Air parrot. Flawless.
Multiple models of Roku still have component connections. Check out their home website.
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I was in the same boat so I stocked up on several Roku 2 XS. Itās the previous top-of-the-line version and will support component connections (you seemed to know this already)ā¦ Yes, itās been discontinued but there are still refurbs for sale for ~50 bucks!
Mostly because my cats like sleeping on the big olā CRTs. Apparently flat panels donāt work for them.
@jlw How much do you spend a month on channels/subscriptions/whatever? Is there enough GOOD free to keep you happy? I think I could almost go to netflix streaming exclusively, for as little as I watch TV now.
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1st gen roku (end of 1st gen, awesome box, every conceivable connector) serviced by 700k DSL to 720p digital projector. Netflix and Amazon Prime subscriptions. Total cost about 50 bucks a month. Verily little lag, perfectly adequate quality, and zero ads.
Also, thenowhereman channel on a Roku. Amazing curated content.
I love my Roku. I originally got the Roku XDS. My daughter bought her boyfriend a Roku 2, with the understanding that she was buying it so she could watch Netflix, etc. at his house (they lived 2 hrs away from each other). When she got a job near him I bought a Roku 3, she took back the Roku 2 and gave him the XDS. She has cut the cord and doesnāt miss Cable TV at all. I have only ever used a Roku so I canāt compare to Apple TV, but Iām very satisfied with it. I wish YouTube and Roku could decide to work together, but that doesnāt look likely. So I keep finding private channels that support YouTube until they get shut down and use Plex as a backup.
Depends on where you are. I actually found it cheapest to keep a minimal cable subscription with Comcast (since it was cheaper than just getting the internet - $39.99 for 50mb internet and around 40 channels, including a bunch of basic cable - everything I care about except for FX and FXX. It also gets me access to the Xfinity streaming stuff (kind of like On-Demand without a cable box) and their StreamPix service.serviveSince I built my own DVR and bought my own cable modern I get all this and it saves me a lot on buying seasons of shows. If there was a rental option for tv shows (who really wants to BUY a season of Itās Always Sunny in Philadelphia? I want to rent it for $.50ā¦) it would be ideal,
If you want to go just Roku, I believe that you can run Play-on on a networked PC and stream all kinds of internet stuff to it - it kind screen scrapes all sorts of sites for video and serves it up. They also have another product (I forget the name) that acts like an internet DVR - you say what shows you want, it scours the legal sites that have then, and then saves local copies on your windows PC and serves it up to any DLNA connected client.
The Boxee Box continues to work perfectly fine, streaming from the Net or locally stored content, and even has received updates to some apps recently (Youtube, for example)
Since the Samsung buyout, they have not shut down their servers and I havenāt noticed any reduction in performance.
Unfortunately the Boxeebox still seems to be unique in the user friendly way it allows one to stream local content without an intermediate like Plex. Of course it has apps like Netflix, Youtube, etc, too, but its the local content support where it shines over recent devices like ATV & GoogleTV that seem to be cloud-obsessed.
Support or no, it keeps workingā¦
I second the nowhereman!
Another pro tipā¦ the roku app on android adds a keyboard, along with the other controls on the remote.
Thinking about upgrading to roku3 just for the headphonesā¦ what a great idea.
Come on, you guys should be honest and list this as a paid Roku advertisement. It certainly does not qualify as a world of interesting things.
The only thing the Roku has over the Apple TV is more channel selection. That is also its downside. Further, it has a horrible interface, it is slow, and I hate to say it but it has too many junk channels.
I also do not get peopleās love of Amazon Prime. I recently gave that a try over my X-Box on a month trial basis. Compared to Netflix it has problems. First, it often tells me I have too many streams playing, but I only have one. Second, unlike Netflix, it cannot tell the quality of my network connection and adjust the quality of the video. Third, the selection is not as great (even though it does have a few things Netflix does not have).
I donāt own a Roku, and after some investigation, I likely never will. I use networked tuners and a low-end headless PVR to record OTA programs. Note that a headless PVR never actually decodes the video, just logs the stream and plays it back. My headless PVR has the performance to simultaneously record several channels while playing back a recording ā but it still doesnāt have the oomph to decode the video, never mind do a transcoding job.
