Dear Roku, you ruined my TV
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What really bugs me are the "Remastered" versions of songs on Spotify that sound like they were produced with today's audience in mind and doesn't sound like the original recording of the time, which has way more character and inherent texture by the artists without the soulless robo-producer repaint job. That would all be fine, except that they remove the original non-Remastered versions.
For some of my favorite albums I have multiple masters available, because they can be very different how they sound and sometimes I can't choose the best one.
Oh, and for most of the people none of this really matters...
This is for me over two decades of hard work and deep interest into music. I highly value my collection.
https://bandcamp.com/search?q=full+dynamic+range&item_type=a...
(also finds some other high dynamic range albums)
A simple description would be: It makes film movies look like direct-to-video productions, so basically everything looks like a soap opera. Horrible indeed.
Motion smoothing absolutely destroys the look of the motion.
I suspect that the mode was originally made for large screen TVs that mostly sold well for watching sports.
[edit] I just mean that an actual film projector does achieve smoother motion than most TVs displaying 24 fps the best they can “naturally”, but a TV’s natural best is still far better than the alternative of alien-looking digital motion smoothing.
I realize that I might just be the exception here, but I honestly really like it.
You’re really gonna hate the fact that 99% of people think this is what stuff on their digital television is supposed to look like.
(Which is exactly why Roku did it)
I'm gonna need to see some data on that. The nearly universally description I hear from regular, non-techie people is "my TV started looking weird", especially when they're watching content they're familiar with. If a brand new movie or show looked like this and that's the only way I'd ever seen it, fine, so be it. I remember seeing "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in soap opera mode on our then-new TV and thinking "WTF is this and how do I turn it off?". That's not what Indiana Jones movies are supposed to look like.
It’s enabled by default on all smart TVs. Q.E.D.
Pardon me, it makes zero sense at all.
Both your assumptions (that we're an extreme minority, and that Roku thinks that way) seem to be only supported by the conclusion you make from them.
All that said, putting the feature in enabled by default and seeing how many people end up disabling it would be how they could be grounded in reality and avoid creating a shitstorm.
Put another way, the best explanation for a metric not being collected is that it's not going to reflect well on the decision-makers.
A way more realistic scenario than what you suggest (i.e. that it doesn't hurt Roku, or even makes business sense) is that it's an outcome of a promotion-driven development.
Someone's getting a promotion for launching that "feature", and statistics that show that people turn it off the moment they realize it's there wouldn't bode well with that.
Instead, it appears that the new feature has a 100% adoption rate among the targeted userbase.
Modern problems require modern solutions, you know.
I said yeah, I hate that too, give me a few minutes to fix it, believe me I don’t want it.
Most people probably don't notice it, or just think "that's the way TVs are now".
But agree with the post above that 24p double exposed is even better. Smooth and no artefacts. Luckily that's an option Sony TVs have by default if you pick cinema mode.
It sets my ancient sony 1080p TV to 24 fps when playing back 24 fps content.
On top of that, it let me recalibrate the colors using my iPhone camera.
Anyway, I bought it to reduce ad tracking, and was pleasantly surprised that it was roughly equivalent to buying a new TV.
What’s your setup like?
Right now I'm using the previous-generation AppleTV with a S/P-DIF output to drive the VSX-45TX, but Netflix has announced that they don't want to support that AppleTV model anymore, as of the end of July.
Sounds like the HDMI matrix box as mentioned by jmb99 is a likely win. There are a few models that break out the audio to S/P-DIF. Maybe by spending $99 instead of $19 I'll have better luck than I did with the simple audio extractor boxes I tried a couple of years ago.
Been there.
Now if the receiver is old enough to not have HDMI at all, there aren’t too many options. S/PDIF from the TV to the receiver works, but is lossy above 2 channels. HDMI audio extractors work, but most suck. I had a monoprice one for a few years that was decent, but not great. There aren’t any other options than that though, unless your sources have discrete channel outputs (an RCA jack for each channel), which these days are effectively non-existent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
So it's back to digging out and ripping my old cds.
