Solving playback issues

[Choboticus]

I have a Roku3 and have been experiencing similar issues. Not only was the Roku itself laggy, but the lag affected apps differently. YouTube was by far the worst affected, lagging to the point of being unusable and often crashing to a gray screen that required rebooting the Roku before YouTube would ever work again.

I solved the problem (fingers crossed, knock wood!) by connecting the Roku to my router via Ethernet instead of wifi. Apparently, using wifi heavily taxes the Roku's CPU.

[Choboticus]

The benefits of switching to Ethernet were short-lived. YouTube gets worse by the day. Now it can gray screen when jogging or trying to use the UI. It used to only do that when it failed to load an ad.

One thing's for certain: pushing updates that don't run well on my current hardware -- and allowing third party app developers to do the same -- is NOT how you get me to buy a new Roku! My Roku experience should be exactly as smooth as it was when it was brand new. I'll buy a new one when it offers something more that I didn't already have. Roku and YouTube are pushing me to build my own HTPC.

[atc98092]

@Choboticus You are faulting Roku for something out of their control. Only the app provider can determine how they will support older devices. In this case, Google has decided they are going to code for the newest devices, and they don't really seem to care if older devices won't work well with the refreshed app. What they should do is tag their updated app versions to only download on the newer devices, and let the older devices remain on the older app that still works well. But Roku can't force them to do it, so your complaint is specific to Google. 

[Choboticus]

@atc98092Nonsense. Roku can impose standards on app developers just like Google does on their own app store. By not doing so, Roku is risking what infamously happened to Atari in the '80s: so many terrible third-party products that it killed Atari's own reputation. They've already ruined their reputation with me. As it stands right now, I would never consider buying another Roku.

[atc98092]

They do impose standards, but those standards do not require supporting Roku devices that are close to or more than ten years old. You have a Roku 3 (unknown model number). That means your device is either nine or eleven years old (there are two different versions of the Roku 3). Lots of electronic devices that old simply no longer work, or they are incapable of supporting some of what might be available for that device.

The Roku 3 was a great player when it came out, but technology has passed it by. I have a Roku 2 XS that hasn't been out of the drawer for several years. It was unusable for YouTube when it was only about 5 years old, and I simply replaced it with a newer model. 

[Choboticus]

The CPU in my PC is also 12 years old. The rest of the computer is even older. It does everything I need a computer to do. More to the point, it still does everything it did when it was new, just as quickly as it did when it was new. If some new software won't run well on it, I simply don't use it.

I don't care if my Roku doesn't support new features. I just want it to work exactly the way it did when I bought it. That is not too much to ask. I'm not a Roku app developer, but I used to develop Android apps professionally, so I have a general idea of what kinds of tools app stores provide for developers to target different devices. If app developers want to release new software with higher hardware requirements, that's fine. Just don't push it to my device.

[t1b23]

@atc98092 I don't agree at all.  

Roku owns the app ecosystem, and they decide what gets promoted to the app store for release.

They could very easily set performance targets for every app before making it available for any given device.  And those targets could include input latency tests.

It's purely a business decision that they're not bothering.

Having owned many Roku powered devices over the years, going back to the first Roku box, I'm as disappointed as the OP is with the high latency between button pushes on all of my 4-5 year old TVs.  As far as I can tell, the hardware on all of these TVs works fine, it's the software that runs on them that no longer performs well.

I can promise that absent some sort of near term remediation (that and maybe not feeling like video ads on the landing page are a feature I am interested in), none of my replacement TVs will be Roku powered.