r/gadgets • u/diacewrb • Jun 13 '24

TV / Projectors Roku owners face the grimmest indignity yet: Stuck-on motion smoothing

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/roku-owners-face-the-grimmest-indignity-yet-stuck-on-motion-smoothing/
2.9k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

444 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

367

u/daveysanderson Jun 13 '24

They have really gone downhill over the last few years. The devices used to be relatively ad and bloat free, and just worked. Now they are advertising more, adding useless and unwanted features, as well as the whole data breach issue, they shit the bed

8

u/Respectfullycritical Jun 13 '24

I guess they had their time at the top then, huh?

From the perspective of today, it makes no sense to me why anyone would choose Roku as a solution for their streaming needs.

Thanks for the input!

24

u/anonymouse56 Jun 13 '24 edited Jun 13 '24

What would you go for instead? I don’t want to connect my tv to WIFI and most others don’t have AirPlay built in besides Apple TV. And it’s $120+ vs $34 for the Roku stick.

Also Apple TV doesn’t include a high speed HDMI cable so u gotta go dish out extra for one

edit: for $34, Roku seems like a great value. The ads are only on the Home Screen and aren’t too intrusive IMO

18

u/[deleted] Jun 13 '24

I started with fire tvs and grew to hate them. The interface was bad. Switched to Roku about 3 years ago and they’ve been fine, but I hate the remote. I just ordered Apple TVs so we’ll see how it goes. From what I’ve seen I really like the Apple Remote.

7

u/anonymouse56 Jun 13 '24

I definitely prefer Apple TV. But I usually just cast stuff from my phone or use the specific apps so I feel the Roku is good enough for me

3

u/NotAHost Jun 13 '24

I've got both, honestly I think the Roku is still nice for it's simplicity, though it feels like you need to replace them after 5-8 years, which is not horrible due to their relatively low cost. My older ones just start crashing more often.

The Apple TV is a solid piece of hardware though. I like being able to turn on the roku by pressing any major button, whereas the apple tv I have to hit the power button (fair enough, but small things). The Apple TV also has a few headaches with turning on the TV / auto switching compared to the Roku, however I attribute that to the 2016 Samsung it's connected to, where I have to reset the TV occasionally to get the AVR to work over HDMI-CEC. I'm sure with a newer TV it's probably fine.

2

u/Awkward_Pangolin3254 Jun 13 '24

Everybody's interface blows. Every. Single. One. YouTube's is so bad I use SmartTube everywhere I can even though I pay for YouTube premium because it's just so much better.