- Today, we're talking about Roku tips and tricks
that you can use to get the most out of your Roku device.
Whether it's a Roku Stick or a Roku Ultra, or a Roku TV,
I've got one of those two.
I've got everything from how to customize your home page
to making typing a lot easier for you,
right up to how to turn your Roku TV into a non-Roku TV.
We'll get to that one at the end.
So let's get started.
(upbeat electronic music)
All right, thanks for joining me today, everybody.
If you like this video,
then go ahead and give it a like, subscribe,
and join me on Fridays at 2:00 P.M. Eastern
for the live streams I do right here on this channel.
I'd love to see you there.
So let's dive right in with the first one.
This is definitely a beginner's tip.
If you just pulled out your Roku for the first time,
you might not know about this,
you can rearrange the tiles on your home screen.
So when you get your Roku,
it's gonna be loaded up with all sorts of apps.
You're gonna have to go download some new ones.
So if you do that,
let's say, I download Wondrium,
formerly TheGreatCoursesPlus.
Sure, okay, yeah, I'll add that channel.
All right, so once I've added the channel,
it's gonna take just a moment.
It says it's has been added to the end of your home screen.
Okay, great.
So you go back to your home screen.
And you go back up to the bottom.
Oh, shoot.
Yeah, there it is.
All the way at the bottom.
All right, so let's say now I do want to use this one a lot.
I'm gonna use this star key on my remote.
That brings up some options that I have for these tiles.
I can rate the app.
I can remove it, if I want to.
I can check for updates.
But right here I can move the channel.
And unfortunately, they won't let me go past
that line at the bottom,
so I gotta go all the way to the top with this thing.
And if this is one that I know I'm gonna use a lot,
I'm gonna bring it up close to the top,
so that it's by the other ones.
Okay, great.
Then I just hit the okay button and it sets it right there.
So something like the Roku Media Player,
I might not use that as much,
so I can kinda move this down
toward the bottom instead
and shift the other ones accordingly.
So yeah, whatever your apps are
that you prefer to use the most,
you can put them right up top.
So for a lot of people,
I think they're gonna be similar to me.
You're gonna use a lot of Netflix and Hulu, Tubi,
Roku Channel, that sort of thing.
Put those right up at the top,
make them really easy to see and to access.
Next up, let's do a little bit more of an advanced tip,
and that is using the Roku app to type stuff.
Okay, so if you're using your remote, it gets real clunky.
If you have to enter an email address or a password,
or if you wanna search for something
without using the voice search,
or you don't have voice search on your remote, whatever.
The Roku app is gonna come in real handy with that.
So when I open up the Roku app,
you'll see right down here, there's a remote page.
And if I go up to the top here, there's a keyboard.
So once I've connected my app to my device,
if I ever need to enter an email address or password
or something like that,
it's gonna be really clunky to sit there
and do that on your remote.
You just use the keyboard option here
and it types it right on the screen.
All right, let's go back to our home screen now
and continue customizing this.
One of the things that I know bothers a lot of people,
a lot of Roku users is the clicking sound
that you get when you are navigating through the menus.
So if you listen close you have, click, click, click.
You can turn that off, believe it or not.
You can turn it down.
You can turn it up.
You can turn it off.
What we're gonna do is come here to the settings menu.
We'll go down here to audio and menu volume.
Those are the clicks that you're hearing.
So I can turn that to high, medium, low,
or off if I don't want them at all,
which is pretty nice.
Now, if you don't mind having a sound,
you just want to have a different one.
Then you can come back here to themes.
Okay, so your theme right here,
yeah, we've got the regular one installed.
Well, we've got a few other built-in options
that we can use.
There's space and Western.
I have those ones downloaded.
You can get these others as well.
And you can download others from online.
But when you get the Roku theme pack,
let's say let's do the Western one.
Okay, we're gonna set this theme pack
and it changes the home page now to a Western theme.
And when I click on buttons here,
you see a little guitar cord when I hit the home button
or when I click the arrow buttons.
You get a little jangling spur.
(Roku jangling)
And yeah, there you go.
So yeah, when you click buttons,
yeah, you're gonna get a little bit different sounds.
So you can change those sounds or turn them off entirely,
whatever you want for your Roku device.
The final tip I've got for customizing your homepage is
well, customizing your homepage.
Let me show you what I mean.
Again, I'm gonna come up here to the settings menu.
I'll come down here to the home screen.
And you can see these are the menu options
that you get on your home screen.
So featured free, live TV, movie store, and TV store.
These all say show.
So right here on my home page, if I...
Yeah, there, there it is.
Featured free, live TV, et cetera, et cetera.
So if I go back there,
now I can hide featured free
if I don't feel like I'm gonna use it, obviously.
If I do think I'm gonna use it,
I don't wanna hide that.
Yeah, live TV,
I don't really watch live TV anymore.
So let's hide that.
Movie store and TV store.
Nah, I just use my other apps for that.
I don't care what offers they have for me.
Okay, great.
Well, shortcuts, we'll come back to that in a second.
But now on my home screen,
you'll see that that left side menu
is very much cleaned up. (laughs)
There's not much on it now.
Just search and streaming channels, that sort of thing.
Okay.
So now if I go back there,
I told you we'd look at that last option,
and that's the shortcuts.
You'll see, there's a couple of shortcuts here,
add channels and TV off.
You can remove these from your home screen
if you feel like you're never gonna use them.
