Users are unimpressed, eager to toss devices if test sticks.
They’re not “smart” TVs. They’re TVs with shitty android spyware boxes attached.
Stop using that garbage. Don’t connect it to a network, just use it as a display.
If you need to watch YouTube on your TV go and grab an OSMC (Kodi-based OS for media boxes) media box. You can get a pre-built one for around $100, or install it yourself on a raspberry pi.
These manufacturers depend on you being lazy and accepting their spyware. You will save yourself so much more headache in the long run if you control your own hardware and software.
Trying to navigate through the world without some minimal knowledge of computers means you’re going to get taken by every scam like what Roku is pulling.
It’s not just the tvs, they’re doing it on their streaming sticks too.
Yeah, every product that they sell will do it.
Using something like OSMC (or buying a Vero is you don’t want to mess around with the setup) will let you control what runs on your player.
Until you do that, you’re paying some random company while also giving root access on a device in your house and letting them waste your time with ads.
All you get out of the deal is avoiding having to learn how to use a new piece of software. A Pyrrhic victory due to the fact that you have to learn to use Roku.
I’d rather spend a few hours learning how to setup Kodi. It’s free software, you don’t pay for it and it’s Free software, you control it with no strings attached.
My big issue with kodi is that i like my media library to be human navigable and named and it does not. Dealbreaker
Kodi doesn’t organize your media, you use other applications for that (tinymediamanager, sonarr/radarr, etc).
The default library layout, for Plex/Jellyfin/Kodi is very human navigable, for example TV Shows are in this format:
TV Show Name |-Season 1 |-Season 2 |-\-S02E01-Episode_Name.mkvThere may be a few extra files in the directories depending on what metadata you’re storing and what you’re pulling from the Internet, but it is organized and navigable.
aight, I never said that Kodi organises media, if it tried to, I would shoot it on sight.
I organise my media, ebcause it’s media I’ve decided I want to keep and organise accordingly. Kodi has very specific requirements and cracks the shits if you don’t give it exactly what it wants. If that fine for you, then that’s fine for you. That is not how I roll
how I do roll:
-> \fileserver
–> Sci fi series
—> Babylon 5
----> 1.01 - Midnight on the Firing Line
----> …
----> 2.01 - Points of Departureetc etc etc.
I’ve played with a translation file so Kodi’s file scrapers can understand that X is Y and react accordingly, but it’s very “my way or the highway” and I don’t bow to a machine. When it refuses to even acknowledge the existence of a file (as in just display the file name, not necessary with any metadata) unless it can jam its thumb up there, I’m out.
I understand, I used to manually organize my own files as well.
When I’m given the choice of user interfaces. Choosing between a file browser and something like Kodi, Plex or Jellyfin seems pretty easy, to me.
Even with the most organized file system, a file browser just isn’t a good UI for a media player interface. No user tracking (watched episodes, saving progress or playlists), for example.
That being said, everyone’s use case is different. There isn’t a “right” way, but in a multiuser environment across multiple types of devices with non-technical users it’s much easier and feature rich to simply use Kodi/Plex/Jellyfin.
Trying to setup direct access to the file system of a media server which could be accessible by Android/Apple phones, video game consoles, smart TVs as well as Linux and Windows clients would be more complex than just using a media interface and a standardized media directory structure.
ok. Please stop trying to convince me to change to something I do not want to.
I stated my issue with Kodi. If there’s no solution to that issue then it’s a dealbreaker, like I said.
This is one of the many reasons why you should be your own streaming service. 🏴☠️
Shut up. Stop making every thread about your piracy agenda. Nobody cares. And this isn’t even remotely related to the topic in this case. Apparently you don’t even know what Roku is.
U mad bro?
Now this is the classic Internet retort I require of my Lemmy subscription
🤌
🤏
Lmao mate you’re on lemmy
Nobody decent shares your opinion. Shut your mouth and sit on your hands.
Pirates are a vocal minority. The majority does in fact share my opinion.
It really doesn’t… Beyond the active “pirates” who would tell you to fuck off are the many MANY regular folks sympathetic to the cause. You live in a fantasy world where everyone else is as much of a tattletale pig boy as you are, friend. Especially on a thing like Lemmy, where the average user is an elder millennial, we all at e very least dipped our toes in e seven seas sorting the Napster/Kazaa days.i
You live on an island, friend. And nobody wants to visit you there.
