F U Roku

Roku 2 Review

This is a guest blog post by CrockerJ

Hello, my name is Crocker and I’m addicted to technology.  A few years back, I discovered that if I ripped all of my DVDs to a hard drive I could stream them from my computer to my TV using Windows Media Center and my Xbox as an extender.  At first this was a fantastic solution to my problem, you see whenever I wanted to watch a movie I just turned on my Xbox and started streaming whatever I wanted to watch.  I didn’t even have to get off the couch.  That’s right, when I watch the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings movies, I just push the back button after the first file is over and play the second file.  No switching disks.  I was in nerd nirvana!  Then a problem arose, I started to amass quite a collection of external hard drives.  I needed one for movies, one for half hour shows, one for hour-long shows, one for sports, and I even needed one just for the Star Trek series.  What can I say? Those video files aren’t small.  Next thing I knew, I had five hard drives running at all times not to mention a computer and an Xbox.  Needless to say, my set up was sucking a lot of watts.  What I needed was a small box that I could quickly turn on, plug in one hard drive and start streaming video.  I thought I found what I needed when I bought a Western Digital media player, but it only worked with WD hard drives.  I was using Seagate drives.  Fast forward over a year to a few days ago, when I found out there was a new Roku 2 coming out and you would be able to plug in external drives  and stream video easy peasy.  It even supported WMVs.  It was the best day of my life, and then I bought one.

I purchased the Roku 2 XS for $99.99 plus tax at Best Buy.  I got it home and hooked it up in less than 5 minutes.  The unit is smaller than the Apple TV, so finding a spot to put it wasn’t hard.  The first thing I did was download the USB media player channel from the channel store. That took less than a minute.  I then plugged in one of my hard drives and launched the channel.  I selected movies and up popped all my files.  I quickly scrolled through the folders until I came to the next episode of “The Wire” that I needed to watch and hit enter.  I quickly heard that well known HBO static pre-roll for about five second, but there was no picture.  Then the screen went black and the box rebooted.  This happened over and over again with all of my drives.  I then threw a MP4 file I had on my Mac onto a flash drive and after 3 attempts got the Roku to play it.  I search online and found out that apparently there will be an update for the video player sometime in September.  Not ideal, but I waited this long, so I could wait a couple of months.  I decided to see what channels this Roku had to offer.  There are a lot of channels at least 50 or so.  I downloaded the 21 that I found interesting and got ready for some quality programming.  The first channel I launched was a rock climbing channel.  I stared at a screen that said “loading videos” for about 2 minutes before I decided that said videos weren’t coming.  Next, I launched the TWiT channel and the Roku promptly crashed and rebooted.  I did an arm list of chores as I waited for the reboot.  After an eternity (maybe 10 minutes), I launched the TED channel and quickly saw the familiar site of a black screen followed a bouncing Roku logo and another painful crash/reboot.  I took this reboot opportunity to swap out the engine on my car and then scrolled through the menu and clicked restore to factory settings.

The Roku 2 is now repacked nicely in the box it came in waiting to be returned tomorrow.  It wasn’t so bad that it failed to do the one thing I bought it to do.  It was just a pity that it failed to do ANYTHING it was built to do.  There’s a giant sticker on the box bragging about a copy of Angry Birds being included for free, but I can’t confirm that it is a working copy.  I don’t like to be Mr. Negative Internet Guy, but the Roku 2 XS was a colossal failure in every way.  It just plain doesn’t work.  People bitch about Apple but I have Apple TV and it works.  Complain about Microsoft all you want, but Windows Media Center works.  I’ll say it again, NOTHING on the Roku 2 XS worked.  A simple small media box capable of streaming WMVs from my external drives to my TV has become my one armed man.  Unfortunately, the search continues.   You did everything you could Roku.  Thanks for nothing.

About Crocker J

My name is Crocker and I’m addicted to technology. I tend to say things that upset people but, I really don't care. You can find me roaming the countryside on my motorcycle taking pictures. Visit my site to get free high res photos http://www.CrockerJ.com

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