But also--never seemingly noticed--the technology leads to very crisp changes in direction of the camera panning. So you see a very smooth pan, stopping with no deceleration period, and then a quick new pan in a different direction, with no acceleration. It's disorienting and makes everything look fake. IMO this is the most annoying part, but it's hard to identify and articulate.
Spotify serves up a stereo version of The Flamingos' "I Only Have Eyes for You" that completely destroys the atmosphere of the song. It's nearly criminal.
When the CD format first took hold in the early/mid 80's, it was common for the record labels to push out CD's that were just straight digital transfers of the original analog mastering that was used to create the vinyl LP.
Now we're here 40 years later, and you can still find those CD's on Ebay and rip them using a program like foobar2000, and the result is basically flawless for all the common playback use cases (I'm not here to make the audiophile argument).
I'm also impressed that the 80's and 90's era CD's are not going bad on me. Boomers and Gen-X-ers will always have that box full of treasured CD's, and not a single one of them has failed on me so far.
Where I live (Norway), there is a five year warranty on long lived products, which a tv is, and if it breaks during that period, the seller needs to fix or replace the product. Motion smoothing that can't be turned off seems a serious breakage, and if they seller pushes back, you can point out that Tom Cruise and a bunch of other movie luminaries think motion smoothing ruins movies.
Not sure what the rules are with software updates after the tv is out of warranty. But I do suspect the seller would still be in hot water, if the update breaks important functionality.
Is this the standard in Norway, where the consumer can just call something they personally dislike "serious breakage" and demand their money back? Does this work? Would you actually invoke your Tom Cruise argument and expect that to change anyone's mind?
Or is the culture there just so passive and avoidant that they'll give you your money back just so you go away and stop bothering them?
Whole thing seems wild to me.
Having the video play in a way you personally dislike is perhaps upsetting to you, but it's a TV and the video still plays.
Sorry I misread the article and didn't realize this happened. You're right, my bad.
Honestly just seems nuts to me for the law to be so vague.
Why don't they just say, "Refund under any circumstance the customer feels inconvenienced and upset" and be done with it?
I find that much more honest and easier to follow than what you're describing.
Caveat emptor and all.
The whole point of these laws is to prevent manufacturers from squeezing people by making products that fail early, or that are difficult to use. If you don't understand why this is important then I'd question how much life experience you really have.
Maybe they don't care about running afoul of these laws? Or feel that they are on solid ground?
> The whole point of these laws is to prevent manufacturers from squeezing people by making products that fail early, or that are difficult to use.
But neither of those things happened in this case did they? The TV still TVs (it didn't fail early) and it's not suddenly more difficult to use. The person just dislikes the update.
> I personally continued using the phone but I could see how someone who purchased the phone for that feature would be dismayed at its sudden removal.
I guess this is where we differ. Somebody feeling dismayed does not mean the company owes them a refund (in my opinion) and governments should not (in my opinion) be writing laws that protect people from being dismayed with their purchases.
I can! It's a thing that presumably I was happy with for some amount of time. Things change.
> Would you be okay with your airpods suddenly deciding that they can only pair with sufficiently new apple devices
Yes! It's a risk of buying something. I can evaluate that risk and I can make different buying decisions in the future if I get burned.
If I pay for it, I’m OK with it. If I decide I’m not OK with it, I’ll either not buy it or learn my lesson and make a different decision in the future.
> How about a third party breaking into your house and breaking your things, or is that only alright when the original manufacturer does it?
Why don’t you take a wild guess here?
I think that the only position consistent with your prior statements is that burglary is just one of those things that happens sometimes, and if the homeowner really didn't like it, they'd move. Caveat emptor.
Software updates throw a spanner in the works.
They were not dismayed with their purchase - presumably they liked the product they bought. Then Roku changed their purchase through a software update to something they thought was worse. The same would be true if a software update removed motion smoothing as an option if you like it.
