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Love It
Pros
Solid, nice and small, plays everything, good for both nontechnical and technical people
Cons
No fast forward/rewind (cue/review)
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
Buy this and free yourself from burning CDs.
I bought the Roku about 8 months ago and loved it so much I got another for another room in my apartment. It plays just about every type of music format: MP3, flac, ogg vorbis, wma, m4a, m4p, wav. All my music is on my central PC, one one drive. It is then streamed to every other room. No more burning CDs.
If you're techy, you'll be happy to know that there is a command port where you can connect via TCP and issue both system commands and player commands. I wrote a http://search.cpan.org/~batman/Roku-RCP-0.03/lib/Roku/RCP.pm to facilitate this. From my computer I can say: "roku.pl pat Bon Jovi" (pat = Play Artist) and Roku will magically start playing all of Bon Jovi. There are similar commands for albums, songs and playlists.
The player works with any UPnP/DAAP server. The rokulabs.com website provides the open source Firefly Media Server for you to enjoy, but you can also use SlimServer, TwonkyVision, iTunes, or any of the other ones out there. SlimServer also has a control port to telnet to.
If you have a subscription music service (DRM 10.0), like
Yahoo Music Engine or iTunes, I believe this unit works with that as well. I myself have tested Yahoo Music with rented music,
but have not tried iTunes, as I can't stand Apple and their subpar, walled garden software. To get Roku to stream DRM protected music, you have to put the player (YME, iTunes) into share-mode.
The unit itself is nice and small and fits nicely into my already crowded entertainment stand. The display is nice and big and displays all the information you need. You can even connect to the unit and tell it to display whatever you want. When the unit is in standby, the time and date are optionally displayed. These are gotten from the internet, so they're always right.
Roku does a pretty good job of taking lower quality mp3s and making them sound a lot better. It has analog and digital outputs for connecting to a receiver, but a nice added touch is a headphone jack for connecting to headphones or standalone computer speakers.
It plays web radio and has a list of presets. You can add your own urls via the web interface. It supports playlists (m3u and pls and the Firefly dynamic playlists) so you can be pretty creative. The unit itself has a search and browse mechanism for finding artists, albums and songs.
One missing feature is the ability to fast forward/rewind within a song. You can skip an entire song and go to the beginning of a song, which has proven adequate for my usage, but still, it would be nice.
If you're thinking about getting rid of spinning media and obtaining location independence, this is the device for you.
If you're techy, you'll be happy to know that there is a command port where you can connect via TCP and issue both system commands and player commands. I wrote a http://search.cpan.org/~batman/Roku-RCP-0.03/lib/Roku/RCP.pm to facilitate this. From my computer I can say: "roku.pl pat Bon Jovi" (pat = Play Artist) and Roku will magically start playing all of Bon Jovi. There are similar commands for albums, songs and playlists.
The player works with any UPnP/DAAP server. The rokulabs.com website provides the open source Firefly Media Server for you to enjoy, but you can also use SlimServer, TwonkyVision, iTunes, or any of the other ones out there. SlimServer also has a control port to telnet to.
If you have a subscription music service (DRM 10.0), like
Yahoo Music Engine or iTunes, I believe this unit works with that as well. I myself have tested Yahoo Music with rented music,
but have not tried iTunes, as I can't stand Apple and their subpar, walled garden software. To get Roku to stream DRM protected music, you have to put the player (YME, iTunes) into share-mode.
The unit itself is nice and small and fits nicely into my already crowded entertainment stand. The display is nice and big and displays all the information you need. You can even connect to the unit and tell it to display whatever you want. When the unit is in standby, the time and date are optionally displayed. These are gotten from the internet, so they're always right.
Roku does a pretty good job of taking lower quality mp3s and making them sound a lot better. It has analog and digital outputs for connecting to a receiver, but a nice added touch is a headphone jack for connecting to headphones or standalone computer speakers.
It plays web radio and has a list of presets. You can add your own urls via the web interface. It supports playlists (m3u and pls and the Firefly dynamic playlists) so you can be pretty creative. The unit itself has a search and browse mechanism for finding artists, albums and songs.
One missing feature is the ability to fast forward/rewind within a song. You can skip an entire song and go to the beginning of a song, which has proven adequate for my usage, but still, it would be nice.
If you're thinking about getting rid of spinning media and obtaining location independence, this is the device for you.
