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My main beef with the roku is the sluggishness of the UI. And I have a few of them in the house (ultras or whatever the top of the line one was as of six months ago. Amazon had a sale and I bought a few). I also have a bunch of Apple TV 4Ks.

Say I am watching Plex and then want to switch to Netflix and then maybe go over to Channels to watch some News on MSNBC. The Apple TV can do this without reloading the app or losing my place in the video. It is nearly instant. The Roku has to reload the entire app taking a minute and losing my place.

But I do like the Roku remote. So there is that.

discuss

baddox|5 years ago

Interesting. I have the 4K Apple TV and sometimes apps feel extremely sluggish. Netflix clearly has some sort of compounding problem (maybe a memory leak) where simply scrolling through the app gets progressively slower until it’s nearly completely unusable. Killing and restarting the app fixes it temporarily.

johnpowell|5 years ago

I haven't noticed that in Netflix. But 80% of my use of the Apple TV is plex and a little app I wrote that reads directories on my computer running Apache and shows everything in a directory structure. And a bash script that runs through everything calling HandBrakeCli (if needed), generates thumbnails with ffmpeg, and then creates the xml.js file the app reads.

It took around six hours to build and I had zero experience with any tvos or ios development. Just a fun covid-project.

karatestomp|5 years ago

Sluggishness switching apps? Probably a result of supporting a lot of very low-end devices. I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of their active devices in the field have very poor specs. And probably cost less than $100 when originally purchased—often way less. You’re not getting a bunch of fast SSD memory to suspend programs to, nor enough RAM to keep several open, on that kind of budget.

scarface74|5 years ago

The CEO of Roku said in an interview on a podcast that their goal is to keep the build of materials needed to run the software under $25 for the TV manufacturers.

HumblyTossed|5 years ago

Our first streaming device was a Fire Stick. Talk about sluggish. Wow. We replaced it with a 2017 Nvidia Shield TV (even though we're an Apple house, go figure). Much better.