GeForce GTX 1660 from 2019 than a 4090.
2.0% of Nvidia card owners have a 90-series Nvidia card from *some* generation.
68% of Nvidia card owners have a 50- or 60-series card (entry level).
35% of AMD card owners have a 500- or 600-series card (entry level).
The high-end gets a lot of attention, but its audience is minimal in numbers.
Dup (Score:5, Insightful)
We already had this discussion.
https://entertainment.slashdot... [slashdot.org]
There, I said:
It is a good thing I use a "TV" as a monitor and have a separate devices feeding it, including a Roku Ultra. Because if any device forced me to use motion smoothing (or required me to turn it off EVERY TIME I played something), it would go right into the trash. At least in this case, it looks like it might be only when using the "roku" function in the TV, so it might have nothing to do with the HDMI inputs, so you could disconnect it from the net and use any external streaming device without a problem.
I am so sick of products thinking they know better than I do what I want or must use/do/see.
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> I am so sick of products thinking they know better than I do what I want or must use/do/see.
I suppose then you are not using Windows 10/11?
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>"I suppose then you are not using Windows 10/11?"
All my systems run Linux. Have for close to 30 years.
Never buy a Roku controlled TV...... (Score:2)
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In that case the TV goes from a "smart" TV to a regular dumb TV, where you can still use the various inputs and TV tuner. We have Roku TVs we use in our camper totally offline and they work perfectly fine.
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"Controlled" and "compatible" are two different things. I have two Roku TVs that get used as computer monitors. After I learned to tell them Roku wasn't available when setting them up, they work fine.
Of course, none of the network capabilities work, but that's not important for an office. At the time, their sale price put them well under the cost of a dedicated 4K monitor. And, once to box is recycled, "Roku" disappeared from them.
Solution (Score:3)
In that vein: here's Jeff Geerling on youtube doing a walkthrough of setting up a Raspberry Pi 5 as a media center [youtube.com] - a highly capable replacement for an AppleTV, Android box, Roku Ultra, NVidia shield. It really, truly, is not that hard, and cost-competitive for its capabilities. Internet streaming? Done. 4K video? You got it. Play movies you ripped to a hard drive? Child's play.
Best part, the OS+media player is (largely) open source. If an update screws things up, you can choose not install it, or roll it back after the fact, or install something else entirely.
Grow up and get AppleTV (Score:1)