Roku v1.0.30 - Big Line-Ups Without Running Out Of Room

Nine crash reports, six devices, four screens — one cause

Over three days, nine reports came back as the device shutting the app down for using too much memory, across six different Roku models. They happened on four different screens — Search, VOD, Live TV and the TV Guide — which is exactly why it looked like four separate faults.

It was one fault, and none of those screens was at fault.

The app was holding every channel of every playlist you had added

Measured on the roomiest Roku we own:

Channels	Sources	Device memory used
2,059	1	13–18%
16,255	2	43–53%
30,565	3	56–67%

Two thirds of the best hardware there is, gone before you touched anything. On a 32-inch set there was nothing left at all — so whichever screen you opened next was simply the one that ran out of room.

The app now stops before that happens

Once the device is nearly full it stops taking on more playlists, keeps the channels that fit, and records why. A working app with some of your line-up beats a full line-up and an app that closes on you.

If you have one enormous playlist that could fill the device on its own, that is caught while it is still loading.

It can now tell us what happened

Every time a playlist loads, the app records how much of the device's memory your line-up is using. Not one of those nine reports could say how full the app was when it closed. The next one will.

A correction to v1.0.29

The Sports memory cap added last release was reading the wrong number — a background job can only see its own memory use, not the whole app's — so it never actually applied. Fixed, along with the new check.

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Installing keeps all your profiles, favourites, history and resume points.

Roku v1.0.29 - Big Playlists Without The Crash

The TV Guide could kill the app on a big line-up

A member with five sources — their account, their provider, and three large public playlists carrying over 30,000 channels between them — lost the app four times in fifteen minutes.

To fill a tab, the guide read the whole playlist from top to bottom, once for every category on that tab. On a 14,000-channel list with 200 groups that is around 2.8 million passes, all on the thread that draws the screen — and Roku stops an app that holds that thread too long. The app simply vanished.

Each playlist is now read once, with every channel filed under its group as it goes. Filling a tab is then a straight lookup per category instead of another full sweep: roughly 2.8 million passes down to 14,200.

Reproduced on a real device with the member's exact five sources, then verified fixed on the same ones — the guide opens, all eleven tabs work, and the app closes cleanly where it used to be killed.

Sports could run the box out of memory

Opening Sports built a record for every channel of every source before it scanned anything, with nothing stopping that list from growing. A member on a Roku Premiere with 54,151 channels was killed by the box for using too much memory, 54 seconds in, while looking at the screen.

The scan now stops adding channels when the box is near its limit and still shows a full screen of fixtures. Checked both ways on a real device: it does not trip on an ordinary 11,843-channel line, and when pushed past the limit it degrades to a working screen instead of a crash.

Your place in a film is safer

A saved position could be quietly refused. Roku gives the whole app 16–32 KB of storage, and when it is full a save simply does not happen — no error, nothing. That covers resume points, favourites and profiles alike, so things you changed could revert with nothing to explain it. Refused saves are now recorded, and the biggest hoarder was found and stopped: rows synced from the phone for features Roku does not have were being kept forever. They are now left where they belong.

Starting a film before the first sync landed could wipe your phone's position. For about two seconds after the home screen appears, this box has not heard from your account yet, so a film you were halfway through on your phone looked unwatched — and pressing play overwrote the real position for good. The app now waits before saving anything, and if it turns out you were partway through somewhere else it asks:

Carry on where you left off? You were 42:10 into this on another device.

Nothing is disabled and nothing waits — the film starts straight away, exactly as before.

Also in this one

• The captions and subtitle picker no longer draws a half-empty panel; it fits the number of choices.

Still open

The same member also saw an out-of-memory exit, which this release does not explain. It could not be reproduced on the office device, which has more room than a cheap TV — holding 42,000 channels is a lot for a small box whatever the guide does with them.

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Installing keeps all your profiles, favourites, history and resume points.

Roku v1.0.28 - A Whole New Look

A whole new look

Kwick Player for Roku has been rebuilt to look like the phone app. Slate
colours, a typewriter-style typeface throughout, and a faint pattern behind
every screen that you can change or switch off in Settings › Home &
appearance › Background effect — None, Grid Lines, CRT Lines or Both.

The player

The controls have been rebuilt to match Android: outlined buttons sitting
directly on the picture, and a progress bar that runs the width of the screen
with the time you are at on the left and the running time on the right.

