It has been a few months since I last posted about the changes I was making to our home multimedia experience. I went over the Roku last time and will give everyone an update on my thoughts after a few months of usage. I will also be going over the rest of the gadgets I’ve put in place. Nothing too fancy mind you, I am working on a “limited” budget. First things first though, I am still not completely done with the project as some issues have not been easily fixable with minimal cost.
Now that I have more bandwidth to play with, we are enjoying netflix even more. The selection of “watch instantly” shows is not wondrous by any means but it is consistently getting better. We have the second lowest plan which gives us one DVD out at a time and unlimited streaming from the netflix website and it costs only $9 per month. As an aside we do not pay the surcharge for bluray disks from netflix (which would be an extra 2 dollars a month) and I am not sure that I am willing to pay that extra when netflix admits that it is an arbitrary charge because bluray has a higher perceived value. Yes, that means it doesn’t cost them anything extra it means they think people will pay it because they want to watch bluray movies more than they want to watch DVD’s.
The issue with netflix is this, you either watch DVD (or bluray) disks on your television or you can stream movies to your computer. I want to make all the content available to us watchable on both our televisions and computers. There are a few ways to get streamed netflix content onto a television but I went with a Roku. The roku lets you stream netflix and also can let you buy or rent television shows or movies from the Amazon Video on Demand website. The clincher for me is that Roku is adding 10 more “channels” to their little box by the end of the year. There have been no real announcements as of yet (except the accidental one by blip.tv) however the conjecture is that stuff like hulu.com and tv.com are 2 of the 10.
The Roku is a really nice device. It has an HDMI port (among others) to connect to your TV and can connect to your home network by 802.11g wireless or by Ethernet. Note that this is not compatible with 802.11n, for those that are looking to squeeze every drop of speed out of their video enabled home network. I have a Belkin router and when I put it in “N” only mode I couldn’t connect to Roku to it. This was a bit of a learning experience for me since I have not played with 802.11n much at all. On the wireless “G” network the Roku worked very well. We have experienced one video interruption during playback in the week that I have had this setup. The netflix stream through Roku seems to be pretty solid. The setup of the Roku overall was really simple. During the connection to your netflix account it generates a code that you need to authorize on the netflix website. There is a similar process for Amazon content. The Roku box itself is very small, about 6 inches square and 2 inches high so I put it right behind my television. The remote is pretty small and has a very simple layout which is also true for the Roku’s UI. All in all easy to setup and easy to use. The one downer for folks who are really big on true HD content is that the Roku tops out at 720p. So if you just have to have full HD everywhere, the Roku is not for you. If you don’t mind 720p and really are into the functionality and currently expanding content, this device is definitely for you. Personally, I love it.
I am in the middle of converting over to DTV and getting rid of our very expensive legacy services and putting low cost IP based services in place. My first step was to get rid of my Verizon DSL service and get Comcast Cable Internet service. Comcast is $10/month more expensive but it offers 5 times the speed (3 meg vs 15 meg) and I really needed a beefier connection to handle the video I am now streaming. Next was my land line phone service (also from Verizon) and that was replaced by T-Mobile @Home and since I already have T-Mob for my cell phones the home phone service only cost $10/month.
By legacy services I mean land line phones, cable/satellite tv providers and anything that is now available for free or very low cost on line. Just to be clear I am in no way advocating piracy and with the on line presence of the major networks and sites like hulu, netflix, crackle, blip.tv (the list goes on) the out right piracy of media content should really be a thing of the past. Understand that I also believe that fair use is another issue altogether and is much larger than this short series of posts.
Next will be a bit about the gadgets and services and network setup that will help me to replace (for my wife mostly) as painlessly as possible, the functionality of our satellite service and the dvr that was part of it.