You can understand how this is behaviour from companies - removing functionality from products through software updates - is something that pro-consumer countries might want to discourage?
It would not _at all_ surprise me to learn that this was a mistake, and that there's no one left that knows how to fix it.
Yes, I really _didn't_ want my 7 year old to stream the Walking Dead, thanks for the nightmares Roku!
If you don't fall into that category, you don't have a choice. Things that may be irritating or upsetting to you, if they make money or drive some number that helps a manager get a promotion internally, you're simply out of luck when it comes to software.
Products aren't built for individual users, they are built for massive collections of users that generate revenue.
Their response so far suggests this isn’t on accident (it’s a feature!) and they won’t change it back. I’ll probably have to not hook up the internet on my next TV. Use a steaming box instead.
It gets its video from a TiVO or an AppleTV box. I’m not using the internal software for anything - I don’t trust it at all. You might think the same of Apple, and that’s fine, but I’m posting this from my iPad, I have an iPhone and an Apple Watch and a Mac; they could screw me any time they wanted to, but other than pushing out strange UI they haven’t.
Consumers are at best the #3 most important customer, after advertisers and TV manufacturers, for Roku. They have incentive to not care about consumers.
In my case I basically would love if Fire TV never did another update, stayed on old Android 9, and just let me use the three or four streaming apps with my custom launcher – I don’t want anything else, thanks
I get around this with my custom setup but the hold down home / quick launch is available on all fire tv devices since the beginning.
I'd be tempted to give Roku the same benefit of the doubt except that the person here on HN who says they like motion smoothing is literally the only person I've ever heard of who did. My in-laws are far, far from tech-savvy videophiles. Last time we visited them I had to set their TV to the right aspect ratio. They'd been watching it that way for ages. And when a software update turned on motion smoothing, they called to ask me how to turn it off because they absolutely hated it. These are regular, non-techie people who just want to watch TV and have zero interest in tweaking or tuning a thing. They are not nit-picky. If it bothered them so much that they had me fix it, I've gotta think there are a lot of people who dislike it.
And because of all that, I think this decision is bonkers. It's a hugely polarizing setting. People who like it like it. People who don't tend to absolutely detest it. I can't imagine what advice Roku got that made it seem like a good idea.
Between the invasive conversation monitoring and ad spots on the menu, it's much better to buy an Apple TV / Nvidia Shield.
The fact that I agree makes me feel sad.
Just wait until earnings line goes down, then they will make pay to play probably.
As soon as it becomes shitty, i add a chromecast
That's my moto. Apart from Firefox, my banking apps and Signal, I don't update anything, ever. Not the TV, not the media-box, nothing. Eventually it leads to tragedy and discomfort.
Sometimes I custom update my Win machines for Security patches, but anything that has to do with usability, UI, function, etc. I leave it as is. (I firewall all my apps in my machine anyway).
one pin [pin14] on the HDMI connector allows this to happen; disable it and that problem wont exist until specs & standards revision happens.
More recently, I updated my Vision Pro to the OS beta, which broke my ability to open files off my NAS. That, too, is fixed now…but again, I should’ve just left well enough alone.
If anyone here wants to solve a real problem and get rich doing so: start a company that makes dumb electronics. I’ll pay a premium.
That'd just make you a useful idiot for those sellers. Better use the thing in whatever 'dumb' mode it offers, never connect it to the internet but only expose it to a restricted local network. That way you don't have problems with auto-updates, you don´t get ads, you're not being spied upon, etc. Of course all bets are off if there is an open wifi network around for the thing to connect to but those tend to be rare. There are bakers tales about devices having their own cellular access built-in but I have yet to see proof of something like that - and will abuse the hell out of it when I find it.
Pro-tip: Go with higher-end LG OLEDs. They are fantastic, super fast, and designed for cinephiles. You can often get "certified excellent" open-box deals at Best Buy for a very reasonable price. They're equivalent to brand new.
People on Hacker News love to complain about ads. I hate them too, and go to great lengths to block them. To be clear, they're referring to the "suggested content" on the Home screen, which I'm not sure many people use. Either way, all of that is easily disabled in the settings.