• "Ends at 8:42 PM" — the player and the film page now tell you what time
  something will actually finish, using your own TV's clock. It follows your
  12 or 24 hour setting.
• Next and previous channel while watching live TV. Hold the button and it
  waits for you to settle rather than tuning to every channel on the way past.

Film, series and channel pages

All three rebuilt to match the phone: a wide picture across the top, the
title's own artwork instead of its name typed out, the ratings, and the
buttons in a row underneath.

• Long descriptions used to trail off in "..." with no way to read the rest.
  They now say "Press OK to read it all".
• The highlight on Play, Resume and Watch Live is far easier to see.

Getting around

• Back now takes you home. From settings, a film page, the guide, anywhere
  — Back walks you out one step at a time instead of stranding you. On the
  home screen it asks before it closes the app, so nothing shuts by surprise.
• On Search, three keys were doing the wrong thing: Right off the last result
  jumped back to the first, Up did not return to the search box, and Left did
  not return to the menu. All three fixed.

Your channels and your place

• Refresh channel list and Refresh TV guide added under
  Settings › Sources. If your provider answers with a nearly empty list,
  the app keeps your channels and asks you first, showing both numbers.
• A stream that dropped out was deleting your place in it. A film that cut
  out came back offering to start from the beginning. Fixed.

Under the hood

• Several screens were drawing past the edge of the television, including one
  grid that ran off the side entirely.
• Artwork that had no size limit could use a megabyte to draw a small badge —
  a cause of the out-of-memory crashes on smaller Roku boxes.
• The profile pictures are now original artwork.

Roku v1.0.27 - Search Without Running Out Of Room

Searching no longer closes the app on smaller Rokus

If you have a Roku TV, a Roku Express or a Premiere, opening Search
could close the app outright — sometimes within seconds of opening it, and
often again the next time you tried.

Search looks through every channel, movie and series from every source you
have added, all at once. On a big provider that is tens of thousands of
titles, and the smaller Rokus simply do not have the room. The last update
made each entry smaller, which helped, but on the tightest devices the
sheer number of entries was still enough to run them out of memory.

It now watches how much room it has left and stops loading before the app
is at risk, instead of pushing on until the Roku kills it.

On most Rokus nothing changes — a Streaming Stick, an Ultra or a recent
4K model has plenty of room and will keep loading the whole catalogue, so
your searches are exactly as complete as before.

And it tells you when a search is short

If the app did have to stop early, or one of your sources could not be
reached, the results are no longer presented as though they were the whole
story. A line under the search box says so.

That mattered more than it sounds. A search that quietly returns half your
library looks identical to one that returns all of it — you search for a
film you know you own, see a handful of unrelated results, and conclude the
app cannot find it. Now it says why, and suggests a more specific word or
searching from the Movies or Live TV pages instead.

Notes

Updating: install over the top — your profiles, favorites, resume
points and settings all carry straight over.

Roku v1.0.26 - Continue Watching, Wherever You Left Off

Continue Watching, and it finally knows what you watched on your phone

Home now opens with a Continue Watching row, the same place the phone
app puts it — the movies and shows you have started, ready to carry on.

More to the point, what you watch on your phone now shows up here. It
didn't before, and not in a small way:

• There was no Continue Watching row on the Roku at all, so a film or show
  you had started had nowhere to appear — even one you started on the Roku
  itself.
• Watch history arriving from your phone only ever set the resume
  position. Find the title yourself and it picked up in the right place,
  but nothing on screen ever told you it was there.
• Channels you watched on your phone were thrown away entirely on arrival,
  so Recently Watched Channels only ever listed what you had played on
  that particular Roku.

All three are fixed, and your existing history is restored — not just what
you watch from now on. On the test box that brought back 50 titles the
device had been holding silently for weeks.

Episodes appear as their show, so a series you are working through is one
tile rather than twenty.

The TV Guide is steadier

A member's Roku Express closed itself on the TV Guide. Six places in that
screen could trip over an empty channel list without noticing, and all six
now check first. A guide where every source fails to load its categories
also says so plainly instead of leaving you on a blank screen.

Being straight with you: that crash was never reproduced here, so this is
belt-and-braces rather than a confirmed cure. What did change for certain
is the diagnostics — if the app closes on you now, the report it sends says
what was happening at the time instead of only which screen you were on.
That is the difference between a fixable report and a shrug.

Notes

Updating: install over the top — your profiles, favorites, resume
points and settings all carry straight over.

