Roku TV owners complain that motion smoothing is stuck ‘on’ after an update

Somebody, call Tom Cruise — several Roku TV owners say that motion smoothing is suddenly enabled on their TVs with no way to turn it off.

Contributors on Reddit and in Roku’s community forum reported seeing the change on TCL TVs running on Roku OS 13, as did a few staffers on The Verge. However, for others who have access to “Expert” picture settings, the same update is in place without a change, and the settings to control it are still available.

For some people experiencing the problem, they said this is the first time their TV offered Roku’s motion smoothing feature at all and that there’s nowhere in any menu (either the standard settings or the picture settings available while watching TV) to turn it off. The update notes for Roku OS 13 mention a new “Roku Smart Picture” feature that will optimize based on the content being watched, so there may be a bug there. However, people in older threads have reported similar issues with some Roku devices before.

A Roku community moderator responded on the forum that the team is looking into the incident. Roku also offered its typical instructions for disabling the settings, which involves clicking the Star button on the remote during playback and heading to the Action Smoothing submenu under Advanced Picture Settings.

The Verge has reached out to Roku for further comment and will update this story when we hear back.

The smooth motion feature has been known by many brand names over the years, like Action Smoothing for Roku, TruMotion for LG, Motionflow for Sony, and Auto Motion Plus for Samsung TVs. It attempts to reduce motion blur by inserting fake frames that increase frame rates for TVs with high refresh rates. It can be useful while watching fast-motion sports, but some complain it can take away the cinematic look of movies made for 24fps and create a hyperrealistic soap opera vibe instead.