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Visitor45763
Roku Guru

Re: Favorites completely gone!

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@ncguy68 wrote:


I have been looking at the Mediasonic digital tuner on Amazon ($30).   The description says it has a program guide,  but I don't know how much data it will show or how far in advance. 


It's probably an over-the-air guide. In my area, lessor channels are notoriously innacurate with the guide info broadcasted. This could be a big difference between Roku TV's builtin tuners. They probably use an online guide's info(?).

I tend to use the web page "zap2it" for seeing what's on. I almost never use the on-screen guide. Just habit. The onscreen guide could be better. There could also be better guides online too. I settled on zap2it.

"People are often amazed at how much we’ve done with the number of engineers we’ve got." (Roku CEO Anthony Wood, Austin Statesman, Oct 4, 2019). "Amazed" is one way of putting it.
ncguy68
Binge Watcher

Re: Favorites completely gone!

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To get a good online program guide that would scan a week or two in advance (like the Roku guide)  we would probably have to invest in one of the OTA DVR units. 

ncguy68
Binge Watcher

Re: Favorites completely gone!

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@Visitor45763 

I'm anticipating doing that too. I like the idea of the universal remote to control both TV & external antenna-to-HDMI tuner. I saw this post yesterday, describing how to program a universal remote to use Roku features. (Another post in that thread emphasizes how the universal remote's numeric keypad won't give access to channels. Roku's software doesn't recognize those keys. Thus, one of a few reasons to use an external tuner as an HDMI input.).

What I dread is delving into each one's user-interface/menu/features. To me, that's the important part. You could make your own digital tuner and output to an HDMI connector. The interface to use it is the part that takes some thought about what would be intutitive, ease-of-use. 

I had a Zenith (DTT900) & DigitalStream (DTX9950) analog-to-digital tuner (back when the DTV cutover happened, and we got "vouchers" to buy converters.). Those had very nice user interfaces (intuitive, ease-of-use features) -- especially for being made for a captive audience & a gravy-train of government subsidy. I didn't appreciate the way those were made until I owned a Roku TV. (Just to clarify for others: Those devices won't work for this intended purpose. Those converted digital signals for old analog tvs. We need the same receiver that outputs digital out an HDMI port. Hopefully with the same, considerate user interface.).

I remember one of them was slightly better. I forget which. One of them, you could press "4" and it would go to that channel after waiting a couple seconds for an additional ".1" or ".2". You didn't have to press enter. It would just "do the right thing." It would go, letting you easily get close to where you'd like to be. If there was no signal, it said so. You could up/down arrow to where you wanted to be. If it was a hidden channel, it you could pull up the menu to unhide it (without having to circumnavigate 4-5 menus, leaving the channel you so easily accessed). You could scan for new channels without losing your existing previously-discovered set of channels, already hid/faved. It just updated your existing set with what was newly discovered (previously-discovered channels with no signal were removed. New channels added in. Anything that didn't change was left alone. You could do a full scan too, replacing everything, starting over.).

I think it speaks volumes about Roku that they don't care about elegance like this. It shows in so many ways (the lack of beta testing; the lack of response from "the appropriate teams" after customers caring enough to provide feedback is "passed along." Making an already clunky interface more unfriendly by removing Favorites, or making the channel-change remote button a single-operation instead of continuous. Years of ignoring customers asking for numeric keypad remotes. Everything sends the same msg to customers.).

Anyway, I'd love to see detailed reviews of those external tuners (their features). I'm worried they might be clunky like Roku's. I wish I could find something like those Zenith or DigitalStream boxes (with similar consideration put into the functionality, ease of use, elegance). They're so cheap, maybe I'll buy a couple and review their elegance factor.

I have seen a few reviews posted online at You Tube.   Antenna Man has a review of the Mediasonic and there are a few others.   I've also been reading user reviews online,  but they offer no visuals. 

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wa2exz
Reel Rookie

Re: Favorites completely gone!

