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Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

theverge.com

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Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#41

What would be the downsides of simply buying a big computer monitor instead of a TV? It seems to me like an easy way to avoid all the crapware that comes with Smart TVs.

The fact that a big computer monitor is like 32". Any bigger than that and it's going to be much wider than 16:9.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#43

What would be the downsides of simply buying a big computer monitor instead of a TV? It seems to me like an easy way to avoid all the crapware that comes with Smart TVs.

It's hard to use a computer comfortably from the couch

That's what Chromecasts and its competitors are for.

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.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#44

What would be the downsides of simply buying a big computer monitor instead of a TV? It seems to me like an easy way to avoid all the crapware that comes with Smart TVs.

Mostly cost - a 55" Samsung Odyssey Ark computer monitor is like $1800. You can get a similar TV for 1/2 that price.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#45
If you live in the right jurisdiction consumer protection laws might be able to force the seller to get this defect fixed or have them take back and refund the tv.

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.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#46
post #26

I don't know what this looks like but I probably hate it. It's like the frame interpolation that some TVs had to generate 120p frames from 60p. I actually prefer the original 24p (or 24p double-exposed to 48 like cinema projectors do) for films. 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 rec…

> It's like the frame interpolation that some TVs had to generate 120p frames from 60p. I actually prefer the original 24p (or 24p double-exposed to 48 like cinema projectors do) for films. I realize that I might just be the exception here, but I honestly really like it.

Same for me. I can't stand watching sports with fast motion or large panning scenes on a low refresh rate screen.

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.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#47
I gave up on TVs. Luckily I watch very little TV anyway so it's no big deal. I remember my friend buying a TV for thousands a few years ago and seeing just how laughably bad the interface was compared to Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 2 that I've been running close to 10 years now. Literally it's been on almost that whole time (just had to replace the power supply once). Not only does it play everything on my NAS, I can stream to it and control it from my phone etc. I never update it because it just continues to work. I use a projector instead of a screen because it's better and thankfully they are still dumb. Oh and a huge sound system. And all of that costs less than that one shitty "smart" TV...

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#48

> Not long after the update rolled out, other Roku TV owners (mainly TCL, but Hisense, too) began posting about the issue in Roku’s community forum and on Reddit. Since I work at The Verge, I told our team about my issue. We reached out to Roku for comment and got no response. We wrote about the problem. Commenters on that post agreed: it sucks. Still, there was radio silence from Roku. They're probably working on so…

Another excerpt from the article that is worth pointing out:

> 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.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#49
I hated my stupid TCL Roku TV so I got a TCL Android TV and it’s worse. The terrible incompetence of the team who manages to make a UI that lags out by multiple seconds when trying to cursor to the OFF option is frustrating. But I’m sure it makes their Project Manager overlords happy because it’s easy to supply ads to.

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.

Re: Dear Roku, you ruined my TV

#50
I used to work at Roku (audio team). I left in late 2020, but I know that many of Roku's best and brightest were shitcanned as part of the several rounds of layoffs that happened recently, in an effort to cut costs.

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.

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