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Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

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Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#161

Post by Timon3 »

monort wrote: post #154
ssl-3 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us strongly prefer things to be presented as they are, without artificial enhancements. 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.)

I understand that, but everyone here is saying that the stuttering version is better in itself and the smooth version is horrible? To my eyes it's the opposite.

It's definitely something that is different from person to person. I strongly prefer it disabled, but not because it looks terrible most of the time - I could get used to it if it looked exactly like it would look if it had been produced with that higher framerate. The issue arises whenever it breaks, for example by making the acceleration of visible motion unnatural. This happens fairly often, either through unrealistic acceleration, or by breaking the previously established visual language of the movie. That's where it breaks my immersion - but that's not the case for everybody, and it's absolutely legitimate to say that you prefer either, or don't care at all!

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.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#162

Post by lsaferite »

adamomada wrote: post #69
iamleppert wrote: post #65

I hate to break it to you, but you are only a tiny fraction of the users of something like Roku. The software isn't developed for individual users, it's developed according to a product roadmap, which is itself driven by the behavior of the largest and most profitable cohort of users. 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 o…

I agree with you and this is why I choose android or android-based streaming devices, in my case Fire TV. There’s enough hackability built into android that you can use e.g. tasker or other dedicated macro apps to do just enough customization that it ends up working the way you want. I know I’m the minority and most people don’t care or take it for granted how the thing works, but I don’t. In my case I basically woul…

As a related aside, I have a Fire Cube device on one of my TVs along with Jellyfin. I've been ripping all of my Blurays and DVDs to a local NAS with the objective of having my content available even if my internet connection is down. I discovered, the hard way, that the Fire TV won't function AT ALL without an active internet connection. It just says it cannot load the home page with no option to open any installed applications. Other STBs in my home worked just fine during the outage. If I can't find a way to make it run Jellyfin during an outage, it's going in the bin.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#163

Post by hagbard_c »

azinman2 wrote: post #135
hagbard_c wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better still, use Kodi or Jellyfin on whatever you have lying around - Kodi works fine on a Raspberry Pi 3 - so you're not swapping one spy for the other.

AppleTV doesn’t spy. Downstream whatever apps you do will, but they already know what you’re playing anyway. It’s mostly diff use cases for if you have media already or use streaming platforms.

What do you base your trust in Apple on? I don't trust them any more than I trust Google or Microsoft or Amazon or whatever other data-hungry corporate entity you may think of.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#164

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

rolph wrote: post #31
recursive wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even give my TV the wifi password. I'm paranoid that it's going to update something without my consent. I fear the day they come with cellular modems and bypass the wifi entirely.

HDMI can be used to move tcp/ip packets [HEC], all it takes is one media device with connectivity, and a firmware that provides tunneling capability, and your TV will leak over the HDMI connector. one pin [pin14] on the HDMI connector allows this to happen; disable it and that problem wont exist until specs & standards revision happens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI

Given how scattershot support is for CEC, is that a real concern? Cannot even get the basics working, are they really going to try and nab external network connections?

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#165

Post by paulcole »

thfuran wrote: post #156
paulcole wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you okay with a bait and switch executed on a shorter time frame 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?

>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.

Call me crazy but I think there's a difference between breaking and entering and theft of physical objects and motion smoothing being turned on in a TV set.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#166

Post by ssl-3 »

thfuran wrote: post #160
monort wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that, but everyone here is saying that the stuttering version is better in itself and the smooth version is horrible? To my eyes it's the opposite.

Yeah, I don't know why people want horrible low frame rates. It's distracting every time a shot pans. But it seems a lot of people do.

We don't want "low frame rates". A lower frame rate is not the goal.

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.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#167

Post by devilbunny »

moomin wrote: post #149
devilbunny wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we are not an extreme minority. My wife - who really doesn’t notice SD vs HD, let alone 4k, if the aspect ratio is correct for the screen - went ape when we got a TV with motion smoothing. I said yeah, I hate that too, give me a few minutes to fix it, believe me I don’t want it.

I don’t think I know of _anyone_ who prefers it on.

I don't either, but you've got to be a close friend before I'm watching TV at your house, and I don't pretend that my close friends are a randomly selected portion of the populace.

Most people probably don't notice it, or just think "that's the way TVs are now".

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#168

Post by azinman2 »

hagbard_c wrote: post #163
azinman2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AppleTV doesn’t spy. Downstream whatever apps you do will, but they already know what you’re playing anyway. It’s mostly diff use cases for if you have media already or use streaming platforms.

What do you base your trust in Apple on? I don't trust them any more than I trust Google or Microsoft or Amazon or whatever other data-hungry corporate entity you may think of.

For AppleTV the hardware is far more expensive than the alternatives because it’s not subsidized by selling your viewing habits. The privacy policies tell you this, as does public knowledge. Companies like Roku which make most of their money on analyzing and selling your data do so publicly because they want people to know they should buy this info from them. Apple as a whole has had its traffic analyzed across devices by many many many security researchers; if there was a great contradiction in terms it would be public info by now.

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.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#169

Post by CamperBob2 »

kstrauser wrote: post #129
CamperBob2 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you doing for audio? That's been my big stumbling block when trying to use a newer AppleTV with an older TV and 5.1-channel amp. I've tried several HDMI audio extractors and found them all to be pretty terrible.

I have a decent - not great, but decent - Sony STRDH590 receiver that serves as an HDMI switcher. Apple TV and PS5 send HDMI to it, and it selects the signal to forward on to the TV. What’s your setup like?

An antique Pioneer VSX-45TX receiver with an older-but-not-quite-antique Vizio LCD TV used as a dumb HDMI monitor. Looks good, sounds good, but doesn't work with the newest AppleTV since there's no way to get audio back out of the monitor, as there is with many newer sets.

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.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#170

Post by kstrauser »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #169
kstrauser wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a decent - not great, but decent - Sony STRDH590 receiver that serves as an HDMI switcher. Apple TV and PS5 send HDMI to it, and it selects the signal to forward on to the TV. What’s your setup like?

An antique Pioneer VSX-45TX receiver with an older-but-not-quite-antique Vizio LCD TV used as a dumb HDMI monitor. Looks good, sounds good, but doesn't work with the newest AppleTV since there's no way to get audio back out of the monitor, as there is with many newer sets. 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…

Got it. You’re almost in the situation where if you want to upgrade the CPU, you’ll need newer RAM, but that goes in a different motherboard, with connectors your PSU doesn’t have… but at least you can keep the case!

Been there.

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