Current State of Roku vs Other Streaming Players

I'll just link to two threads I found by searching which had great info in them, but unfortunately, I don't know how dated the info is. I don't want to resurrect them with no posts in the past 6 months or so, so I'll just link to em.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...light=roku+ps3

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...oku+ps3&page=2

I was able to watch my first HD stream from Netflix this past weekend and was impressed enough to start shopping for a device. I was not the least impressed with the interface on the PS3 though, and didn't like that it still needs a DVD in it to play a streaming movie. The quality though was beautiful.

I saw several people in those threads talking about available bandwidth limiting their experience. I hope that won't affect me on my connection. I think I've got 5 or 6MB down and regularly can sustain a constant 630KB/Sec actual transfer. Hopefully that's enough to support HD in its present form.

I like the idea of the Roku, and the very simple remote. I've never seen the interface but it can't be worse than the PS3. After speaking to Netflix, HD streaming to a PC is still a long way off. The Roku is even more appealing if the quality of the SD streaming is better than it used to be. I don't stream much at all now mostly because I'm a bit of a snob concerning the image quality I watch. I rarely watch anything on DVD anymore. I use a projector and when the image gets large, it really showcases the weaknesses of the lesser formats.

I'd really like to hear opinions from folks who've compared the current Roku to streaming BD players or consoles. Also, an old post above did say that Roku was looking to add a whole bunch of other content streaming besides Netflix. If that's a reality, I'm interested in feedback on that as well. Really, any info on the current state of affairs would be nice.

Thanks in advance.

Probably due to its other capabilities, I found the PS3 to be less than intuitive. I suppose browsing the movies wasn't an issue, and once I had it playing it was fine, but up to that point I wasn't thrilled with the amount of time it took to get started. I don't own a PS3 so my experience with it is limited. Navigation certainly isn't second nature to me. I never did see where I could add movies without going to the PC. It must be there though.

The one very appealing thing to me about some of the other solutions is the ability for me to play something without getting up off the couch. As I understand it, they are working on that for the PS3 but for now, you need a dvd. Additionally, it's way more money. Though, not really any more than the LG BR player. And that I don't understand at all. It looks like saving any money at all on hardware pretty much means Roku or bust. After that you're just buying whatever additional features fit your situation.

Thanks for the feedback.

Now that I think about it, I suppose if you could, that would be a loophole in the system. Makes sense then. I assume then that is the case for all the devices, yes?


Wow, that's about $180 less than I've seen it for. I said to my sister the other day to just go get one cause they were relatively cheap, but wow, when I saw the price I figured I'd just remembered wrong.


Eliminating that media for me is a big issue, I'm sure for some it is not. I was not aware it was a licensing issue. I was just told "they were working on it" by another nf user.

A quick call to Netflix answered a few of my questions. According to them, the Roku HD is limited to output via HDMI for HD content. If someone knows otherwise, please correct me. I would not be surprised if some others are also.

The particular CSR I spoke to owns an Xbox and said that either the Xbox or PS3 allow you to add items to your Q, but only those two devices do that. The Xbox however requires a gold something-or-other membership that costs ~$8/ month to use. It does not require any media in the unit though. The PS3 on the other hand, requires the use of media, but does not have an additional monthly fee associated with the ability to stream.

They knew nothing about plans to add browsing/adding capability to the Roku. Also did not know if the media in the PS3 would be needed in the future or not.

Kewl, I'll keep an eye on that and might just grab one if the price comes down. Knowing me, I'll probably have a Roku too...

Thanks Scyber.

I'd probably hook up via hdmi anyhow, but that question had come up elsewhere and I thought I'd ask it. I sorta expected the rep not to have detailed info on the Roku. Even I thought my questions were a bit much, sorta off topic for a NF CSR.

These experiences mirror mine.

When I had crapcast cable here, my service was horrible. I can remember going days not able to FTP a 10K text file. Other family members locally had similar issues. Today I was working onsite for a customer, and download speeds on crapcast were 170K/sec from HP.com and ATI.com. What a joke. My service at home would completely drop out for hours at a time on a daily basis. EVERY day, not once in a while. If the sun was out, so was my cable. It didn't win awards at night either. It couldn't handle a vonage phone. Now on DSL, my service has not been out for 1 minute in 3 years. At work, we have had one outage of our Verizon DSL since 2003. Know what it was? Comcast dug up the cables.

Not much chance of streaming movies over cable here.