Wed May 11, 2016 7:17 pm
The other day I was browsing through various channels trying to find something to watch, and came upon a documentary that interested me. It was over an hour long, and I was getting tired, so I paused the channel half-way through and went to bed. The next evening, when I wanted to continue watching the video, my Roku had returned to the Home screen. I couldn't even remember which of the several channels I'd been perusing was the one I'd been watching, never mind which menus and sub-menus I'd have to navigate to get back there. I gave up trying to find it. Very annoying!
I'm also in the habit of watching TV episodes sequentially on Netflix and Amazon, and like to leave the next episode cued up ready to play. With this new "improvement", to get to the next episode on Netflix I have to launch the channel again, wait 10 seconds for it to load and finish "retrieving", navigate to the 3rd row down (past My List and Search to get to Continue Watching), then navigate two places further left to get to the #1 slot on the grid row, then re-launch the episode, and only then am I back where I left it. Annoying! It's not much better on Amazon. Many channels, e.g. NowhereTV, even though they will bookmark the position within individual videos, have no "take me back to the last video I was watching" function.
Every channel I've watched in the past has made it easy for me continue where I left off; they just did nothing, and when I turned my TV back on, everything was as I left it. Now Roku has decided for unknown, undisclosed reasons to reset my device back to the Home screen. I don't remember seeing users clamoring for such a feature in these forums. It's not the end of the world, but it does seem very unnecessary -- and annoying! If I wanted to return to the Home screen when I was done using my Roku for the day, I'd just press the Home key before going to bed.
Anyway, I have an old legacy Roku 2000C lying around doing nothing useful, so I programmed it to continually ping my Rokus to keep them from going back to the Home screen. The paused video-player will still exit, but at least the channel and the respective details screen are still displayed.
Last edited by
belltown on Wed May 11, 2016 7:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
https://github.com/belltown/