Roku LT Operating System open source distribution | Hacker News Reader

Roku LT Operating System open source distribution

blog.roku.com

139 pointsdpmdpm70 comments

Open source all you want! It doesn't change the fact that they're spying the contents of your screen no matter what input is being used with Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology

https://docs.roku.com/published/acrservicepolicy/en/CA

The original idea of open source or rather free software is to bmactually "own" the code in a way that you can modify it to your needs. Guess this is not the case here, then. But I guess also most of android falls in that category that by now. I guess we should be using better,more attributes when describing open source

"Free software" has always been a misleading term, unfortunately. Maybe calling it "Freedom software" instead would be clearer.

But when you conflate free software with open source, you get confused people cheerleading their own abuse. Android is probably the worst offender here. Google Chrome, VSCode are others that come to mind.

There's at least:

source available - whether you can read the code

open source - whether you can run (a modified version of) the code on some piece of hardware you own

open hardware - whether the hardware they sell you lets you run modified versions of their code

open contribution - whether they want your modifications

free software - whether your modifications have to be open source too

If it's at least source available, it can have any combination of these.

open hardware to me means that you have access to all of the specifications for building the hardware. Things like when the laptop company Framework posts github repos full of CAD models. Or, initiatives like RISC V.

And, alongside that, there's also open firmware.

Unlocked hardware is maybe what I would call hardware that enables swapping out the software. Although, historically, we didn't even need a term for that, because that was the default aside from outliers like Apple.

I think your definition of "free software" is too strict, otherwise public domain software would not be free software

Your definition of free software conflicts with the FSF's:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#SoftwareLicen...

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

The idea of free software, yes, is to own the code in a way that you can modify it to your needs. The idea of "open source" as a mantra is to confuse and muddle the ideas of free software in order to subvert the ideologists in that camp into supporting and furthering the goals of billionaire corporations. "Open source" as a calling card is intended to kill free software.

   you can disable this feature by going to Settings > Privacy > Smart TV Experience.

can you ? can you really ?

it’s open source now so presumably it’s harder to outright lie about how their system works.

Samsung does that too and use it to sell you stuff, show you ads, and retarget you across devices! (Not saying it’s a good thing, but rather pointing out how common this is)

I'm really sick of the enshittification of smart TV's.

A while after I've had my LG TV, and found every arcane different menu you need to remove all the ads. They started sending me ads via the notification pop-up.

This continued even after finding and removing the consent for advertising (that I'd missed in one of the consent pop-ups.)

I've considered and looked into "dumb" TVs, but I don't think they're for me. I just want one that's not enshittified!

I just don't bother with television full stop.

I can't say I have either since they tried to change the format to cinema from electronic theatre.

This is not "enshittification". That implies it's gotten worse over time. Smart TVs have been doing this from the beginning.

Smart TVs are the enshittification of regular TVs. An attempt to extract more money from the customer without providing a useful benefit.

I disagree. It's definitely gotten worse, notification ads for my TV for example.

LG also didn't used to have home screen ads, but that's a long time ago now.

FWIW I’m pretty happy with my Panasonic OLED (2019 model), it has totally optional smart features (ie it has a Netflix app), works well offline, and turns on instantly.

Why not disconnect your smart TV from the internet and use [insert favorite streaming box]?

I use Apple TVs on all my smart TVs and none of them have ever been connected to the internet. No ads with consistent interface across TV brands.

the only good smart tv is one with no network connection. As long as the manufacturer has any control of the compute on your device they will always be pressured to abuse it to grow revenue. You need to budget 200 to 600 additional dollars for a linux box and use that

That's still not good. I recently switched from a Sceptre dumb TV to a top of the line LG OLED model, and it is sooooo slow. Everything takes forever because it's got to wait for the network connection which doesn't exist, play all its stupid animations, run the "AI" bullshit, and attempt an internet connection again.

Then you did it wrong. The tv should be turned on and set to display one port, say hdmi1 then never touched again until its time to shut it off. Volume should be handled through hdmi-cec from the tvs perspective it should get an on or off signal and maybe some volume signals and it should display hdmi and that is the entorety of its existence.

I guess that's fine if you only have one device connected to your TV, and it supports CEC.

That is not my use case though.

then put something like the OREI 8k HDMI 5 in 1 switch in front. Costs less than 60 dollars, you can control it with whatever universal remote you want or the remote it comes with. If I needed that I would just map it on my flirc skip remote and continue operating my whole setup from that one remote very easily with the tv only ever getting on/off and maybe volume signals. The nice thing about this solution is it lets you run everything at hdmi 2.1, which is often impossible on even newer tvs because only one or two of the ports are hdmi 2.1 on many tvs.

So your answer to "TVs suck these days" is "lol just buy more crap."

You are exactly why TVs continue to suck.

No, my response is protect yourself from the reality of the market via mitigation because you and i cant affect change because the incentive is to get worse for the corporation and minimum efficient scale is too high to have enough competitors to change the benefit math

Is it really enshittification if it was shit from the beginning?

I disagree. I much preferred it when they didn't pretend that TV should be the same as cinema. Even the mistakes are entertaining whereas on modern TV, they tend to stand out.

Is this their dongles, TVs, or both?

Both, and the speakerbars. Roku's business model is not selling hardware.

Yeahhhh I had to disconnect mine from the internet due to this (I don’t want a display ad on the menu screen when I turn on my TV like WTF, my TV just enshittified itself randomly with an update that added this a year or two ago). Which would be fine but you can’t change the TV menu tile layout if you are disconnected from the internet… Just incredible layers of design stupidity here.