This means that the playback device must decode the MPEG video stream.
As far as I can tell, the Roku devices have never had an MPEG decoder. My end-point device needs to handle MPEG video in TS files, with AC3 audio. Of course, it makes sense for it to handle lots of local video formats as well. The TS files are typically running about 18 Mbps, so it canāt be a decoding slouch. It should also be able to switch between available audio and closed caption streams. (In other words, it needs to act like a TV.)
Since the box will likely have to plug in to power, it should plug into the network as well. Wired is consistently more stable than wireless, gigabit is faster, and it saves my wireless bandwidth for actual mobile devices. I would also want both DLNA and NAS support ā not every storage unit is up to date enough for DLNA.
It turns out that many, many boxes to NOT handle all these features!
Iām likely headed for a WD Live box. It supports a ton of formats, and has a Netflix client that is recent enough to support subtitles and alternative audio.
The only thing that could swing me would be a box that also runs XBMC, which can front-end the PVR very nicely. Iām currently running a Raspberry Pi in this role, but itās right at itās limits with the video capabilities, so user control tends to lag a bit. It also doesnāt really have the local capacity needed to seriously buffer programs; ideal local buffering of an 16 Mbps stream would let you jump a 3 minute ad set with no re-buffering needed, but that means between 400 MB and 500 MB of advance buffering available.
I tried one of the Android set top boxes. It showed a little promise, but overall smoothness just wasnāt there, in part because each of the capabilities was a separate app. To be fair, the one I tried did not have have full Android capabilities, like editing the app layout on the launch screen. Maybe the next gen of these will be worth checking out again.
Finally, I second the need for Canadian reviews. Although Netflix support is now pretty standard, almost every other service is broken up here. Yep, I could unblock - but maybe some of these companies could get their act together instead.
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Are you real?
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I have a Raspberry Pi with XBMC loaded on the SD card (Raspbmc).
It gets me BBC iPlayer, YouTube, TvCatchup, SoundCloud and various XBMC channel feeds. Iāve not tried Netflix.
It works, itās geeky, fairly basic and itās cheap 
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I pay for Netflix, Hulu and have Amazon Prime. Thats it. I can not torrent content where I live, it is verboten.
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Iām really curious about the Roku and the other options presented here. For years Iāve been using my PS3 to playback everything, which is still the case. Anything downloaded gets put through mkv2vob to convert it into a container that the PS3 recognises, but Iāve ended up using Vuzeās media server which is basically just a folder containing the linked files and which eventually becomes difficult with all the content on there.
I started using Plex since I got a Nexus 10 and love it! Works perfectly on there. It also works well on the PS3, but it uses the same settings as the Nexus and transcodes the audio all the time. Plex has a setting for Apple TV to send through the AC3/DTS stream to be handled by a receiver - is there a way to get it to do this for the PS3 as well? Or is this something that the Roku can do? I would love to have a solution that lets me use Plex and not have to use mkv2vob to get 5.1 sound.
Basically, if you do a fair amount of shopping through Amazon, the free shipping plus the streaming is a pretty decent deal.
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Or if you live in the UK you pay the same for Prime - but get nothing but free shipping - Amazon owns LoveFilm and doesnāt want to pull customers away from this ailing offering.
Thatās a detailed explanation of what doesnāt work for you, both about the player and about the free content of the website the player is being discussed on.
So, what does work for you, in terms of media players?
I dunno about Roku and the iToy but my old debian based BoxeeBox will pickup, decode, and play OTA HD signals.
What a shame that project died the way it did. The interface is amazing.
Your setup seems similar to mine - Iām using MythTV as a DVR, connected to HDHomeRun tuners, and even an FTA satellite rig.
I do have a Roku, but I found it a pain in the ass to transcode HD video into NTSC-quality h.264 to watch it on the Roku. So I picked up a LG TV Upgrader thingy. Itās interface sucks, but I can watch stuff from the MythTV, Netflix, etc. The WD Live might have been a better choice.
