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 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.
Yes that is my favorite part of the apple tv as well, that it adjusts output to the source frames and resolution. As long as you have a good looking panel with nice color you'll never need to get rid of it. 1080 can really look gorgeous even with everything today being 4k
I was sad both to hear that Pioneer got out of the plasma TV business, and also to let go of mine. It was funny how Pioneer basically perfected the form then promptly exited--true to name I guess. Panasonic bought Pioneer's TV biz, so that was the upside.
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.
The best solution I’ve found is an HDMI matrix. If all you need is to connect your HDMI devices to the TV and an older receiver, get a 2x2 or 4x2 matrix, have one of the outputs go to the TV and one to the receiver. This solves the problem where the TV supports newer HDMI standards than the receiver.
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.
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.
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.
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!
It makes things in the foreground have very sharp edges and seem brighter than the things in the background. They call it "soap opera effect" because it reminds you of the way those sets and people are lit.
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.
> I don't know what this looks like but I probably hate it.
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.
It butchers animation, which is carefully drawn at certain intervals. There's a reason you can pause anime at any frame and it will look like a defined, static image without blurring and smearing.
Motion smoothing absolutely destroys the look of the motion.
For the second part, 100%. I started years ago already collecting my own flac files, and I'm quite careful on picking the best mastering if possible. In 2024, finally, some of the latest remasters are great (like the new Steely Dans from Bernie Grundman). But between 2000-2015 or something a remaster of an album was usually just compressed to the maximum and made very _loud_.
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...
There is nothing official available. There may or may not be services in the internet that meticulously archive every possible master and of course you can go to discogs to buy a physical copy of a certain version of the album if somebody still has it.
This is for me over two decades of hard work and deep interest into music. I highly value my collection.
Real film does have (effectively—the aperture’s closed half the time so you don’t see a smear of moving film) a blacked out every-other-frame which makes the perceived motion smoother (some digital projectors can replicate this, though it halves the effective brightness so you need a really bright one for it to work ok) but yeah, I’d take a little judder over faked digital smoothing. It looks awful.
[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.
Another thing that annoys me endlessly: a few months ago, Apple Music introduced animated cover art and then proceeded to animate album covers that shipped decades before Apple Music existed. If modern artists want to use this for their new albums, or if an artist wants to rethink the album artwork for a remaster, fine. But, Apple deciding to do a shoddy job of moving the Beatles to another layer and having it pulse in and out on the cover of Abbey Road? Fuck that.
The loudness war has ruined a lot of music on streaming services for me. Remasters where you lose the ability to distinguish instruments. No way to listen to the original version.
> What really bugs me are the "Remastered" versions of songs on Spotify that sound like … [a] soulless robo-producer repaint job.
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.
> 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.
I was trying to say that we’re in an extreme minority; they didn’t even think more than ten people would disable it. What’s the reason that makes sense? They forgot?
There were way more than 10 people who read, commented on, and liked that Verge article.
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.
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 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".
That's just not true. My non-Roku TV has this as an option alongside dozens of others I can turn on and off.
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.
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.
For sports it’s the one and only time I enjoy 60 Hz content, to the point that 25/30 feeds look like garbage. I mainly watch footer and hockey, slower sports it might not look so bad.
For the music listening use case, if you can get your hands on a CD and rip it to FLAC that's the way to go.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
Kind of, yes. Terminology used in Australian consumer law is that devices must be "fit for purpose" and of "acceptable quality", especially in regards to other similar products. A software update changing the product in a significant and negative way after purchase definitely would be grounds for a "remedy".
I think you're being unreasonable. "Acceptable quality" is whatever a reasonable person accepts an argument for. If Roku doesn't want to run afoul of these laws perhaps they should make these kinds of features optional instead of forcing them on people? I remember back in the day when a software update removed my ability to play FM radio on my phone and that was certainly frustrating for me. 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.
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.
> If Roku doesn't want to run afoul of these laws perhaps they should make these kinds of features optional instead of forcing them on people?
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.
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?
I can understand not caring about motion smoothing, but I cannot fathom being totally okay with manufacturers being able to retroactively change features of a product after you've purchased it and without your consent. Would you not mind if your car got an over the air update and suddenly had a governor at 70 mph and half the acceleration? Would you be okay with your airpods suddenly deciding that they can only pair with sufficiently new apple devices? Any change that would materially affect the purchase price or decision to purchase absolutely must not be imposed unconditionally after purchase. It's fraud with extra steps.