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This is even worse than when You decided to take away manual favorites.  Based on This decision and your unwillingness to listen to your customers on this issues I will never buy another roku product no matter what the price is.  Your attitude of telling us what we want as Apposed  to asking us what we want is not customer centric.  I would never ever recommend a roku tv for anyone wanting to watch any live on the air tv channels.  I’ve asked how I could move back to the previous firmware version but no one will answer me so I suspect it is not possible... showing even more inflexibility. 

MARK16
Newbie

Roku adds streaming TV channels wiping out favorites in the process

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I turned on my TCL Roku tv this morning and found that Roku had, without permission, added streaming channels to the channel guide and took away my favorites. The net result is that it now takes 3-5 seconds to go from channel to channel and an eternity to go from one channel to a channel that's far way. Why don't Roku programmers spend some time watching Roku tvs so they can better understand what improves the viewing  experience and what really detracts from the TV's functionality in the first place? Roku should give the users the ability to explicitly designate favorite channels as users used to be able to do. The idea that users don't know what their favorite channels are is just ludicrous.

dubydubydo
Newbie

Re: Favorites completely gone!

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Just ran into this issue myself with update 9.4.  OTA channels cluttered with hundreds of garbage streaming channels.  I just want to watch a handful of OTA channels and some streaming apps. Now I have to browse dozens of unwanted OTA channels.  My Bush-era digital tuner has better functionality than this "smart" TV.

mleek
Reel Rookie

Re: Favorites completely gone!

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This is not a solution - not a happy customer.

IK
Reel Rookie

Re: Favorites completely gone!

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To be fair, one positive feature of this change is that when you go to the channel guide and use the up and down arrows to switch, you can scroll speedily though the channels on the listing, much more rapidly than before when it just stepped through the channels one at a time.

d0n1
Channel Surfer

Re: Favorites completely gone!

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I'm done with roku TVs. I hate that they update my TVs automatically. Leave my TV alone roku! I will replace my 2 roku TVs and buy TVs with actual numbers on the remote controls. 

I really liked roku when I first got the TV a few years ago. I even told people to buy one! I even bought a 2nd one for another room! With this latest update, the roku TVs are basically unusable for convenient watching of OTA TV. 

Visitor45763
Roku Guru

Re: Favorites completely gone!

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@d0n1 wrote:

I'm done with roku TVs. I hate that they update my TVs automatically. Leave my TV alone roku! I will replace my 2 roku TVs and buy TVs with actual numbers on the remote controls. 

I really liked roku when I first got the TV a few years ago. I even told people to buy one! I even bought a 2nd one for another room! With this latest update, the roku TVs are basically unusable for convenient watching of OTA TV. 


Agree with your sentiment. If you only watch tv,: someone posted that you can do a home>settings>system>advanced>factory reset, and tell the setup dialogue that you don't have internet access, and it will install whatever version of Roku it came with. If you never connect to the internet, it will never update. That would work if you never stream. (I think there's also a way to discover the url the tv goes to for updates, and block that in your router. Then you could have access to streaming without updates. But, the streaming apps probably need updating. That might be great to stream with old apps.).

There is a way to manually update the software later (downloading the latest update to a USB flash drive, inserting that into the tv). That would be an option if a future update came out well. (I wish I'd been doing that previously, and had a curated collection of updates I could up/downgrade myself to.).

I wish there was a way for the community to develop the antenna interface. An open-source version of that part of Roku. I think some really slick yet intuitive things could be done. It's not complicated. The "gestures" of watching antenna tv are decades old. It's not an entirely new interface to figure out. ATSC 3.0 is coming soon. That will add features to the same interface. If the basic 1.0 interface isn't understood/implemented, I can't imagine what 3.0's added features will look like. Even more intuitive, I suspect.

"People are often amazed at how much we’ve done with the number of engineers we’ve got." (Roku CEO Anthony Wood, Austin Statesman, Oct 4, 2019). "Amazed" is one way of putting it.