If used with an Apple TV, set top box, or, best of all, 4K Blu-ray, it's a premium experience where you're in control of all the picture settings.
Check out @hdtvtest on YouTube for in-depth dives.
it's absolutely awful for everything else
You may say that that's the same as a Smart TV, and chromecasts come with their own crapware, but the big advantage is that they're separate devices. The Chromecast has no way to infect your monitor through HDMI.
If the Chromecast or whatever starts misbehaving, you throw it away and replace it with something else. You lost $50 instead of the $300+ that your Smart TV costs.
For lots of people, the builtin speakers and apps are fine. I also got the impression that TVs have gotten faster and UI are less sluggish. Why spend $50 for Chromecast when TV already has Android TV, and cost $200 cause going in spare room?
Don't have to use the smarts of smart TV. I never use the apps on my TV, it displays HDMI. I could stop applying updates or unplug the Ethernet and it wouldn't change.
The computer is a Raspberry Pi 4 running Kodi/LibreELEC. It works just dandy. I usually use CEC to control it, though sometimes I instead use a cheap Logitech K400 compact keyboard/trackpad combo. Both input methods are convenient (CEC even uses the regular TV remote), and both were plug-and-play.
It doesn't seem hard to use this computer from the couch at all, and it lets my dumb TV remain dumb while still accomplishing much of the functionality that I want from a video system that lives across the room from the sofa.
(And for everything else, there's Chromecast and friends.)
We did purchase a Roku stick a couple years ago, but they wanted credit card info during the set up, which I thought was BS for something that I just wanted to use for our existing streaming apps -- so we never used it.
The best way is to get a good smart tv (rtings.com) and do not connect it to your network. Use an Apple TV/Android TV/Fire TV device, it’s easier to avoid/disable crap.
They're probably working on some slimy PR excuse for why they feel the need to force-feed you an unwanted feature, how it's actually for your own good, and subtly insult you for not liking it. That seems to be the standard pattern for when a tech company arrogantly pushes a feature that people don't want or like and provides no way to turn it off.
> What you probably should avoid is weeks of customers flagging the same issue with no meaningful feedback or updates. Possibly even more important, your support infrastructure shouldn’t be difficult to navigate or have their own bugs that hinder their use. In this case, there’s both.
This is probably an intentional design choice - make it as difficult as possible to report any kind of issue, thus cutting down the number of issues that actually get reported and reducing the number of support staff needed.
The point where I would have given a giant corporation the benefit of the doubt that this was not intention is long past.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40879492
The number of people who've never had to watch an old soap opera is increasing.
This video has a longer explanation: https://youtu.be/62noXbp-l9o?si=aZqIre3sJy2SpOo7
This means that if a movie is shot at 24FPS (as nearly all of them are), and is shown to theater audiences at 24FPS, then it should also be displayed at 24FPS in the living room.
(But if you prefer to view the world through rose-tinted glasses, then you do you.)
Sure, it's smoother; anyone can see that. It's also weirdly smeary or something.
The (presumably) 24FPS version has a regular amount of judder, and it's the same amount of judder that I've experienced when watching films for my entire life, and each of those frames is a distinct photograph. There is zero smearing betwixt them, and there is no smearing possible.
If films were commonly shot and released at 120FPS, then we'd see videophiles clamoring to get the hardware in-place in their homes to support that framerate.
But we're not there. Films are 24FPS. That's what the content is. That's what the filmmakers worked with for the entirety of filming, editing, post, and distribution processes.
And the process of generating an extra 96 frames every second to fill in the gaps of the actual content is simply not always very good. Sometimes, it's even pretty awful.
It seems obvious to say, but artificially multiplying a framerate by a factor of 5 inside of a TV frequently has issues.
>If films were commonly shot and released at 120FPS, then we'd see videophiles clamoring to get the hardware in-place in their homes to support that framerate.