> I cannot fathom being totally okay with manufacturers being able to retroactively change features of a product after you've purchased it and without your consent.
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.
Are you okay with a bait and switch executed on a shorter time frame? How about a third party breaking into your house and breaking your things, or is that only alright when the original manufacturer does it?
> 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?
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.
Fundamentally altering the way the picture is shown without anyway to revert to the original functionality is obviously a severe deviation from how the product was originally sold. It's akin to not having blue anymore.
So if it downscales to 512x288, your contention is “the video still plays” even though the quality is horrid. If not, what do you imagine the important distinction to be?
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.
Geez, add this to the crummy way they've been rolling out no-opt-out "features" and regressions like automatically showing your recently watched series.
Yes, I really _didn't_ want my 7 year old to stream the Walking Dead, thanks for the nightmares Roku!
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 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.
This presumes that a very large fraction of Roku users asked for motion smoothing/soap opera effect. I would be surprised. (1) Most people I've pointed it out to say "I can't tell the difference". (2) None of those people had ever known that this method even existed--even a lot of people on this thread didn't know about it before today. (3) As for profitability, is there a single person in the world who would buy a Roku because it had motion smoothing?
A ton of people ask me for TV recommendations. Rokus were my goto, but not anymore. I won’t buy one.
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.
I have a TCL Roku TV. It is not, has never been, and will never be connected to the Internet. I have to restart it periodically because there’s a strange sound system bug that makes the audio insanely quiet, but it sure was cheap.
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.
Agree on Apple, they could screw up over but they really do look at users as the customers because we give them most of their revenues.
Consumers are at best the #3 most important customer, after advertisers and TV manufacturers, for Roku. They have incentive to not care about consumers.
That's a solid point! Much as I gripe about my iPad Pro not doing things I wish it did, Apple still sells a gazillion of them to people who think their vision is better than mine. They're a $3T company by knowing what their customers want.
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.
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 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
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.
Hey I hope you see this: you can use your fire cube offline, the thing that doesn’t work is the home screen. But if you hold down the home button, you can get to the app quick launcher (first or second selection, depending if you use profiles) and launch the app directly
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.
Nvidia Shield was one of the best purchases I ever made. I also never made the mistake of updating it like the author of the above article. If something works, and does everything you want it to do, you should never "update" it unless it is absolutely necessary. More often than not these "updates" only serve to restrict the device you own or inject more ads and spyware.
> If something works, and does everything you want it to do, you should never "update" it unless it is absolutely necessary. More often than not these "updates" only serve to restrict the device you own or inject more ads and spyware.
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).
I wish that had been my motto earlier. I bought a resin 3d printer off craigslist in perfect working condition, tried to update the firmware (for no good reason), and ended up promptly bricking the thing. I got it fixed in the end, but it was a huge unnecessary waste of time and energy.
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.
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.
I used to worry about cellular modems, but now I think it will be just plain old wifi they use. There's Comcast Xfinity, Amazon Sidewalk, and probably other companies that turn their device into a communal wifi hotspot.
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.
That is why you connect it to a source which does not have direct internet access. Use an adversarial mindset when dealing with commercial services, they are out to get you after all.
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?
Can you be a film purist and buy a Roku TV? I mean come on - Snark aside, the mistake was thinking the TV was yours as opposed to an advertising vehicle for its makers to use to extract further value from you. Don't feel bad, I was the victim of the same with the Nvidia Shield. Looking at you Android TV.
I felt the same way reading this, though I felt like a patronizing douche. If you buy a TCL or bottom rung TV and expect it to cater to cinephiles, you're just begging to be let down. (Not that there's any excuse for this shitty anti-consumer behavior from Roku)
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.
I will never buy an Android TV again after a horrible experience with a high-end Sony TV. It was extraordinarily laggy. Even changing the volume was a nightmare. Quite possibly the worst UI experience ever.
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.
> 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.
Does anyone want or like motion smoothing? It’s seemingly universally hated by a majority of those who care (myself included), and a minority of those who don’t. Why are TV manufacturers so dead-set on shoving it down our throats?
it's good - or at least, fine - for stuff that you want to look as true-to-life as possible. Sports, nature documentaries, news coverage (if you're into that)
I don't think it's even fine for anything. In all the implementations I've seen, as soon as the action gets too big/complicated, the interpolated frames are dropped. Right when you need the intermediate frames most, it seems to drop to the source frame rate. (maybe just for part of the screen?)
