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Roku lays off 300 workers and removes streaming content to save money
(www.engadget.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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My only real issue with Roku is the lack of a decent Ethernet port on them. 100mbit ports are too slow for 2023
It does feel like antiquated tech but what streaming service uses even 50+mbps streaming? The services I know of (apple, Netflix, Disney) all max out around 30mbps.
Self hosted (jellyfin, Plex) can use more.
But could the decoder keep up? Decoders come in a variety of sizes and I doubt they’d pay the extra cost to put a 120Mbps decoder in the device when no streaming services require it.
It’s appropriate for the device’s functionality. 4K HDR is at most 40Mbps. If the device supported large local storage and offline playback, you’d have a point. But given the device’s use case as a streaming client, I doubt you’d be able to find any workload that gets close to saturating the network. Even if you could find a content source that was higher than 100Mbps, it’s unlikely the decoder would be able to keep up.
Bluray rips can be 80mbps+ but I've never had trouble streaming them on any device including roku. Important to remember that the bitrate is an average so some scenes will be well above the advertised bitrate.
Yes but that’s why the network and decoder are buffered. It’s also why most content is constrained at encode time to target both an average bitrate and a peak bitrate. A 200% constraint is typical, so you shouldn’t find 4K HDR in the wild at over 80Mbps peak bitrate.
The buffers on streaming devices are much smaller on these devices because of how cost reduced they are. You're way overselling how large they are.
Also, 80mbps is actually a pretty common avg bitrate on 4kuhd blurays. You have 100gb of disk to play with and they generally want to use it as much as possible.