- 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.
