How the **bleep** did Pluto TV get certified???
Tracker ID: 28-467-001
For the rest of us: Express+ 3910, 12.5.0b4178-51, Pluto TV version 5.30b2. All claim to be recent.
The problem: Find a movie to stream (I've been doing a Godzilla marathon), play it. Wait 30-60 minutes. One of two things will happen on my unit.
1: Pluto TV will start choking and then crash back to the main Roku home screen.
2: Pluto TV will start choking and then hard crash the Roku, screen will go black, bouncing Roku reboot animation will play, then I'm back to the main home screen.
This will usually happen twice within a 90min movie. Sometime the auto save location will get close to the crash point to continue viewing, sometimes it will force me to watch all the #### commercials again and really waste my time.
I have been playing many other movies from The Roku Channel and Tubi (also Godzilla marathon), and I have yet to see this problem with them. I seriously doubt this is a hardware issue with my unit.
Noted Point: No channel/app should go haywire enough to cause the linux back end to hard crash.
Noted Point: Since the Roku interface is so primitive to be "easy", to get certified, there needs some kind of crash reporting that automatically gets sent to the channel creators. I used to do something like this with the linux servers I used to build for automated monitoring. It should be trivial to implement on the back end of a channel. Note to devs: Was there a clean exit at the end of a video?
Another performance issue with Pluto TV: When first loading their channel, they go straight into some live TV that I do NOT want to view, and then they keep it in the background. On an Express+, this makes navigation EXTREMELY SLOW AND PAINFUL ("regular" navigation isn't much better). As I'm still evaluating Roku, I don't care to buy a U*model to see if this is any better. To get certified, this behavior shouldn't be allowed. Why??? #1 is the awful sluggishness I already metioned. #2 They're wasting my internet bandwidth. In the big city, this probably isn't an issue, but sometime in the future, I may move out to some land I own out in the country, and it will be a problem. #3 Now I get "trash TV" episodes listed in my "Recently Viewed" list that I never wanted to see. It's like overly desperate advertising (that pisses off the customer). I've already complained about Roku navigation clutter and organization. This behavior is also called "slamming" in other industries and is used to pump up view counts where none should have existed.
Someone may shoot their mouth off and tell me that this is entirely Pluto TV's fault (which a lot is), but Roku are enablers of this bad behavior... so before you post: no, not entirely. And for the record, I'm generally for open channel design how ever they want to do it, unless it starts causing problems (like what I just mentioned).