Everyone has pirated something when they were 15. I’m still pirating stuff sometimes to this day. But I don’t see it as my mission to spread it like a political agenda on every thread on the internet. Literally copy-paste without context. What’s the point of doing this? It’s really annoying especially when phrased so arrogantly, like it’s the only right thing to do and everyone should pirate because it’s some kind of political protest against big-tech or something. It’s all just bullshit coming from people who don’t want to pay but feel guilty about it, so instead of just admitting that they don’t want to pay they perform some moral gymnastics to rationalise their behaviour and keep the cognitive dissonance at bay. Just do your thing and let everyone do theirs.
Really shit the bed with that one m8, got something going on? Send me a dm and talk it out
Just take it elsewhere. I’m tired of seing the same comment about piracy on 75% of my threads recently. You don’t need to tell us you do piracy. You’re not actually on a mission. You can cope elsewhere.
You know what would make you less mad? Watching less ads. You know you could do that? Piracy.
I can do that without piracy aswell.
But this is still totally off-topic as you cannot pirate Roku. It’s a device. Not a streaming service.
Then you don’t know what Roku is either. Because it’s definitely a steaming service, too.
For example, they got the exclusive on Weird Al Yankovic’s “Weird”. I watched that on Roku. The first time. But I found the ads so grating that I pirated it so I could rewatch it without the annoyance.
say what you will, but piracy ensures that my copy of Brokeback Mountain will never be taken from me again.
👢👅
I wish I could, but I didn’t type it.
We had one on our TV the other day. This will absolutely be our last Roku.
In the meantime I immediately installed PiHole, to block all their ads.
This is the way.
I will absolutely be getting rid of mine if I experience this.
I only have my roku tv because I got it dirt cheap ages ago, I don’t use it all that often and no good enough reason to replace it, I’m already considering replacing it with a dumb tv and just hooking up my laptop to it. If I ever experience this, it will make the cost of a new dumb tv 1000% worth it.
You can reset your Roku tv and simply not connect it to the internet. It will still work as a dumb tv.
I’ll try that, thank you.
Yup!! 100%
Go look at the down votes on all your posts and just how universally unpopular your take is - That’s called being wrong. That’s fine, you can be wrong sometimes, that’s okay. It doesn’t define you, but stop digging in the wrong direction.
I can pay for music, I often don’t on principal. I work to find other ways to contribute to artists as directly as I can (patreon, merch, shows, etc). I’m not alone in that. You had some weird guilt socialized into you that tells you your value is in what you spend and own. Protest at any level is valid. Copyright law is bullshit, DMCA takedowns are bullshit, DRM and digital streaming music that you never actually legally own is all bullshit. Anything you can do to make that broken system nervous or hurt is a great and valuable thing to broader society.
You are unequivocally wrong here, you’re the last person to realize that, but you still can realize it here and now today and go forward from here. How about it, take the olive branch, bud?
Basically punishment for people who either don’t get their own streaming box/avoid tvs with roku built in.
What? This is reported to be happening on both sticks and tv versions of the rolu app.
It’s capitalism… When every CEO, Board Member, and shareholder wants a yacht, it’s literally never enough. They even created a term to describe this inevitable deterioration of every company’s product: enshittification.
It’s not that they all want yachts, they make enough to each buy multiple yachts. It’s just that nothing is ever enough. They don’t know what success is, so they chase the undefined feeling until they die unfulfilled. Fucking living dead and a cancer on collective humanity
They want nesting yachts.
And once they have a nesting yacht, they want an even bigger yacht to nest that one in.
It’s yachts all the way up.
Enshittification was coined for online services, which includes roku, but doesn’t apply to all products.
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
Whether it was coined for all products or not, it’s definitely applying to all products
The same way drowning can be used to describe all types of suffocation, sure. As long as you absolutely ignore context, words can mean anything!
Making things worse, making them stop functioning, and making them overly restrictive are three different things.
Enshittification: making online products and services worse over time to serve business interests.
Planned obsolescence is making things stop working after a period of time, not just making them worse.
I don’t know what the term is for HP printers not allowing third party ink to work or not letting a scanner in a combo printer/scanner work without ink but that also isn’t something getting worse or stopping due to an arbitrarily short end of life. Those are overly restrictive design decisions, which is different than enshittification because the printer sucked from the day it was purchased.
At this point in time, the term “enshittification” gets broadly applied to things being made progressively shittier, which is exactly what the term sounds like it says. Feel free to downvote me for saying that, but it’s how people are using it, and it fits. No part of that word suggests anything about it being specifically about online products and services, so I don’t really get the hostility towards people using it outside of that.
People use terms wrong all the time and ruin the nuance. Like calling all lying gaslighting.
Oh course it does, what are you talking about? It applies to any product or service that can have its quality gradually and intentionally reduced in service of having its profit margin increase.
Originally coined it was meant to describe online software that started out useful and frequently free, then run into the ground when it came time to monetize it.
