Fun With Roku, HDTV
Over the past couple of days, I’ve been playing with my Roku box. Primarily because I also bought an HDTV over the weekend, something I haven’t previously owned. While the Roku didn’t come with an HDMI cable–needed to get the full HD benefits from a Roku–I bought one separately at Fry’s.
It didn’t take too long for me to configure my Roku box to use the full 1080p goodness of my TV. I watched several netcasts from TWiT and they streamed beautifully on my large screen. The crap on The Daily GizWiz was crisper and clearer than ever before! I also watched some content from CNN, but it was clearly not HD-friendly, as things were a little blocky when upscaled.
My wife also managed to use the Roku box today–without my help. Apparently she wanted to watch something I had made available via a flash drive attached to the Roku box. After she figured out which input on the HDTV I hooked up the Roku box to and got over the fact the box (or the remote) lacked a power switch, she was able to figure out how to work it. I didn’t observe any of this as I was not home at the time, but it does speak to the fact that the Roku interface is fairly straightforward for normal people.
Meanwhile, the next step is to try Hulu Plus. I won’t complain if you sign up with my referral link, which will give you a two week trial instead of the standard one. However, I’m not hearing fantastic things about this service (namely, there’s still ads and not all the content is available on the Roku), but I’m going to give it a shot anyway.
More to come.