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.
YMMV, but $900 for no crapware is a price I would happily pay. We don't watch TV in our house, so haven't updated it in over a decade, but our next "TV" will be a monitor.
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.
Ironically I bought a big TV to use as my computer monitor because it was so much less expensive. Never connected it to the internet or did any sort of "setup" other than setting it to HDMI mode.
Depends on your setup, but you won’t have any audio without a speaker system
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.
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.
Large monitors are rare. I found Dell 55" for conference rooms. They don't have the features like HDR. They are expensive, the Dell is $1000, and cheap 55" are $300, decent $500, and good $1000.
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.
I use a computer pretty comfortably from the couch.
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.)
> 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 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.
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.
Lol, my TV. That thing on your wall, that thing you paid thousands for, is controlled by the software. You don't own that software. It is owned and controlled by other people. You have paid for a service, that service being the privilege of calling yourself owner of a thing. Your privileges are temporary and may be revoked at any time. In the meantime, any perceived changes are for the benefit of those who actually own the software. Any impact of said changes on renters like yourself is very much secondary.
I used to like my Roku TV. It has a pretty straightforward interface, just tiles of all your apps, and the ads are to the side, out of the way. I love the simple ergonomic remote control. But their actions recently have gotten me looking for a new TV. First the thing with forcing new terms of service on everyone. Now this. My Roku TV has gotten way slower in the past year or so, to the point where many apps are nearly unusable. And I guess they'll be pushing video ads soon.
I'm in a subculture where people mostly don't own televisions (I do watch shows on my laptop, occasionally) but so I have never seen motion smoothing - is there a demo, online, like on youtube or something, that can give me a sense of what you are talking about?
I've heard that before and it just sounds so strange - why would interpolated frames on a HDTV remind people of the production values from standard definition televisions?
It's the frame rate. People are accustomed to seeing video at ~30fps. But old soap operas were somehow at ~60fps, among other things. I think this motion interpolation thing looks significantly worse than the old soap operas, because the interpolated frames break down when there's too much movement, which is exactly when they could have the most value, if you believed they had any value proposition at all.
This video isn’t really worth watching in entirety, but it’s one clip with motion smoothing on and off, so you can skip around to get the idea: https://youtu.be/INQrxHREmJ0?si=E5v3L-gZ__BrUHyC
So I see a lot of stuttering during panning in that video. With motion smoothing on, almost no stuttering. How can anyone prefer the stuttering version?
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.
To me, the "smooth" version is artificial and alien in ways I can't quite articulate, just as it is hard to articulate why a long-winded LLM response, while having good grammar, might be both stupid and wrong.
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.
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.
>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.
Tell me, mr. Ad-man, what good is an ad network... without an internet connection?
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'
Totally off topic, but I have wondered for 30 years where Information Society got “a knife and a fork, a bottle and a cork, that’s the way to spell New York”, because it was clearly intended as a sample or re-creation. Now I’m one step closer.
This definitely looks like what I'll use when I buy my next TV. I'll then just run everything through a set-top box like an NVIDIA Shield or my PS4/PS5.
Smart TVs are cheaper. As already mentioned in another response, just use a smart TV in dumb mode. You get the streaming providers to subsidize your purchase without you giving them any money.
>You get the streaming providers to subsidize your purchase without you giving them any money.
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.
If there are devices around with cellular data access which do not require subscriptions that sounds like something which would be ripe for, shall we say, alternative use cases. Are there? I have not seen these yet but that does not mean much. I do know that if I ever get my hands on one the supplier will rue the day they decided to add a surreptitious data exfiltration channel to their products.
Yes there are. Construction equipment manufacturers sometimes buy a worldwide low data rate cellular plan, and give every machine they ship the ability to phone home.
I recall that there was also an e-reader with similar functionality.
Yes, I know about such connections in heavy equipment and cars and about the old Kindle with 'lifetime' data, what I was wondering about is whether there are surreptitious cellular links built into consumer electronics which enable those devices to exfiltrate user data even when the user does not allow them internet access. I have not heard of such devices yet but that does not mean they do not exist.