Roku v1.0.25 - Channels That Can't Play, Handled Honestly

A channel that can't play now says so straight away

Some channels carry their sound in a format no Roku has ever been able to
play. It is nothing to do with your account and nothing to do with the
channel being down — it is how that provider sends it, and the same
channel usually plays fine on a phone or a Fire Stick.

The app handled this badly. It treated the failure like a dropped
connection and reconnected three times before giving up, so you sat
watching "Stream hiccup — reconnecting..." for about twenty seconds on a
channel that was never going to play. Then it said "Couldn't play this
stream", which reads as a dead channel, and quietly asked your provider
whether your subscription had lapsed — which had nothing to do with it.

Now it recognises the failure immediately and tells you what it is:

This channel's sound is in a format this Roku can't play. The channel
isn't broken and there's nothing wrong with your account — it's how this
provider sends it. If they list the same channel more than once, another
copy may work.

That last line is worth trying. Many providers list the same channel
several times, and the copies are often encoded differently, so a
different one may well play.

The same applies to a picture format this Roku can't decode, and to
copy-protected streams.

Why it matters beyond the wait

Every one of those pointless reconnects opened another connection to your
provider. If your plan allows only one or two streams at a time, four
rapid connections on a channel that can't play is enough to tie up your
own allowance — and some providers treat that pattern as account sharing.
One failed attempt now, instead of four.

Genuine hiccups on a working channel still reconnect exactly as before.

Notes

Updating: install over the top — your profiles, favorites, resume
points and settings all carry straight over.

Roku v1.0.24 - Your Profiles And Favorites, On Every Roku

Your profiles and favorites now arrive on a new Roku

If you set this app up on a Roku recently, please update. Backing up
and restoring your profiles, favorites and resume points was switched
off on a fresh install, and nothing told you.

What that looked like: you signed in with KwickTV, and instead of being
asked "Who's watching?" you landed straight in a single empty profile.
Your other profiles were never fetched, and your favorites and resume
points were never coming down either. The phone app has always had this
switched on — the Roku app was the odd one out.

It is now on unless you turn it off, and a Roku that was already set up
during this will pick your profiles up on its next launch. Nothing is
lost, and if you deliberately switched it off, it stays off.

Search no longer runs a smaller Roku out of memory

On Rokus with less memory — the Roku Premiere and Express in particular —
opening Search could close the app outright, sometimes within seconds.

Search looks through every channel, movie and series from every source you
have added, and it was holding on to far more information about each one
than it ever needed: full plot summaries, cast lists, directors, ratings.
Across tens of thousands of titles, on a small Roku, that was enough to
run it out of room. It now keeps only what it actually uses to find and
show a result.

When something can't connect, the app now tells you why

"Couldn't reach the server. Timed out" is true and completely useless. The
app now works out what actually went wrong and what to do about it:

Your network is blocking kwick.cc

The rest of the internet works from this Roku, but it can't even look up
the address for kwick.cc.

That is your router or your internet provider blocking it — the server
itself is fine, and nothing is wrong with your account.

What usually fixes it:

1. Try signing in with your phone's hotspot. If it works there, it is
   definitely being blocked on this network.
2. Change your router's DNS to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8, then restart the
   router.

Before showing anything, it quietly checks whether the internet is working
at all, so it can tell the difference between your connection being down
and one particular server being unreachable. It also covers a server that
is refusing connections, a secure-connection failure (usually your Roku's
clock being wrong), and a server that hangs up part way through.

Notes

Updating: install over the top — your profiles, favorites, resume
points and settings all carry straight over.

Roku v1.0.23 - Better Crash Reports

Better crash reports

A small but useful one: if the app ever crashes, the report it sends now
says what you were doing.

The app keeps a diagnostic log and saves a copy so it survives a crash —
but it only saved that copy when the app started and then once every 90
seconds. A crash in the first minute, which is the usual case, produced a
report containing nothing but the startup line. Two Roku crash reports
came in this way and neither could be worked out at all.

It now records which screen you opened and saves the log every time you
move between screens, so the next report actually says something useful.

Nothing else changes. This is purely so real problems get found and fixed
faster instead of turning into "it just closes sometimes".

If the app has been closing on you, please update — on the older
version there is nothing in the report to go on.

Notes

Updating: install over the top — your profiles, favorites, resume
points and settings all carry straight over.

Roku v1.0.22 - When A Source Goes Down

When one of your sources goes down

If a provider stops answering — its server is down, or your internet
can't reach it — the app used to wait for it before showing you anything,
even when everything from your other sources was already loaded and
ready. You'd sit looking at a spinner, and there was no way to tell the
difference between "still loading" and "broken".