I use pfblockerNG(like pi-hole but for pfsense) to block ads to my roku. And I set up pi-hole at family members houses to block ads and telemetry on theirs.

Actually they don't want to open source it. This is the result of a lawsuit.

My router has a separate network for "appliances" (roku boxes, thermostats, etc) that has a very restrictive firewall that only allows internet access according to a manual allowlist.

I feel a cold, dark anger everytime I see my fridge has a wifi connection. I live in a rural area, with an acre+ of land, but suspect my neighbours can still see it.

And maybe an open wifi network of theirs can too.

it is amazing to me that the data collected by things like this is valuable enough to even consider implementing these things.

advertising really has gotten well out of control.

advertisers keep escalating, and i don't think that will ever stop. at some point the medium of television will be ruined, a lot like how mobile web browsing on ios is today.

it seems like it will be necessary to ban this kind of thing, if advertising itself isn't banned entirely. they will not stop until they must break the law to proceed, and even then i'd give it 50/50 on them stopping collecting personal data.

That looks neat, the code appears be mostly in C, seems reasonable documented and is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/rokudev/lt-sdk

I wonder what would make this better (for some use cases at least) than venerable FreeRTOS? Or Zephyr? Or any of the other many, many RTOSes? In particular, the ESP32 comes with top notch documentation and SDKs that will make beginners at least want to stay with Espressif's modified RTOS for a while.

That's also what I was wondering. What problems is this custom RTOS solving that all the other ones don't, or is it in fact just that some Roku engineers decided they needed some job security and having an OS nobody else uses would be a good path to that?

after looking at it, i would use anything else over the roku stuff if i felt the need for tasking. bare metal esp32 is easy with the espressif sdk anyway .

esp32 is way too power budget heavy for anything using batteries though. even using all deep sleep available a msp430 will leave it in the dust by a large factor. i’m surprised they use such large devices in remotes but go figure

I wish they would offer the instruction in text as well rather than only in videos. Videos become stale and can't easily be used as a reference.

Get an AI to transcribe the videos for you and then ask it to create a manual from the transcription.

That's actually not the worst idea, thanks.

God I have put together so many things now, where I have to watch a 30 minute youtube video. All I needed was a 1 page diagram and I'd have been done, but they gotta show close ups of each screw head as it's put in.

The good thing is, it is not written in Brightscript.

Brightscript could have been worse!

And much, much better, as well

How could it be better? Brightscript is a proprietary language that serves nothing but a low power STB.

On hackers news a technology focused platform where custom weird languages thrive. You're complaining about a company who the original developer made their own language.

Isn't this exactly how all of the other languages where created?

    > How could it be better?

On a purely language basis, I'd start with the things the BrighterScript [1] folks have done to clean up the warts and inconveniences of the language.

Personally I'd rather it not exist. Roku would be more pleasant to develop on had they chosen a more popular, existing language as the basis (e.g. Python). Then the task of developing for the platform ~mostly reduces from "learn a new language and a new framework" to just the latter.

I suppose it hasn't inhibited their success, of course.

    [1] https://github.com/rokucommunity/brighterscript

>that is already used in our industry-changing Roku remote controls.

Why does a remote control require a RTOS?

Voice command handling, I would suspect.

Roku remotes are sophisticated devices. There are many models, so features vary, but among the possible features are 3.5mm audio output, Bluetooth audio, voice command input, Wi-Fi, infrared, battery charger and other things. Clearly a substantial MCU is present and thus, an RTOS.

Pretty sure they don't have gyroscopes and accelerometers anymore, but they did early on. It was basically a Wii Mote and I played a ton of Angry Birds on my TV.

to spy on you

You can do an IR remote without a RTOS, but as soon as you do BLE you realistically need a RTOS. You have timers for keep-alives, connection states, competing interrupts, CPU-"intensive" tasks that can be preempted (for crypto)

Please someone make a Roku remote with a physical keyboard.

This might be possible now. I think the better option is having a hardware device that acts a bridge between a bluetooth keyboard and the Roku.

On my rokus, I am able to use my phone as a remote via the roku app. This includes typing on mobile via my phone's keyboard. Makes logging into things much easier.

AppleTV is like that too. It's nice being able to use the password manager on my phone rather than have try to enter some long complicated password a letter at a time.

You can probably do it with a keyboard paired to a server/RPi that emits the keystrokes to the Roku ECP API, if having that second device is acceptable.

Rokus have a rest api that accept all the navigation and text inputs you'd do with the remote.

Does this meaningfully allow a person to push a modified version to their own TV without using a screwdriver?

From the front page of the site at least, no. This isn't for the Roku device itself (which is almost certainly running some flavour of Linux), its for peripherals like the remote control which will have much less powerful processors.

On the topic that will likely pervade this news item: does anyone know the best FOSS TV system

Not sure what exactly you are asking for, but check Jellyfin, it might be part of the answer.

Jellyfin is good. I'm currently using the Roku version

Jellyfin is great.

I know it isn't FOSS, but I just plug a $500 Mac mini into my LG TV and use it with a wireless backlit keyboard/trackpad combo I got for $35 off the zon. IINA is a fantastic player. I rarely use the tv os.

I don't know if I'm missing something but from what I can see...

They don't seem to have any written documentation online, not even a list of features. They seem to have some doxygen docs on the repo, but they're not built anywhere. The only information ready to check are YouTube videos. The developer forum link they have in the top right doesn't work (I think since January they killed their forums).

It's a chore just to know what does it do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Reply on news.ycombinator.com