I mean: It's not cellular, but crowd-sourced services like Amazon Sidewalk are things that exist in the wild, and are available for third-party use.
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.
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.
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.
You work at Apple and you think Apple is trustworthy. I'm fairly sure people who work at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and the others say the same about their employers. The mere fact that Apple products are expensive does not make Apple trustworthy, it just means they target the 'premium' market segment. Here's some food for thought for those who put too much trust in Apple:
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.
We have a Samsung "smart" TV, with smarts not connected to the Internet. We hook it up to a Roku box. When we turn the TV on it splashes a banner encouraging us to connect. It disappears after 15 seconds or so.
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.
FWIW I have a TCL Roku TV running 13.0.0 and don’t seem to be impacted by this. Motion smoothing is definitely not enabled when watching Hulu/Netflix/HBO.
If I go to picture settings, I see the option for Roku Smart Picture, but it’s not enabled.
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...
> 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?
It's asking you to empathize with users who can notice motion smoothing by imagining that you suffer a major noticable annoyance. The logic flows perfectly well in that sentence.
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 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.
I got an Apple TV 4K a while back to replace my Roku.
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.
Yes that is my favorite part of the apple tv as well, that it adjusts output to the source frames and resolution. As long as you have a good looking panel with nice color you'll never need to get rid of it. 1080 can really look gorgeous even with everything today being 4k
My 2013 Panasonic plasma is still going strong with AppleTV as the primary input source.
Well, short of Pioneer Kuro units, the Panasonic plasmas were the best screens of their time and are still very, very good.
I was sad both to hear that Pioneer got out of the plasma TV business, and also to let go of mine. It was funny how Pioneer basically perfected the form then promptly exited--true to name I guess. Panasonic bought Pioneer's TV biz, so that was the upside.
Same here. I have a Panasonic Plasma hooked to the AppeTV 4K in the bedroom, and the picture quality is awesome.
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.
The best solution I’ve found is an HDMI matrix. If all you need is to connect your HDMI devices to the TV and an older receiver, get a 2x2 or 4x2 matrix, have one of the outputs go to the TV and one to the receiver. This solves the problem where the TV supports newer HDMI standards than the receiver.
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.
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.
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.
It makes things in the foreground have very sharp edges and seem brighter than the things in the background. They call it "soap opera effect" because it reminds you of the way those sets and people are lit.
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.
> I don't know what this looks like but I probably hate it.
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.
It butchers animation, which is carefully drawn at certain intervals. There's a reason you can pause anime at any frame and it will look like a defined, static image without blurring and smearing.
Motion smoothing absolutely destroys the look of the motion.
I've even commonly heard it referred to as "soap opera mode".
Yeah that's what I'd feared--I hate that soap opera effect. It makes fictional escapes into film look like every day life or a TV newscast.
I suspect that the mode was originally made for large screen TVs that mostly sold well for watching sports.
For the second part, 100%. I started years ago already collecting my own flac files, and I'm quite careful on picking the best mastering if possible. In 2024, finally, some of the latest remasters are great (like the new Steely Dans from Bernie Grundman). But between 2000-2015 or something a remaster of an album was usually just compressed to the maximum and made very _loud_.
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...
Earache Records released several remasters of classic metal albums with increased dynamic range:
https://bandcamp.com/search?q=full+dynamic+range&item_type=a...
(also finds some other high dynamic range albums)
Where do you find masters? I only know of stems ripped from games like Rock Band.
There is nothing official available. There may or may not be services in the internet that meticulously archive every possible master and of course you can go to discogs to buy a physical copy of a certain version of the album if somebody still has it.
This is for me over two decades of hard work and deep interest into music. I highly value my collection.
Mp3Caprice
The site seems to sell high quality 320kpbs mp3s but as far as I can tell none of them are seperate multi-channel recordings (aka masters)
Real film does have (effectively—the aperture’s closed half the time so you don’t see a smear of moving film) a blacked out every-other-frame which makes the perceived motion smoother (some digital projectors can replicate this, though it halves the effective brightness so you need a really bright one for it to work ok) but yeah, I’d take a little judder over faked digital smoothing. It looks awful.
[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.
Another thing that annoys me endlessly: a few months ago, Apple Music introduced animated cover art and then proceeded to animate album covers that shipped decades before Apple Music existed. If modern artists want to use this for their new albums, or if an artist wants to rethink the album artwork for a remaster, fine. But, Apple deciding to do a shoddy job of moving the Beatles to another layer and having it pulse in and out on the cover of Abbey Road? Fuck that.
