roberta591 wrote: After reading other posts this is beginning to look like a wide spread issue.
Look at home>settings>system>update. It should tell you when your tv was last updated. If that date coincides with when this behavior started, you may have been affected by one of Roku's untested updates. A lot of peoples' antenna-tv experience was degraded by 9.4.
You may have already had 9.4, but something went wrong with the online guide Roku uses. I never used the guide before 9.4. I don't recall what it looked like, or how it changed in 9.4. But, after 9.4, my channel changing became slow due to what looked like waiting for the guide info. (Some people who watch antenna tv without internet couldn't even watch anything.). On one occasion (something slow between me and the guide), it took 10 seconds to change channels. That lasted an entire night.
SOLUTION: I factory-reset my two Roku tvs, but during the initial setup I told them I would connect to the internet later (but, never did). That, is a much more usable antenna tv experience (for me). Continuous channel changing works again. The "Favorites" feature is back. Captions on mute work again (although I've seen others saying it's working again without cutting the cord the way I did). Volume leveling is back.
The only possible downside is that there's no guide info, But, then again, I see that as an upside. I'm not subject to Roku's Mad Hatter reliability issues. (Plus, I never used the on-screen guide anyway. I always used titantv or zap2it from my phone or laptop. Just a matter of habit from my prior tv. So, losing the slow guide was all upside to me. It does display the channel's program info when you change to a channel. That info comes from broadcast EPG data.).
I'm using both my tvs that way (as "dumb" tvs. Roku makes them dumb. They're just dumb in a less harmful way now.).
For streaming: I've added a $22 Firestick Lite to one. I use a $24 Sofabaton F2 slip-on universal/learning remote to control the tv. Its 11 buttons are barely enough. I mapped them this way:
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You lose 1) the circular left/return button. (I think that's only used to switch to the immediately prior channel. Sounds handy, but I never use it. So, I sacrificed it.). And, 2) the home button. The left (back #2) button takes you to home. So, that seemed like the best way to do it. (If I needed either of those two buttons, I'd sacrifice the "*" settings button and anticipate needing to use the Roku remote whenever I had to access that. I felt like the above was the best tradeoff.).
I was going to stream this way through my other Roku tv, but have since decided to replace it with a TCL Android tv. I saw a video showing a TCL Android operating upon numeric keys from a universal remote. (I have a URC-7880 universal remote I can use.).
Beyond having a numeric remote to access channels: I'd like to see how TCL Android tvs work (compared to Roku). Something seems very wrong with the TCL<->Roku relationship. Nobody knows who's testing updates, if they are being tested at all, etc. Android has a more established infrastructure for working with hardware makers. There's a lot of fingerpointing between TCL & Roku which hurts the customer.
So, I want to get one foot in the water this way. I imagine TCL is prone to hardware failures (being inexpensive). I'll definitely spend the $40-50 USD for the 4-5 year extended warranty. I usually don't buy these things. I figure they wouldn't sell it if it didn't make them money. But, after seeing all the TCL problems here (or, not knowing how much of it is TCL versus Roku's reckless/sloppy software development), I'd definitely buy the warranty this time. I'd just like to see if TCL Android has the same kind of mysterious, unexplained problems TCL Roku does. (The way Roku never wants to formally track bugs, it makes me suspect it's not TCL's fault. So, I'm gonna throw $200 that way instead of spending $50 on another Firestick Lite & F2 remote. Maybe donate my old TCL Roku to charity -- with a note attached to never connect it to the internet, due to Roku's problems.).
Perhaps your guide problem has resolved itself (like my 10-second channel changing did after one night). The above may not be much use to you. But, if your Roku continues to be unstable, you might want to bookmark the above.
One thing I like THE MOST about being disconnected from the network: my tv is protected from future untested updates. If we had a way to turn off updating (like Android has), or roll back to a previous software version (like I've read Android does), it wouldn't be so bad. But, I'm not playing this Russian Roulette with my tvs. I like having things more modular (so I can dispose of a $22 streaming stick). I've seen the dark underbelly of having all your eggs in one basket (carried by someone who doesn't care what they do to your tv. If you look back through months and years of threads here, there's virtually zero customer engagement. People are having the same problems for months/years. It's just "passed along" forever.).
I feel like Roku has become the "Comcast of streaming." They were leaders of the rebel "cord cutting" movement a decade ago. Now they're as bad as anyone we cut the cord from. #CutTheCord2.0