I'm not sure that's actually the consensus opinion. Some of the complaints about frame interpolation are about specific kinds of artifacting, but many are of "the soap opera effect", and those same complaints were levied against The Hobbit, which was actually filmed at a higher frame rate.
Maybe a good analogy to understand the "it's objectively wrong" perspective (even if I disagree) is AI upscaling, for example of historical photos. Just like autosmoothing it adds details in a mostly plausible way, and some people prefer it, but it adds fake detail (which understandably annoys purists), and sometimes it actually breaks and produces visual artifacts.
I have tried it, and it is horrible.
> On June 6th, my TCL TV’s Roku OS was updated to version 13.0.0.
It’s mostly diff use cases for if you have media already or use streaming platforms.
But most importantly I work at Apple and see how the sausage is made — privacy is integrated into every step of the process. Working in AI this is quite difficult because it means I don’t have user data to work with unlike if I worked at some other bigcos. It’s funny to me when I interview people coming from such companies, it never really clicks until they ask how many GPUs I have access to and I reply “where all this data is coming that you want to process?”
I think it’s easy to become jaded, but when it’s based on assumptions then you don’t know the delta between it and reality. Overall I suspect the true distribution of corruption/valid concerns across society overlaps little with public beliefs… I believe most of the shady stuff is happening outside of the public eye and we don’t even know it exists.
https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-is-an-ad-company-now/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/23/apple-use...
There's more to be found on this subject, just feed a search engine with questions related to apple tracking and gathering data on its users.
Please note that '...but they are not as bad as Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Facebook/etc' does not exculpate Apple. They may well be but that is not what I compare them to. I compare them to that Google-free device running an AOSP-derived distribution connecting to the server-under-the-stairs, not to any other corporate entity. In that comparison they fail spectacularly, hence my preference for running free software.
The same ad every time, or is it still phoning home for new ads?
I recently got my hands on a "smart TV" for free because the power supply was broken and the replacement the owner had bought did not work. That turned out to be due to the fact that he bought the wrong board so I used parts from both boards to create a working power supply and there I was with a working "TCL 50DP660", this turned out to be a 50" 4K Android TV. Whatever I do with it, it won't get an unfettered internet connection just like all other 'smart' things around here. They live on their own private network where they only get to see what I allow them to see, i.e. my own media services and whatever proxy service I provide to the outside world. No auto-update, no ads, no nothing.
In Cocaine [1] Dillinger spells "New York" as 'a knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork'. Here we spell the 'New Net' as 'a wall, a block, a proxy and a lock'
Exactly. My Android-based TV shows me an ad (a still one) on the home screen for some new TV show available on some streaming service, and that's it. Then I just press down-arrow a few times and another button to start Jellyfin or SmartTube.
It's only a matter of time before the Alexa device like the one on my nightstand starts providing a sliver of Internet access to a smart TV that you have never been intentionally brought online.
I recall that there was also an e-reader with similar functionality.
I have no problem with the Roku box, but this makes me happy I didn't buy a Roku TV, and that I've never attached the TV itself to the Internet. My next streaming box will be an Apple TV, but as of now I'm in no hurry.
Then there’s the constant screwing around with the home screen. I think I’ll be going back to AppleTV next time around.
...or unplugged it from the network.
Now, it sounds like they may have done me a favor.
Also, that should be a crime.
If I go to picture settings, I see the option for Roku Smart Picture, but it’s not enabled.
> If you’re someone who doesn’t notice motion smoothing or doesn’t particularly care about it...
This basically is me.
It then proceeds to describe a number of things that would be blatantly obvious and asks you to imagine if you couldn't turn them off. Yes, if my Kindle's fonts all went 3x size, I'd both notice and probably care.
But this "logic" fails to work with that previously quoted sentence. Yes, I would care about something I noticed or cared about. But why should I care about something I don't notice or don't care about?
I usually notice motion interpolation within a second of watching. I also find it to be intolerable.
Maybe people like you can come out ahead on the newly reduced prices on these RokuTV's with recently reduced market value.