The TV off actually does come in handy.
Especially, if you have a lower tier,
a Roku device that doesn't have TV controls
on the remote control.
So you want that on there,
so that you can easily turn off your TV with this remote.
So you don't have to search around
for your other TV remote to turn it off.
So I probably would leave that one there on some device.
On my device, I'll turn it off.
This one, add channels,
obviously, you can decide whether you would want this one,
but essentially, the add channels
is just a menu option to go find more apps.
Well, you can already do that right over here
on the left side with streaming channels.
It's the exact same thing.
There's no difference.
So for me, I don't want that.
I'm just gonna go ahead
and take that off of my home screen.
Really cleans things up a little bit.
Just makes it a little more pleasant.
Oops.
A little more pleasant to use my Roku device.
So there you go.
Now it's gone.
Now it's just the tiles for the apps
that I'm actually gonna use.
Now let's talk about sound leveling.
To do that, I'm gonna need to open up some content.
So I'm gonna open up Netflix.
It doesn't really matter what we turn on.
Sure, we can watch "300."
Okay, fine.
It doesn't matter.
(chuckles) I'm actually just gonna pause this
so we don't get dinged for copyright stuff.
Now I'll hit the star key on my remote again,
and it pulls up some options here on the screen.
Sound settings and accessibility.
All right, so in these options,
I go to sound settings and volume leveling.
Right now, it's turned off.
You'll see, there are three different options.
There's off, night, and leveling.
Okay, so sound leveling
is gonna smooth out the general sound output
from your Roku device.
So say you're watching live TV,
which is notorious for having very loud commercials, right?
I just use the sound leveling
to kind of even out the sound
that I'm getting from commercials
or the content that I'm watching either way.
You can also set it to night mode, as you saw.
If I set it to night mode,
then this is gonna do kind of a more extreme
version of sound leveling,
so that if I'm watching something
with a lot of car chases and explosions
followed by a scene with people whispering,
it's going to do a lot to kind of bring those closer
to the same volume,
so that if you're watching it at night,
you don't wanna wake up the whole household
with gunfight or whatever,
but you still wanna be able to hear the whispering scenes.
You can do that with night mode.
Next up is guest mode.
Let's talk about guest mode.
Why would you want guest mode?
Well, if you have...
Say you have relatives coming to visit,
or maybe you have an Airbnb property or something like that,
where you're going to have other people using
your Roku device and you don't necessarily want them
being able to make purchases on your account
or you just have privacy concerns, maybe.
We come up here to settings,
and then under system,
we can come down here to guest mode.
When you enter guest mode,
it's gonna ask you for your pin.
And then once you've entered that,
it will enter guest mode and allow other people
to sign in with their email address and password,
their Roku account.
So if they have apps that they wanna use apps,
app that they're logged into,
content that they wanna be able to access,
they can do that.
And the really cool part about this
is that you can select a date for them
to be automatically logged out of your device.
And the last tip I have for you
is how to turn your Roku TV into a non-Roku TV.
This one is really helpful if you've got a Roku TV,
but you find yourself wanting to use
a different platform more often.
So obviously, because I review
streaming devices all the time,
I have a ton of them and I'll find myself gravitating
toward different devices all the time.
So whether it's my Apple TV or my Fire TV,
or maybe my Nvidia Shield, or something like that,
whatever it is, it's pretty simple to do this.
We just go up here, again, to settings,
and we'll come to system, over here to power,
and then power on right here.
Power on.
Right now, when I turn the TV on,
it goes automatically to the home screen.
Generally, this is what you're probably going to want,
but maybe I play a lot of video games,
I'm kind of in that mode.
And so I want it to just automatically
open up the PlayStation channel when I turn on the TV,
or maybe I have one of those other devices
that I'd rather use more often,
like my Fire Stick.
So I can set it right there to the Fire Stick.
Now, when I hit the power button,
it's going to automatically go to that input.
You can see I've already renamed this one.
You can actually rename these inputs. (chuckles)
So this is the Fire Stick.
And I can click on that.
Now, when I power on my TV,
it's automatically going to open up the Fire Stick input.
So now, if I've got my Fire Stick remote,
I can just use that to turn on the TV power.
It's gonna power on the Fire Stick and the Roku TV
and go right to the Fire Stick input.
It's almost like having the smart Fire TV.
What do you call these?
Fire TV smart TV, if that makes sense.
And now I feel like we should do a bonus one.
Okay, let's do a bonus tip.
We're gonna come right down here
in our settings to TV inputs.
And right here, like I said,
I renamed the Fire Stick one.
Yeah, you can go right over here to rename these.
So if you have say a PlayStation or a Fire Stick
or what have you, whatever's plugged into your inputs,
if that's plugged in and it ain't moving,
then you might wanna go ahead and just rename that.
So yeah, I can rename it.
I can edit the icon that goes with it.
So you can see on my home screen.
Yeah, I've got the PlayStation 4
with a little console icon there.
So I know what I'm hitting when I go to that input.
All right, I hope that helps.
I hope there are a few tips in there that you could use.
Let me know in the comments,
if there are any others that you like to use
on your Roku device,
or if you have any other questions
about how to make the most of your Roku device.
Hit those comments on the way down there,
be sure to like and subscribe if you liked this video.
Thanks so much for watching everybody.
I will see you on Friday at 2:00 P.M.
for the live streams that we do here.
And yeah, I'll see you next time.