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Roku HD1000 ($280) is a device that's billed as a high-definition media player for consumers. It can play digital media, including stills, music files and graphics, and even video if it's a certain type the unit can read. It's designed to bring the world of computer graphics, music and video into your living room, where your HDTV resides. Yes, it can do these things, but because of its awkward user interface and sluggish response, the thing acts like it doesn't want to. By the time you're done with Roku, neither will you. Here's a review.
For my testing I connected the Roku into our Midwest Test Facility theater, where we have a wired 100 base-T network connection at the ready and an NEC HT1000 HDTV projector. I also hooked up the Roku to our 5.1 surround audio system, and plugged in a CompactFlash card containing the optional Roku Gallery Collection Art Pack. With everything connected, I hit the On button and the unit began booting up, just like a computer, and after about a minute, it was ready to go -- not exactly instant-on. Based on the Linux operating system, Roku runs its own user interface that looks slightly like that of TiVo, another Linux-based set-top box that's seen significant success as a personal video recorder (PVR). A key difference between these two is that Roku has no hard drive -- it gets its media either from a variety of flash memory cards such as CompactFlash, Memory Stick or SD, or can access media files over a computer network.
It all sounds good. But it's not, at least not yet. The unit crashed so much while I was testing it, I practically beat a path through the carpet to the unit's location on the shelf, the only way to unfreeze it being a complete unplugging of power from the back of the unit. I would attempt to play an mp3 while showing a slide show of pictures from a digital camera. Crash. The thing would completely lock up.
Another tantalizing feature was its ability to use third party software to do even more tricks, such as play back various types of video files. The unit can play back HDTV files, but only if they're in the ATSC-compatible HDTV transport stream format, the same format used to broadcast HDTV in the US. Roku provided us with its HD1000 Gallery Collection (a $200 option), a CompactFlash card with all of its available Art Packs -- The Classics, Nature, Aquarium, Space, Holiday and Clocks. Some of these packs include MPEG transport stream files in full-rez HD which looked splendid. And it indeed does a creditable job of playing back HDTV media files, as long as they are MPEG transport stream files and have a .ts extension, and as long as it keeps from crashing. You could get these files onto your computer by recording them onto a hard disk with an HD tuner card, all of which are hardly beyond the experimental stage at this point. If your network can handle the 19mbit/sec. bandwidth required by these files, it can even play them back over a network. But if you have any other type of video files (how about Windows Media 9? DivX?), they won't play back unless you have a third-party player. I downloaded such a software application, this one called MpegPSPlay, and it locked up the unit so tight it had to be unplugged again. I tried a mp3 jukebox application written for Roku, and the same thing happened. Crash. The system, along with its half-baked third-party attempts at software, has a distinct beta-testing feel to it. That's frustrating because what this unit is capable of and what it actually executes are far apart at this point, but if it could just be refined a bit it could be a useful tool for playing back anything on your network.
Roku can play back stills as advertised. Many digital still camera users may not be aware that 3-megapixel digital photos are well within high definition resolution. That's why still pictures look so beautiful when displayed by the Roku. Alas, it's not a convenient experience to play back pictures on the Roku, nor is it as esthetically pleasing as it could be. The big plus is that the quality of the pictures is as good as your monitor. It's simply stunning. But that's where the pleasure ends. There's a jarring take between each still, where it would add a significant amount of grace if there were a dissolve. I'm reminded of the elegant screen saver on Mac OS X, where there's not only a butter-smooth dissolve between each still, there's a slow camera move on each one that adds a lot of interest to the overall experience. Why not have that with Roku? On the positive side, Roku's ability to include an MPEG file in a stack of pictures is a plus, giving you HD movies interspersed with stills. I also liked the ease of networking with this device -- it was as simple as plugging in the network cable in the back and then all our shared volumes throughout the facility were immediately visible and accessible. Setting up the unit was also easy, except for a few unexplained lockups along the way, an unacceptable occurrence for a product that purports to be a consumer electronics device. I mean, when was the last time your TV, telephone or oven needed re-booting? This much crashing is unheard-of in the home video market.
That leads us to the user interface and its foibles. As we've seen with TiVo, it's possible to create a snappy user interface using Linux, a modest processor and a remote-controlled series of screens. But I have to tell you, even though this Roku interface (see graphic above) reminds you of TiVo in the vaguest of ways, it's doesn't even distantly resemble the near-perfect user experience of TiVo. An annoyance is the awkwardness of the user interface, where if you want to navigate to a directory where your pictures are located, it can be a time-consuming and frustrating experience. Many Windows users, for example, keep their photos in their My Documents folder, and if you want to navigate to that through a network, you'll have to climb about five branches of the directory tree until you're there. Of course, it's much easier to just pop in a Memory Stick or CompactFlash (CF) card, and then your pictures are right there and ready to play. But then, who actually leaves all their pictures on a CF card? Making matters worse, when you're trying to dig through thousands of mp3 audio files, it's immediately obvious that Roku isn't going to help you. It's unbelievably time-consuming to simply find your way from one song to another. I was happy, though, to see that Roku recognizes the WinAmp playlists I had hanging around in my music directory, and it took those and opened all the tunes on each without incident, until, of course, it crashed when I tried to simultaneously view some pictures while listening to one of those playlists. "Go unplug it again, Charlie," said my eye-rolling companions as I made that re-booting stroll once again. I give up. Unless you have just a few music files in a directory, I'd say go ahead hook up your notebook to the stereo if all you want to do is listen to your mp3 collection. It's just not worth it to mess with the Roku for that, even though the box costs a fraction of what you'd pay for a notebook. But come to think of it, if you bought a bargain-basement notebook, it might only cost you about three times the $280 price of the Roku, and do so much more.
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