Remotes

[lebeyer]

my remote jumps all over the channel lineup when I select a channel sometimes scrolling through hundreds of channels and I'm not able to stop it.

[joekam]

Unplug power chord from roku. Wait 10-20 seconds . Plug back in . It should fix it if it. You will need to do it every time it happens until roku fixes sw. Should last up to a week or more each time. 

[Seph13]

I’ve been reading these now going back a few years (multiple topics of this complaint), and I have to say it’s kind of funny/sad the feedback that Roku gives: ”Its your Fault!”

We have Roku’s everywhere in our house. The skipping problems did not start until the last three months.

What has changed in my home? Nothing. Aside from it being the summer of 2023 instead of the summer of 2022 or the summer of 2021… there is no difference. There are no new items in the room. The TV hasn’t moved. And it happens on multiple TVs on 3 different floors and two different buildings on my property (one even uses a different network (great neighbors!!!)). So it’s not interference in one room because it happens in multiple rooms/buildings.

If we turn off the lights in those rooms and we turn off all other power applications; sometimes it stops, sometimes it doesn’t.

If we turn everything on; sometimes it stops, sometimes it doesn’t.

I went from the basic remote that came with the Roku TV AND with a stick version and tried different tvs (element, Vizio, hitachi etc) with different removes…sometimes it stops, sometimes it doesn’t.

I bought a brand new Roku voice remote with built-in battery, USB charger and it has a headphone jack! Still the same results: all the TVs, sometimes it stops, sometimes it doesn’t.

I’ve decided to clean all the sensors on all the Roku TVs and Remotes, sometimes it stops, sometimes it doesn’t.

so I’m not quite sure how it can still be my fault. We’ve determined the TV brand doesn’t matter. We’ve determined that it doesn’t matter if it’s the default remote that came with the TV, that came with a stick or one that I bought brand new from Walmart three months ago. 

not a single Roku TV in my home is younger than two years and everything just started recently. So either I have a really really bad luck, in that I can make all my remotes act up in the same manner just like I can all Roku TVs, OR… now hear me out… OR Roku has a problem that they’re trying to blame on us as the customer.

Oh did I mention that the power company had to shut off my power for seven hours one day last month while they enacted repairs to my exterior electric box? I used an old UPS battery so I could watch TV while they were here. If it were electrical interference, then I wouldn’t of had any problems. Guess what though…

So now that we’ve determined what it is not... And the fact that it’s multiple TVs; multiple different, unrelated scenarios; multiple different accessories... Can we move past the, “it’s on the customer end, not our issue” and work on a bug fix?

[DarkMagician]

10.  ROKU customer support:  Repeat steps 1-8 above until issue is temporarily solved. Our skeleton crew of SW devs are really occupied on ways to better monetize the platform and debugging the remote clicks counter routine is a really low priority item on their Jira queue.

[joekam]

WHAT PEOPLE CAN DO TO STOP THIS PROBLEM FROM REPEATING> As former NASA technical director and a scientist. I assure everyone at this point it is ROku operating sw and the fairly recent change in the last year. I can even now tell you what area it is in in code. It is in something called context "switching interrupt processing of stack information". It is very clear that the channel routine in the main operating system allocates a location in RAM memory the represents button pushes for the channel up dwn , lft . rht buttons. But it also saving channel information of last location you were in the APP and that is the problem. That button location is supposed to be used only by the operating system. It appears that that location also can be moved, which is common. They do it by the use of an address pointer. This is all so far very common is allocating a channel button command location. It is now very clear that the problem is in the channel button push address pointer management. IT is very very clear that the operating system is corrupting the Address pointer and the system is looking at the wrong data value for what represents which and how many buttons were pushed. Roku added a piece of code to the operating system in the update and that new piece of code is accessing the wrong address location corrupting the address pointer for the channel control. We can even now predict where in the new operating system that code resides. It is in the APP channel input command address pointer. It is getting lost in the stack , because whatever new routine they added had to have an interrupt assigned to it. In doing so, they likely exceed the maximum number of interrupt levels now and they are having a stack overflow.  This is all very clear now that we know that resetting with power off the Roku temporarily fixes the issue. This is because as you use channels they are like having open pages in background on your iPhone. When you switch to a new channel it keeps a tally on the window you left.  This is so when you go back to that channel app you go right back to the movie or live channel in it the app you left. Your iphone gets lost if you have too many windows in background open as well. Because the stack that keeps track of them overflows. IT can only store information to restore a window up to about 10 different windows. Well the Roku is using the same methodology. Each time you hit home it does not close the window you are on, it opens a new one. The fix is very easy for ROKU and APPLE using that methodology to fix in SW. They simply need to automatically Close the oldest open window as you open new ones. BUT The thing users can do to prevent this is instead of USING the HOME button, to leave a channel app is to Exit the app using the BACK button all the way back to HOME. IT will simply close the channel app and put the same window you are on back to home window and not save the last thing in the channel app you were doing. Using Back up won't save where you were last on the channel. We know there is no way to see all the open widows on the ROKU like you can on an iPhone, and close them. SO Another thing you can do, to clean all the open window you  may not know are open is simply pull the power plug and it will wipe the temporary memory clean.  

[joekam]

Unplug ROKU power and wait 10-20 seconds. Then plug back in. DO NOT use the HOME button to leave a channel.   It is what causes the problem. Every time you do, it opens a new window, and saves the prior window where you were in the background like an iPhone does; There is a SW bug in saving that information in the back ground that eventually over flows the stack if too many open widows in the background . Use the back button to exit a channel all the way back to home page. and stay in one window always.

[CYCLNZ]

It sounds like you did everything except cycle power on the Roku device. Do that and your problems should go away.  

[Colorado_Don]

Thanks for the post I did unplug for approx 10 seconds and plugged it back in on one of my my 5 Roku devices, and it worked.  I need to check the rest of my remotes.  It must have been a recent Roku update, because ALL 5 of my Roku remotes started skipping channels on the Hulu app. With a single button press, the cursor jumps or skips over multiple channels.  I have a LG smart TV that can access my Hulu account without Roku and I do not have any problems with the Hulu channels.  It took my over an hour of searching through the Roku community to find this suggestion. Roku needs to really step up and provide better support / answers concerning their products.  At this point I'm inclined to be looking for smart tv's where I do not need the Roku devices.

[RokuBen]

@Colorado_Dondo you might posting what kind of devices you have and if they're connected by WiFi or Ethernet?  Did they all start showing this problem at the same time.  We're still in the middle of debugging this and this could be a big clue -- one of the possibilities is that there is something in the local network configuration that's a factor, so having them all hit this together would be evidence pointing in that direction.

[Sblack203]

I’m having the same issue on 2 roku ultras which are located in different rooms.  Each has own remote.  I tried using the app in the remote and still have the SAME issue which means there’s absolutely NO WAY it has anything to do with remotes.