Home Theater Geeks 442 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
00:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
On this episode of Home Theater Geeks. I talk about an article I recently saw about how Roku's latest OS update did something egregious. Stay tuned Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT. Hey there, Scott Wilkinson. Here, the Home Theater Geek.
00:36
In this episode I wanted to talk about something I read recently in my news feed. As you can imagine, my news feed has a number of audio-video related topics. Since I click into them, they seem to show up a lot, which is great. Now, this article came from the Verge and it's called Dear Roku, you Ruined my TV, by Kristen Radke. We'll put a link to the article in the show notes, but it was a very interesting one that really struck me. Now, kristen wrote that she has a TCL Roku TV, a TCL TV with a Roku smart platform as the UI, and she updated her TV, the Roku app, to version 13.0.0.
01:42
According to the release notes, it quote automatically improves picture quality dynamically as users stream. Well, that sounds good enough, right? No, what the notes do not say is that it apparently enabled frame interpolation, what Roku calls action smoothing, and it does not let users turn it off. What? Okay, let me explain frame interpolation. So, in frame interpolation, objects that are. Well, let me first put it this way when you take video of an object moving, video consists of a series of still frames, and if an object is moving while you're shooting it, it can appear blurry. The faster it's moving, the more blurry it can appear. Moving, the more blurry it can appear. And so what TV manufacturers did was they invented this thing called frame interpolation, which takes a video processor, it takes a look at one frame and then it takes a look at the next frame and it sees where the object is in those two frames and it says where should it be in an intermediate frame, if there was such a thing, and it synthesizes a frame to put that object where it thinks it should be in its path of motion.
03:18
And we have a graphic to illustrate that and we can see here. Here at the top is the original image and you can see a car moving across the screen. I'm sorry, the original image is going top to bottom, so the top image on the left is the car is on the right and in the next image the car is on the left as it moves. It moved quite a bit from one frame to the next. So what does this frame interpolation do. It says, okay, here's the car in this frame, here's the car in the next frame. Where would it be if there was a frame in between? And it creates a frame right between the two original ones and sticks it in the middle and, as a result, the car does appear sharper, not as blurry. It works. It's amazing, actually, blurry it works. It's amazing actually how well it works.
04:30
But it also creates an artifact which is called typically the soap opera effect. Soap opera effect, and it's called that because movies that have frame interpolation applied to them look like they were shot on video, like a soap opera. Now this graphic is showing you 60 frames per second, converted to 120 frames per second. Okay, so that's not. That, doesn't? The soap opera effect isn't so bad there, because the original content was 60 frames per second. But when they do it to movies which are 24 frames per second and they convert that to 120 frames per second, they're adding five new frames. They're adding five new frames. There are five interpolated frames for every real frame in the image and, as a result, the soap opera effect gets much, much worse and many people hate it, filmmakers in particular, and video purists certainly, and many TVs now have something called filmmaker mode, which is an attempt to have the TV reproduce the image as the filmmaker intended. And one of the things filmmaker mode does is it turns off frame interpolation. Filmmakers and video purists, movie buffs, really prefer to see that blurry object in motion because it's more like a movie, more like what you see in a cinema. This filmmaker mode also turns off other picture enhancements, most of which actually make things worse than better, and you can look and find filmmaker mode online and why filmmakers and TV manufacturers agreed to do it and, if you have that, turn it on. In my opinion.
07:04
Now, according to the Verge article, soon after the update rolled out, tv owners mostly TCL, but they claimed Hisense as well began posting about the problem on the Roku community forum and on Reddit the fact that now frame interpolation or action smoothing is turned on and it can't be turned off. What this is the real killer? Right there, smoothing is turned on and it can't be turned off. What this is the real killer right there. The Verge in fact reached out to Roku, but they got no response as of when I read this article yesterday. So on the Roku community forum, the complaints were met with a stock response which you can see here, about how Roku is aware of the problem and are investigating, and they're asking users who experienced the problem to send the company information about their Roku model, serial number, device ID, os version and other info you can see right here. They even say send us a video clip and provide it, or upload it to Google Drive and provide us a link so that we can see what it is you're seeing. And that is Notice that you see, right there appeared many times as I was looking at the Roku community forum. Everybody was complaining about this and that just appeared again and again and again.
08:42
So I checked my Roku Ultra. I don't have a Roku TV, a TCL or any other brand, but I do have a Roku Ultra streamer, a little box, and it's on OS 13.0.0. Now, according to several articles that I found, you should be able to access the action smoothing control in the advanced picture settings, and these articles that I found said what you need to do is press the star button while content is playing. So I tried this on my Roku Ultra and the only two items that appeared in that menu are volume mode and language and accessibility. Okay, that appeared in that menu are volume mode and language and accessibility. Okay. So none of those have anything to do with picture quality or picture settings.
09:38
Now, going back to the home screen, there is an advanced display settings menu available from the home screen, several layers deep into the settings, but it only has two items auto adjust refresh rate on off and HDR subsampling 420 or 422. That has nothing to do with this. The auto adjust refresh rate maybe does, I don't know. The description reads auto adjust display refresh rate to the content's native format as needed. Okay, whatever the heck that means. I tried it both ways and didn't see any difference with the TV content I was viewing.
10:25
Now I haven't used the Roku in a while. I've been more using the Apple TV, so I'm not sure what effect it would have on different content, especially movie content. I will look into that. All of this demonstrates the difficulty and the problem of the software running on different different Roku devices not being consistent, which is a real pain. So I wish they could get that act together.
10:59
It could be that the inability to turn off action smoothing affects only TCL TVs. Maybe Hisense as well, but I don't really know. I do know that it is very bad to implement a frame interpolation action smoothing, as roku calls it and not allow users to turn it off. So I really hope roku addresses this issue for those who are having the problem and allow them to turn it off, because for those who hate motion smoothing man, it just ruins the experience completely. So I hope you're not having that problem and if you are, I hope Roku solves it soon.
11:48
Now, if you have a question for me, you can send it along to htg at twittv and I will answer as many as I can here on the show. And, as always, we thank you for your support of the Twit Network. With your membership in Club Twit, you can always listen to the show for free, but if you want to catch the video and watch all the other twit shows without commercials, you can join Club Twit and have all of that content at your disposal. Until next time, geek out, geek out.