That's fixed everywhere it happened. Measured on a real Roku with one
unreachable provider alongside two working ones:

Screen	Before	Now
Live TV	30 seconds	6 seconds
TV Guide	30 seconds	6 seconds
Sports	61 seconds	21 seconds
Search	up to 90 seconds	about 5 seconds

• Live TV and the TV Guide now show the categories that have arrived
  after a short pause, and quietly add anything that turns up late. If
  you have already started browsing when a slow source finally answers,
  they leave your place alone rather than rebuilding the screen under you
  — that source's channels appear the next time you open the screen.
• Sports now asks every provider at once instead of one after
  another, and drops any that can't answer within 20 seconds.
• Search now searches whatever has arrived instead of waiting for the
  last provider, and quietly widens the results as the others land.

VOD tells you the truth now

When a provider couldn't be reached, the movies page said "Nothing in
this category yet" — which reads as "you have no movies". It now names
the source it couldn't reach and makes clear the rest of the app is
unaffected:

Couldn't reach KwickTV. Its movies and series can't be listed right
now. Everything else in the app still works.

It also stops asking a provider for its entire catalogue after that
provider has already failed to answer a much smaller request, which had
been adding about 90 seconds per source before anything appeared at all.

A provider that genuinely carries no movies is still reported as empty
rather than unreachable — those are different things.

Also

• The little source tag on channel tiles and posters is shortened so it
  fits on the artwork instead of running wider than the channel logo.

Notes

Updating: install over the top — your profiles, favorites, resume
points and settings all carry straight over.

Roku v1.0.21 - Use All Your Sources At Once

Use all your sources at once

Until now the app showed you one source at a time and you had to switch
between them. Not anymore — everything you have set up now works
together in one lineup, the same way the phone app has always worked.

Sign in with KwickTV, add a second provider, plug in a playlist from a USB
stick: they all appear together, everywhere.

• Live TV merges every source into one category list. Categories with
  the same name from different sources become a single folder, and when
  you have more than one source each channel says which one it's from.
• Movies & Series merge the same way, with a row of buttons at the top
  to show everything or narrow to one provider. On the "All" view each
  poster carries a small tag naming the source it came from — so when two
  providers carry the same film, you can tell them apart.
• Search sweeps every source at once.
• Home mixes favorites and recents from all of them in the same rows.
• The TV Guide classifies every source's groups into the same genre
  tabs, and each channel's listings come from its own source.
• Sports scans all of them, so one game can list channels from more
  than one provider.

Everything you save now remembers where it came from, so favorites,
resume points and watch history never get crossed between providers. Your
existing favorites and settings carry over automatically — there is
nothing to redo.

Sports is now in the app for everyone

The Sports page was previously held back for a version of the app that was
never released. It finds the game first and then finds a channel showing
it, built entirely from your own channels and guide. It's in the sidebar
now, for everybody.

Fixed

• Channels from some playlists wouldn't play at all. Playlists built
  from an Xtream panel often list channels in a format Roku's player
  simply cannot open — the same playlist plays fine in phone apps because
  their player can. Those are now converted automatically to a format Roku
  accepts, so the streams play. Reported by crak3rjack.
• M3U channel favorites could silently attach to the wrong channel.
  Channels in a playlist were tracked by their position in the file, so
  when a provider inserted a channel near the top, every favorite, hidden
  channel and recent below it quietly became a different channel. They're
  now tracked by the channel itself. Existing items are corrected
  automatically the first time the playlist loads.
• Favorites from your other sources now sync both ways with the phone
  app, instead of being stored and ignored.
• A wrong resume bar could appear on a random movie when watch history
  arrived from another source on the phone.
• The side menu sat too low — it was positioned for seven items and
  Sports made it eight.
• The Sports page was pushed too far right and its loading spinner sat
  on top of its own text. It now lines up with every other page.
• The source tag on a channel no longer eats the channel name on longer
  channel names.
• The category list that opens Live TV and the TV Guide waits longer
  before giving up, so a slow provider no longer leaves the screen holding
  only one source's channels.

Notes

Live TV uses the HLS version of your streams (Roku can't play raw .ts),
there's no DVR, and external links show an address to type since Roku has
no browser. Everything else matches the Android app.

Updating: install over the top — your profiles, favorites, resume
points and settings all carry straight over.