The loudness war has ruined a lot of music on streaming services for me. Remasters where you lose the ability to distinguish instruments. No way to listen to the original version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
So it's back to digging out and ripping my old cds.
> What really bugs me are the "Remastered" versions of songs on Spotify that sound like … [a] soulless robo-producer repaint job.
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.
> 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.
I'm glad other systems offer it as an option for people who enjoy it. I can't fathom the decision process that permanently enabled it for everyone.
They made the feature, they’re gonna enable it or nobody would use it and it would have been a waste of time making
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)
Which is why Roku decided to take away the option to disable it for people who understand and notice the effect and actively don't want it?
Pardon me, it makes zero sense at all.
I was trying to say that we’re in an extreme minority; they didn’t even think more than ten people would disable it. What’s the reason that makes sense? They forgot?
There were way more than 10 people who read, commented on, and liked that Verge article.
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.
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".
If you have to force people to turn it on, maybe it sucks and you shouldn't waste your time developing it.
That's just not true. My non-Roku TV has this as an option alongside dozens of others I can turn on and off.
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.
> I'm gonna need to see some data on that.
It’s enabled by default on all smart TVs. Q.E.D.
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.
For sports it’s the one and only time I enjoy 60 Hz content, to the point that 25/30 feeds look like garbage. I mainly watch footer and hockey, slower sports it might not look so bad.
For the music listening use case, if you can get your hands on a CD and rip it to FLAC that's the way to go.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Kind of, yes. Terminology used in Australian consumer law is that devices must be "fit for purpose" and of "acceptable quality", especially in regards to other similar products. A software update changing the product in a significant and negative way after purchase definitely would be grounds for a "remedy".
It's a TV! It plays video. How is that not "fit for purpose" and of "acceptable quality."
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.
I think you're being unreasonable. "Acceptable quality" is whatever a reasonable person accepts an argument for. If Roku doesn't want to run afoul of these laws perhaps they should make these kinds of features optional instead of forcing them on people? I remember back in the day when a software update removed my ability to play FM radio on my phone and that was certainly frustrating for me. 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.
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.
> If Roku doesn't want to run afoul of these laws perhaps they should make these kinds of features optional instead of forcing them on people?
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.
> dismayed with their purchases
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?
I can understand not caring about motion smoothing, but I cannot fathom being totally okay with manufacturers being able to retroactively change features of a product after you've purchased it and without your consent. Would you not mind if your car got an over the air update and suddenly had a governor at 70 mph and half the acceleration? Would you be okay with your airpods suddenly deciding that they can only pair with sufficiently new apple devices? Any change that would materially affect the purchase price or decision to purchase absolutely must not be imposed unconditionally after purchase. It's fraud with extra steps.
> I cannot fathom being totally okay with manufacturers being able to retroactively change features of a product after you've purchased it and without your consent.
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.
Are you okay with a bait and switch executed on a shorter time frame? How about a third party breaking into your house and breaking your things, or is that only alright when the original manufacturer does it?
> 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.
Fundamentally altering the way the picture is shown without anyway to revert to the original functionality is obviously a severe deviation from how the product was originally sold. It's akin to not having blue anymore.
But it's not akin to not having blue anymore. Not having red anymore is akin to not having blue anymore.
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.
So if it downscales to 512x288, your contention is “the video still plays” even though the quality is horrid. If not, what do you imagine the important distinction to be?
> So if it downscales to 512x288,
Sorry I misread the article and didn't realize this happened. You're right, my bad.
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.
Geez, add this to the crummy way they've been rolling out no-opt-out "features" and regressions like automatically showing your recently watched series.
Yes, I really _didn't_ want my 7 year old to stream the Walking Dead, thanks for the nightmares Roku!
Yeah they keep adding garbage to the home screen, and putting it between the things that I actually use. Smells like desperation.
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 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.
This presumes that a very large fraction of Roku users asked for motion smoothing/soap opera effect. I would be surprised. (1) Most people I've pointed it out to say "I can't tell the difference". (2) None of those people had ever known that this method even existed--even a lot of people on this thread didn't know about it before today. (3) As for profitability, is there a single person in the world who would buy a Roku because it had motion smoothing?
