Roku

[Krakerman]

Anyone have one of these? If so how do you like it?

I just bought online the Roku 2 should be here monday ! Looking forward to see what this baby can do on my living room TV. The wife doesn't like those HDTV's (I have my 47" HDTV in the man cave) so we still have the 500lb Sony TV out there. Nice thing it has Hulu and hopefully it will work with my PlayOn!

[Kustom Kid]

PlayOn does work on Roku devices. Did you get the $100 one with the Wii looking controller and everything?

[Krakerman]

Yeah!

[Kustom Kid]

Nice. I'm debating on getting a Roku box for the bedroom or another Xbox to use as a Media Center extender. Let us know how you like it please.

[celly]

Nice. I'm debating on getting a Roku box for the bedroom or another Xbox to use as a Media Center extender. Let us know how you like it please.

Yeah for sure, let us know! Never heard of the Roku box but it looks pretty cool. I think my kids would enjoy something like this in their bedroom.

[Krakerman]

Will do!

[Kustom Kid]

http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2011-07/roku-2-review/

First review of the Roku 2 for you celly and anyone else interested.

[celly]

http://www.zatznotfu.../roku-2-review/

First review of the Roku 2 for you celly and anyone else interested.

Nice! Thanks Kustom, great review. I think the kids would really enjoy one of them. The XS model looks like the one I'd get, since it offers 1080p and a gameplay option.

[Krakerman]

That's the one I got and for only a $99 can't beat it. Best way around the dual band would be to use a dual band bridge and hook it up to the XS model since that version has the ethernet connection on the back plus has the bonus USB too. Much better buy I think. That might help on the drop signals.

[Krakerman]

Got the Roku hooked up and the test I did in the beginning was not to impressive as my wireless internet in the living room is not that good no fault of the Roku, but when I got home tonight from work I installed D-Link's Powerline AV Network and then hooked it up to my wireless bridge access point and now it is blazing fast as well as my wireless signal in the living room is at full bars ... All I can say is Wow! impressive. Before I would only get like 1-2 bars out there now getting max, very nice! Anyways back to the Roku 2 as it was a snap to setup and they have quite a bit of channels to install. I even got a Sirius XM private channel that I installed and it works good, but the stations are all wrong for some reason not quite sure why, but it does work. They do have a quite a few music channels to setup like Shoutcast and Pandora. I did need to install Orb Caster on my PC for the Sirius XM channel to work, but it was free. It will work with TVVersity as well. I even found Justin.TV private channel very kool. Will test PlayOn later tonight and see if it works. I've heard Roku didn't like PlayOn and removed it Hopefully there is a work-around.

The Roku 2 itself is very light and is the size of apple tv almost fits in my hand. Very strange thou the Roku 2 never turns off it is on all the time. There is no way to turn it off unless you unplug the power cord. They say it only consumes as much energy as a night light.

Overall I am digging it, but will need to give it alot more test as well. Need to watch some movies and see how it plays them. I'll get more use out of it this weekend and let you guys know then how it did with Netflix and Hulu.

All and my wife really like the Angry Birds channel haha

[Kustom Kid]

http://www.playon.tv/devices/roku

I guess Roku pulled the plug on PlayOn. There is a workaround on that page I linked to.

[Krakerman]

Yes you can install PlayOn and see all your channels but it will not play any of them as it will crap out/ timeout per say. That sux, but for playon I will run it from my Wii so all is not lost

Also Roku 2 doesn't have the YouTube channel as Google told them to drop it as well. Then again I can run Youtube from my Wii as well or my DVD/Blu-ray player.

[celly]

Just saw the Roku 2 at Fry's Electronics today. They didn't have a demo but, they did have a huge display with the $99 dollar XS and the $79 dollar other. The wife was impressed but I think she needs to see it in action.

[Kustom Kid]

So I bought a Roku XD yesterday and noticed couldn't stream local content easily. Roksbox was the only solution i could find and aside from costing another $15 it didn't look that easy to get going. That's kind of a deal breaker. I think that's the only thing keeping it from being the best of the bunch in my eyes. I ended up getting a Sony Media Player (SMP-N100) for the same price. I can stream local content, but there are no where near as many "channels". I have the big ones though, Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon, so I'm good with that. Strangely enough PS3 Media Server doesn't work that well with it. I needed to switch to Serviio in order to get it to play AVIs. It still doesn't play MKVs, but I'm sure there's a workaround for that.

[Krakerman]

I have an old PC Pentium 4 laying around and tonight I am gonna convert it into a Boxee Box media center. The software is free and I really like the interface it has. That thing has been collecting dust might as well turn it into something usefull. It's nowhere near as fast as my new PC, but it will get the job done I'm sure. Plus it is plenty fast enuff to put alot of emulators on it as well.