Someone Call Tom Cruise: Several Roku TV owners say motion smoothing is suddenly enabled on their TVs and there's no way to turn it off.
Collaborators in reddit and in Roku Community Forum reported seeing the change on TCL TVs running on Roku OS 13, as did some employees at The edge. However, for others who have access to the “Expert” image settings, the same update is in effect unchanged and the settings to control it are still available.
For some people experiencing the issue, they said this is the first time their TV offers the Roku motion smoothing feature and there is no menu (neither in the standard settings nor in the picture settings available while watching TV) to turn it off. He update notes for Roku OS 13 mention a new “Roku Smart Picture” feature that will optimize based on the content being viewed, so there may be a bug there. However, people in older threads I've reported similar issues with some Roku devices before.
A Roku community moderator responded on the forum that the team is investigating the incident. Roku also offered its typical instructions for disabling the setting, which involves clicking the Star button on the remote during playback and heading to the Action Smoothing submenu in Advanced Picture Settings.
The edge 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 brands over the years, such as 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 false frames that increase the frame rate on TVs with high refresh rates. It can be useful while watching sports in fast motion, but some complain can eliminate the cinematic look of movies made at 24fps and instead create a hyper-realistic soap opera vibe.