A ton of people ask me for TV recommendations. Rokus were my goto, but not anymore. I won’t buy one.
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.
I have a TCL Roku TV. It is not, has never been, and will never be connected to the Internet. I have to restart it periodically because there’s a strange sound system bug that makes the audio insanely quiet, but it sure was cheap.
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.
Agree on Apple, they could screw up over but they really do look at users as the customers because we give them most of their revenues.
Consumers are at best the #3 most important customer, after advertisers and TV manufacturers, for Roku. They have incentive to not care about consumers.
That's a solid point! Much as I gripe about my iPad Pro not doing things I wish it did, Apple still sells a gazillion of them to people who think their vision is better than mine. They're a $3T company by knowing what their customers want.
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.
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 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
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.
Hey I hope you see this: you can use your fire cube offline, the thing that doesn’t work is the home screen. But if you hold down the home button, you can get to the app quick launcher (first or second selection, depending if you use profiles) and launch the app directly
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.
That does work as stated. Thanks!
Thanks! I'll try that this weekend.
We tech people throw a tantrum whenever something isn't perfect, while most people don't give a fuck - if it works it works.
This is why I buy my TV and never connect it to the internet.
Between the invasive conversation monitoring and ad spots on the menu, it's much better to buy an Apple TV / Nvidia Shield.
Nvidia Shield was one of the best purchases I ever made. I also never made the mistake of updating it like the author of the above article. If something works, and does everything you want it to do, you should never "update" it unless it is absolutely necessary. More often than not these "updates" only serve to restrict the device you own or inject more ads and spyware.
> If something works, and does everything you want it to do, you should never "update" it unless it is absolutely necessary. More often than not these "updates" only serve to restrict the device you own or inject more ads and spyware.
The fact that I agree makes me feel sad.
My lg works great. No additional remote, no extra cable.
LG has opt out monitoring, check your menus for it, it defaults to "on" for several models including $1200 OLEDs
Just wait until earnings line goes down, then they will make pay to play probably.
I have my lg on a vlan, if it wants to send out data thats fine for me tbh.
As soon as it becomes shitty, i add a chromecast
"If it ain't broke, don't fix/update it."
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).
Not a problem if you buy a Sony Bravia TV. I bought one and it only took a little over a year before they stopped shipping updates to it.
I wish that had been my motto earlier. I bought a resin 3d printer off craigslist in perfect working condition, tried to update the firmware (for no good reason), and ended up promptly bricking the thing. I got it fixed in the end, but it was a huge unnecessary waste of time and energy.
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.
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.
I used to worry about cellular modems, but now I think it will be just plain old wifi they use. There's Comcast Xfinity, Amazon Sidewalk, and probably other companies that turn their device into a communal wifi hotspot.
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
That is why you connect it to a source which does not have direct internet access. Use an adversarial mindset when dealing with commercial services, they are out to get you after all.
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?
Cellular modems and passwords? No need, it will just connect automatically to some mesh network outwith your control: https://www.wired.com/story/how-amazon-sidewalk-works/
Can you be a film purist and buy a Roku TV? I mean come on - Snark aside, the mistake was thinking the TV was yours as opposed to an advertising vehicle for its makers to use to extract further value from you. Don't feel bad, I was the victim of the same with the Nvidia Shield. Looking at you Android TV.
I felt the same way reading this, though I felt like a patronizing douche. If you buy a TCL or bottom rung TV and expect it to cater to cinephiles, you're just begging to be let down. (Not that there's any excuse for this shitty anti-consumer behavior from Roku)
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.
I will never buy an Android TV again after a horrible experience with a high-end Sony TV. It was extraordinarily laggy. Even changing the volume was a nightmare. Quite possibly the worst UI experience ever.
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.
> 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.
I’ve never connected them. They’re still terrible. Because they’re designed as Android devices and not just fricking TVs.
Does anyone want or like motion smoothing? It’s seemingly universally hated by a majority of those who care (myself included), and a minority of those who don’t. Why are TV manufacturers so dead-set on shoving it down our throats?
I prefer it. When I go to other people's houses their tv looks worse to me. The motion looks jittery and stulted to me.
