Problem reading USB through Media Player
Hello, I have used roku for several years now. Today I inserted a usb drive and got this prompt. "Allow access to external media the external media you have connected can be read by channels ins...
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Again, that's a generic message that isn't specific to Fubo or any other channel. It's simply saying that a channel is able to read your external drive if that's the purpose of the channel. Right now there are a number of channels specifically designed to access your USB drive, including Roku Media Player, Chaneru, and several music-only player channels. Plex can't access the USB drive, and I can't remember if Emby can. But those channels that can are designed for that specific purpose. If a channel isn't developed for local media playback, it won't be accessing your drive, plain and simple. People are reading nefarious intent into this, and it simply isn't there.
Sorry atc98092 , any channel can access the USB drive if it wants.
The main takeaway here is that nothing has changed! It's always been this way. Maybe Roku should have made that clear from the start, but it seems that they've opened a real can of worms letting people know about something that's been around for over a decade. Ignorance was bliss. The right way to do this would be to add permissions a la Android, but I've rarely known Roku to do anything the right way.
Jim, yeah, kinda alarming to realize a portable HDD or thumb drive with family info has been essentially hanging out on the internet. Despite what many of these obscure "channels" claim to be offering, there's no way to know the extent of their access, beyond just offering a movie chock full of advertisements. I'll admit, I've used a couple, for certain old movies, but I remove them when I'm done. And I'm sure not gonna watch ALL the activity on my home network, looking for suspicious activity. But, you're absolutely correct, "Ignorance is bliss."
cskyI never realized these "channels" had the freedom that I now suspect they have. It's been a while since I've dug through the "Terms" set forth in the Roku app. I did once again a couple of days ago and still didn't see anything pertaining to "channels" having the freedoms I suspect they do.
atxchip, I wouldn't say channels (Roku may finally be calling them apps) have that much freedom and Roku keeps taking away any "freedoms" they may have had. For example, apps can no longer see the MAC address or serial number of a device. I don't know what those could have been used for nefariously, but that ability is gone. The USB access just hasn't kept up with today's expectations on privacy issues. Other than that, Roku devices are probably more locked down than any other platform I've seen.
I've always used devices with USB ports since those are the ones with Ethernet ports, but I've only ever attached a USB drive for testing. I much prefer a NAS for my media. It could be argued that any app has free reign over anything attached to a user's network, but I don't see a way around that. Should Roku block all access to the local network? That would upset a lot of people. It's really about time that they added permissions for apps.
And, in case anyone was wondering, USB drives get mounted read-only, so no app can change anything on a USB drive.
OK, I worded my response poorly. I didn't mean to imply that only channels that are designed to play media from an external drive are able to read that drive. But a channel is going to have to be programmed to access the drive, and there's really no reason to do so if the channel isn't designed to play media from the drive. It uses resources that they don't need to use, make hooks into the Roku OS that aren't needed, and would simply be a waste of time because there's no market for any information that might be found on an external drive. Where is the benefit for the channel developer to access an external drive if they aren't planning on playing the media?
If you go down that rabbit hole, then you'd have to ask the same question about channels that really do need to access the drive. They have the same ability to read the drive, and could misuse any information found there. But again, how could it be misused? What possible benefit is there for someone to retrieve that data? What are they going to find? The file names of the media on the drive, and perhaps the codecs used in those files. There is no value to that information, even if the file names are matched to a movie or TV show.
You just need to step back and look at any possible reason someone would want that data and realize there is no valid reason. And it's a read only data path, so someone couldn't alter anything on the drive.
renojimI appreciate your insights regarding the range of USB access that may or may not exist regarding 'channels' using Roku! Seems like Roku's sudden interest that it's users get 'the message' that it inserted that pop-up whenever we connect a USB device, definitely got the attention of some of us.
But even more immediately concerning was/is that disallowing access via the pop-up choices also caused problems with further access for us. Conundrum much?
Yah, love it that almost every piece of software nowadays is referred to as an "app." I think I've seen even an Android O/S being called an "app" 🙄