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
Just because people atarted using it to mean ‘stuff gets shitty’ doesn’t change the original meaning.
Enshittification was coined for online services, which includes roku, but doesn’t apply to all products.
American businessmen: “Hold my beer and watch this”
hence, punishing those who didnt get their own streaming box (that isnt roku based), or has a tv that has roku built into it.
Owners of smart TVs and streaming sticks running Roku OS
The article clearly states
Owners of smart TVs and streaming sticks running Roku OS
It IS affecting tvs with roku built in.
hence its PUNISHING those who bought tvs that have it BUILT IN
Then you are writing it to mean the opposite of what you intended.
Is this what you meant?
hence, punishing those who didnt get their own streaming box (that isnt roku based), AND those who have a tv that has roku built into it.
hence why i went to clarify it on the second comment. I can agree that on the first attempt, it can be read off, but the second attempt clearly shows that roku tvs are affected regardless of how you read it
Not what your original comment said. And completely disingenuous too, since the Roku streaming box is one of the most popular ones
I never plugged mine into the Internet. I just plugged in an Apple TV, and I’m good to go. No ads, no sweat, no problem.
New devices don’t allow that
I got mine three weeks ago from Amazon. How much more new can it get?
Really? Last time I used a Roku device it forced an account.
It appears to be device dependent, some have the initial online setup requirements, even the Community Forum on Roku’s site tells a poster they will need to setup with the internet connection and then can disconnect after setting it up.
Last post in this thread with a response by a former moderator.
You will need an internet connection and a Roku account to activate your Roku TV.
…
Once the activation is complete, you can disconnect from the internet and continue to use your TV
Roku is the worst thing to happen to TVs since motion smoothing.
News to me, what Roku do?
I mean the sticks and boxes, not the TV’s themselves, I get those suck.
I don’t understand the question. I’m reacting to this story, what the company is doing, without distinction between the branded TVs and peripheral devices.
I get ads suck, and I was pissed and confused when I received one the other day on my Roku.
I just didn’t know if there was some other reason that they were the worst thing that happened to TV that I missed.
You ever wonder why many of Rokus remotes don’t come with a mute button? Weird huh… Maybe just an especially expensive button, huh?
Huh…I must have gotten lucky because all of mine have a mute button…
It’s a problem. Also reports of some reviews that do have mute buttons, but the functionality gets selectively disabled - I.e. on the YouTube app, pressing mute will pause an ad, but not mute. The point is to force you to complete watching ads.
I’ve not run into that either, but YouTube doesn’t show me ads, fortunately
It’s definitely a dark pattern
NVidia Shield 2 when?
Apparently Valve might be releasing a shield-like thing. If they do it’s an instant buy for me.
A steam link?
Steam Link 2 that also does 4K video would be awesome.
Never, apparently. Dunno why Nvidia is dragging their feet on this one
I was expecting them to release one with the Switch 2 but haven’t heard anything yet unfortunately.
Not to say that the Shield 1 isn’t great. It’s still the best streaming device to this date! It’s awesome!
Ive never looked into it but how viable is a raspberry pi zero for this? I mean, is the hardware powerful enough and is there software available for easy TV use? Potentially paired with an android bluetooth remote.
I don’t have personal experience trying to do that specifically but the zero is a really underpowered device that’s sluggish even updating itself. I’ve tried streaming games through a pi 4 which is way more powerful and even it struggled with the video being choppy, though it is more intensive than just streaming video by itself.
You’d probably have good luck with a pi 4 or 5, though, and they aren’t very big either.
You are right. Ive looked into it and it lacks memory for what I’d want out of it. Pi4/5 would certainly work though it would no longer be the “stick” form factor.
Tried this with streaming from the cable box, and it did not work really well. Upgraded to a Pi 4, which now runs a full Kodi MediaCenter and is connected via Gigabit Ethernet to the cablebox. I use a Logitech harmony with an IR USB dongle, which was a bit clunky to get to work because it’s old, there’s probably much easier Bluetooth solutions available, or you can just use your phone as remote. All in all I fiddled around an afternoon to get the whole thing to work, there’s tons of how tos on the web.
I remember when Roku was the big cost saving alternative to TV. I remember when it was the all in one streaming aggregator.
Meh, I don’t even watch TV anyway
Oh god, and I was considering getting a Roku stick for my old dumb TV, glad I went for a Xiaomi box instead 🫣
Glad I never set up the smart features on my roku TV.
HTPC+PiHole 👍👍
Also if you’re cool 🏴☠️
Roku is terrible anyways. They can’t even accurately reproduce the colors.