Maybe it is good for tracking the ball in sports? (Note: A hypothesis. I don't watch sports ...)
it's good - or at least, fine - for stuff that you want to look as true-to-life as possible. Sports, nature documentaries, news coverage (if you're into that)
it's absolutely awful for everything else
I don't think it's even fine for anything. In all the implementations I've seen, as soon as the action gets too big/complicated, the interpolated frames are dropped. Right when you need the intermediate frames most, it seems to drop to the source frame rate. (maybe just for part of the screen?)
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.
YMMV, but $900 for no crapware is a price I would happily pay. We don't watch TV in our house, so haven't updated it in over a decade, but our next "TV" will be a monitor.
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 fact that a big computer monitor is like 32". Any bigger than that and it's going to be much wider than 16:9.
Ironically I bought a big TV to use as my computer monitor because it was so much less expensive. Never connected it to the internet or did any sort of "setup" other than setting it to HDMI mode.
Most the lack of useful things that come with those TVs like support for eARC and similar technologies.
Depends on your setup, but you won’t have any audio without a speaker system
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.
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.
Large monitors are rare. I found Dell 55" for conference rooms. They don't have the features like HDR. They are expensive, the Dell is $1000, and cheap 55" are $300, decent $500, and good $1000.
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.
I use a computer pretty comfortably from the couch.
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.)
> 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 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.
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.
Lol, my TV. That thing on your wall, that thing you paid thousands for, is controlled by the software. You don't own that software. It is owned and controlled by other people. You have paid for a service, that service being the privilege of calling yourself owner of a thing. Your privileges are temporary and may be revoked at any time. In the meantime, any perceived changes are for the benefit of those who actually own the software. Any impact of said changes on renters like yourself is very much secondary.
I used to like my Roku TV. It has a pretty straightforward interface, just tiles of all your apps, and the ads are to the side, out of the way. I love the simple ergonomic remote control. But their actions recently have gotten me looking for a new TV. First the thing with forcing new terms of service on everyone. Now this. My Roku TV has gotten way slower in the past year or so, to the point where many apps are nearly unusable. And I guess they'll be pushing video ads soon.
[dupe]
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40879492
I'm in a subculture where people mostly don't own televisions (I do watch shows on my laptop, occasionally) but so I have never seen motion smoothing - is there a demo, online, like on youtube or something, that can give me a sense of what you are talking about?
It looks like a 90s/2000s soap opera, like Days of our Lives. I always turn it off on TVs I use.
I've heard that before and it just sounds so strange - why would interpolated frames on a HDTV remind people of the production values from standard definition televisions?
It's the frame rate. People are accustomed to seeing video at ~30fps. But old soap operas were somehow at ~60fps, among other things. I think this motion interpolation thing looks significantly worse than the old soap operas, because the interpolated frames break down when there's too much movement, which is exactly when they could have the most value, if you believed they had any value proposition at all.
I've seen those soap operas and it's true. I'm having trouble finding an online source that really shows what it looked like.
The number of people who've never had to watch an old soap opera is increasing.
I still don't understand what that means. I've never sat down to watch a soap opera, so I have no idea what they look like.
This video isn’t really worth watching in entirety, but it’s one clip with motion smoothing on and off, so you can skip around to get the idea: https://youtu.be/INQrxHREmJ0?si=E5v3L-gZ__BrUHyC
This video has a longer explanation: https://youtu.be/62noXbp-l9o?si=aZqIre3sJy2SpOo7
So I see a lot of stuttering during panning in that video. With motion smoothing on, almost no stuttering. How can anyone prefer the stuttering version?
https://youtu.be/INQrxHREmJ0?t=211
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.
To me, the "smooth" version is artificial and alien in ways I can't quite articulate, just as it is hard to articulate why a long-winded LLM response, while having good grammar, might be both stupid and wrong.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Hard to see in this clip, but it's super annoying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkSjTgrVa3w
Which subculture is this? I also do not own a tv. But I’m not part of any subculture that I know of.
for lack of a better way to describe it, people who were active on everything.blockstackers.com in the late 1990s
mpv can do it, look into manpage, I do not immediately remember the param.
I have tried it, and it is horrible.
My next TV purchase will be a dumb TV.
You can put any android TV into dumb mode ("Basic TV") during setup, which disables many-most of the smart features without affecting core display functionality: https://support.google.com/googletv/answer/10408998?hl=en.
You're still greeted by a full-page ad on the main menu. But yes; it is better.
Tell me, mr. Ad-man, what good is an ad network... without an internet connection?
