Roku owners are facing their worst kind of indignity yet: stopped motion smoothing

Roku TV owners have been experiencing a number of inconveniences recently through the software update route. There were terms of service requiring arbitration that locked your TV until you agreed (or mailed a letter). There is an upcoming introduction of ads on the home screen. But the latest irritation is hitting some Roku owners right in the eye.

Reports on Roku Community Forums and on Reddit Look for owners of TCL HDTVs, which have Roku as the operating system built-in, are experiencing Action Smoothing without turning it on after updating to Roku OS 13. Some people have reported that their TV didn’t offer Action Smoothing before, but is now showing the results without any method To turn it off. Neither the TV’s general settings, nor the specific settings available while playing content, provide a way to turn it off, according to some users.

“Motion smoothing” is Roku’s name for video interpolation or motion smoothing. The heart of motion smoothing is motion estimation and motion compensation (MEMC). Fast-moving videos, such as live sporting events or intense action scenes, can have a “shake” feeling when viewed on TVs with lower frame rates. Motion smoothing uses MEMC hardware and algorithms to artificially boost the frame rate of a video signal by creating a best guess of what a frame will look like between two existing frames and then interpolating it to boost the frame rate.

When it’s on, the signal sounds more fluid and, as the name suggests, smooth. When left on and processing a more traditional signal at 24 or 30 frames per second, it works fairly well. The shows and movies look uncannily realistic, essentially lacking the motion blur and smooth motion we’ve become accustomed to. Everything feels like a TV series or as if you are watching a behind-the-scenes video of your show on your smartphone. It’s a problem so persistent, and often buried in TV settings, that Tom Cruise made an entire public service announcement about it in 2018.

Ars has contacted Roku for comment and will update this post with a response. When affected Roku TVs regain their ability to maintain smooth motion, the setting is usually located in the “Expert Settings” area of ​​the TV or by enabling “Movie” mode from the quick settings.