I recently received a Roku Netflix player as a gift. I have always been skeptical of the Roku player and the quality of the picture that they could possibly deliver over someone’s network connection of unknown quality and load. When they recently announced a player update with HD output, I figured that they must be delivering some high quality content.
I have only had it about a week, but so far I’m impressed. There seems to be a few video encoding levels in use by the Netflix folks and I’m happy with all but the lowest. Some video content is pretty grainy and suffers during fast panning of the camera. However, most of the stuff I’ve wanted to watch thus far has either been higher quality standard definition or in HD. I must say that although the HD programming doesn’t compare (in quality) to what I get over cable or from a Blu-ray disc, I’m quite impressed with how good it is. The box has HDMI and Component outputs on the back, both of which we have tried. The HDMI is clearly better, but the component is definitely usable.
I’ve done a very small amount of inspection of the network traffic so far and hope to do more. During a buffer fill, it will pull between five and ten megabits of data from the server, cycling as it plays of course. I don’t know what the minimum sustained speed is, but their site claims it is only 1.2Mbit with a recommendation of 5Mbit. So, if you’re on old DSL you probably won’t be very happy with it, but anyone with a decent cable modem (or better) should be okay.
I tend to think that there must be some interesting (read: undocumented) things you can do with the device, but I haven’t seen much mentioned in a few google searches. I did port scan it and I see the following open ports:
PORT STATE SERVICE
8080/tcp open http-proxy
8083/tcp open unknown
8084/tcp open unknown
8085/tcp open unknown
8086/tcp open unknown
Connecting to 8080 returns some sort of command-line interface, but the only command I’ve seen it respond to is “quit”. Definitely some more inspection is needed there.
The only other thing I should comment on is the setup procedure. I haven’t tried to connect it to my encrypted wireless network, but all the other tasks required to get the device working were superbly engineered. The device boots up the first time, presents you with a short Netflix URL and an activation code. You log in to your Netflix account, type in the code, and the service links your player and account. Well done guys.
So, in summary, I highly recommend the player. For $99 you can’t really beat the price, and if you already have a Netflix account, you’re missing out on an otherwise free service!