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'
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9JLen8TTJg
Totally off topic, but I have wondered for 30 years where Information Society got “a knife and a fork, a bottle and a cork, that’s the way to spell New York”, because it was clearly intended as a sample or re-creation. Now I’m one step closer.
Well, great, now I’m going to have that stuck in my head.
> You're still greeted by a full-page ad on the main menu.
The same ad every time, or is it still phoning home for new ads?
This definitely looks like what I'll use when I buy my next TV. I'll then just run everything through a set-top box like an NVIDIA Shield or my PS4/PS5.
Smart TVs are cheaper. As already mentioned in another response, just use a smart TV in dumb mode. You get the streaming providers to subsidize your purchase without you giving them any money.
>You get the streaming providers to subsidize your purchase without you giving them any money.
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.
Dumb TVs are getting harder to find. It would be easier to login on your router and deny access to your smart TV.
Not plugging your TV into the network also works quite well.
5G service channel says otherwise.
If there are devices around with cellular data access which do not require subscriptions that sounds like something which would be ripe for, shall we say, alternative use cases. Are there? I have not seen these yet but that does not mean much. I do know that if I ever get my hands on one the supplier will rue the day they decided to add a surreptitious data exfiltration channel to their products.
Yes there are. Construction equipment manufacturers sometimes buy a worldwide low data rate cellular plan, and give every machine they ship the ability to phone home.
I recall that there was also an e-reader with similar functionality.
Yes, I know about such connections in heavy equipment and cars and about the old Kindle with 'lifetime' data, what I was wondering about is whether there are surreptitious cellular links built into consumer electronics which enable those devices to exfiltrate user data even when the user does not allow them internet access. I have not heard of such devices yet but that does not mean they do not exist.
I feel like there probably aren't. It would be impossible to hide this for very long and it's expensive to implement.
I mean: It's not cellular, but crowd-sourced services like Amazon Sidewalk are things that exist in the wild, and are available for third-party use.
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.
https://coverage.sidewalk.amazon/
Are there TVs with it out now, or is it still Coming Soon?
Unlikely. They don't really exist any more, at least not for a price you will be willing to pay.
Good luck finding one, but this has nothing to do with Smart TVs, and everything to do with what you hook up to a TV.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but the device the story is complaining about is a TV, not a Roku device.
> On June 6th, my TCL TV’s Roku OS was updated to version 13.0.0.
Disable wifi on the TV and use an AppleTV.
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.
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.
You work at Apple and you think Apple is trustworthy. I'm fairly sure people who work at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and the others say the same about their employers. The mere fact that Apple products are expensive does not make Apple trustworthy, it just means they target the 'premium' market segment. Here's some food for thought for those who put too much trust in Apple:
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.
We have a Samsung "smart" TV, with smarts not connected to the Internet. We hook it up to a Roku box. When we turn the TV on it splashes a banner encouraging us to connect. It disappears after 15 seconds or so.
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.
I have a Roku stick, and volume on the remote only works with Roku sound bars. My Amazon stick and Apple TV remotes handled it no sweat.
Then there’s the constant screwing around with the home screen. I think I’ll be going back to AppleTV next time around.
Earlier this year my roku-enabled TV started showing some new Terms Of Service, and it wouldn't let me watch anything unless I agreed to them.
...or unplugged it from the network.
Now, it sounds like they may have done me a favor.
The fine print of that TOS allowed you to opt out if you mailed a letter to a specific legal department at Roku within a certain time frame.
Also, that should be a crime.
Yes! Because they are treating you as if you don't own your TV.
FWIW I have a TCL Roku TV running 13.0.0 and don’t seem to be impacted by this. Motion smoothing is definitely not enabled when watching Hulu/Netflix/HBO.
If I go to picture settings, I see the option for Roku Smart Picture, but it’s not enabled.
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...
I have a TCL with what I assume is Roku TV, and I'll never connect it to the internet for this exact purpose.
Per the law of enshittification, soon only monthly subscribers will gain the ability to disable motion smoothing.
The article says...
> 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?
It's asking you to empathize with users who can notice motion smoothing by imagining that you suffer a major noticable annoyance. The logic flows perfectly well in that sentence.
No one's asking you to care. Some people wouldn't notice tripled text size, even though it's similarly hard for me to imagine.
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.
I think I got my first Roku device in 2008? So far quite happy.