so anybody here do roku??

[frenchy]

i'm pretty much sick up and fed with directv and forgetaboutit when it comes to comcast .. and eeeeeeeeeeeeee.. when it comes to prism by centurylink .. that prism made me wanna commit murder .. of course thats illegal and believe me i checked .. they said i couldn't even kill em just a little bit .. bummer man .. so whaddya do ?? well i just got a roku.. it seems that televeision is takin a whole new turn .. at first the whole idea of it all just confused me .. i mean you're used to just turnin on the tv and lookin to see whats on .. and then makin a choice based on WHATS ON RIGHT NOW .. as opposed to what you might wanna see right now .. now don't get me wrong a tivo or dvr is a step in the right direction and was the first move toward where we're goin .. but the future is what do you wanna see right now .. go to your list of favorite channels and pick somethin and they stream it for you .. some channels are free some are not .. the free ones will probably come with some commercials but the price is right so how can you complain ?? if you get netflix you get it all commercial free and that includes regular tv programmin as far as i know .. i'm still figurein this out as i go .. just got it .. but i think i'm ready to take that step into the great beyond .. i think one of the things i need is a internet connection of at least 3mbps and thats what i have now .. but for a small phenominal fee i can bump it up to 7 to 10 which will take care of any of them circles of death you get when its bufferein cause you're internet connection is too slow .. so anybody else here do roku yet ?? any hints and tips you can give us ?? cause i think in a few years we'll all be doin it .. come on people talk to me .. 

[ProblemAgain]

oh oh frenchy...just when you thought you had figured it out....

TOKYO—Persuading consumers to trade in bulky old-school televisions for slim, high-definition models was a huge success story for the TV industry. Now manufacturers are angling to kick off another buying spree.

They are gearing up to promote what the industry calls "ultra high-definition" televisions, or UHDTVs, which promise four times the resolution of existing TVs and are likely to be a hot topic at next week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Such TVs create images using more than eight million pixels, compared with about two million pixels of today's full high-definition televisions

Sony Corp. and LG Electronics, for example, have introduced 84-inch ultra high-definition sets priced at $25,000 and $20,000, respectively. Toshiba Corp. has announced a 55-inch set in Japan for ¥750,000, or $8,700. UHDTVs are expensive because they use a new liquid-crystal-display panel that requires a greater degree of precision from component manufacturers. So far, the manufacturing efficiency for such panels is low, but production quality is expected to improve over time.

A big question is how quickly television manufacturers will bring down prices. The introduction of full high-definition televisions in the mid-2000s provides a model for how quickly prices can decline. A 40-inch, high-definition television, which cost about $4,800 in 2005, sold for about $560 in 2012, according to NPD DisplaySearch.

There should be no shortage of competing 4K set makers to help push prices down, at least to judge by expected activity at the CES. Westinghouse Digital LLC is planning to show, besides conventional sizes, a 110-inch UHDTV set available for custom order in the first quarter; pricing hasn't been announced.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/next-step-tv-evolution-paying-0338006...

110 inches?? frick does making it bigger make it better? or is crap just bigger crap on a larger screen?

[blithe spirit]

I had never seen roku Frenchy...until you mentioned it the other day. Yesterday, I was at Sam's Club and ta da...there was roku...The cost was $69.99...a box of some sort and a remote control it looks like...its a streaming from the internet to a TV thing? Anyway...thought I'd share;

[frenchy]

a good question almond .. i remember when i had the video store there was a tv and vcr repair guy next door to me .. old nick .. and if my memory serves me right he was tellin me how tv sets ( this was back in the early 90's ) had a resolution of 220 lines .. and a vcr had the capability of 320 lines of resolution .. so no matter what you did you coudn't get your vcr to look as good as it could cause your tv could only reproduce 220 lines .. but the new higher resolution tv's were commin out soon and they were gonna be 520 lines which was more than double what we had before .. and then the dvd was on the horizon a few years later .. and then came hd tv transmissions and i pretty much lost track of where we were .. i'm not sure if the first hd transmissions were 520 or 720 lines .. and now they have 1080 .. but i wonder if thats the amount of lines of resolution or just another number that stands for somethin else ?? i mean can they possibly get that many lines of resolution ?? it seems they're changin the way they rate the picture quality and the higher they can get that number the more it confuses the public into thinkin gee maybe i need a new tv .. they do the same thing with digital camera's . i have an old pentax digital camera that is rated at 2.2 megapixels and i can get 8x10's out of it .. not the very best quality but good enough to view .. and now i have a fuji thats 10 megapixels .. i read an article in popular photography awhile back about megapixels and how many do you need .. and the gist of the whole thing was 6 was good 10 was better but once you got past 10 a lot of camera's couldn't really get you a better picture .. the extra pixels past 10 would just be too many pixels gettin in each others way .. and it actually gave you a worse picture .. so why did they keep makin camera's with 14 and 16 megapixels ?? because if all you had was an 8 megapixel camera and your neighbor george came over with his brand new 16 megapixel camera it would make you feel somehow inferior so to keep up with the jonses you'd rush out and look for an 18 megapixel camera .. never mind that it didn't take better pics .. you'd have somethin to show george and say yeah its 18 megapixels too .. i suppose as the screen sizes get bigger and you have more screen area you might need more megapixels .. but i'm sure there will be a cutoff point where any more megapixels won't be perceptible to the human eye .. if you were an eagle and flyin a mile high maybe .. just my 2 cents .. didn't mean to take the long way around but i thought it all applied ..       

[Karin M Fichtner]

I have a theory about all that. Remember when we were young....a guy would brag about how fast and powerful his car was? Well, now our cars all look the same, have less cylinders, rarely have a manual shift, and are " green". What's to brag about? So now guys have to brag about how many gigs their computers have....how many cool apps we have on our phones....how fast our tablets are....how clear (and large) our tvs are, and how many megapixiels are in our camera.
Kinda sad....but there always seems to have to be a "measuring stick" in there somewhere.

[ProblemAgain]

i was talking with someone who has an nbox..

http://www.amazon.com/NBOX-N31-Digital-Media-Player/dp/B002N3DIC4/r...

and it seems what this is for is an interface between a hard drive, a flashdrive or a memory card and your tv...so it enables you to play downloaded movies or saved files thru your tv....it has a usb port to accept a flashdrive or an external hard drive and a memory card slot...

you could download a lot from places  and then play those

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO82t4ViZl4

[ProblemAgain]

frenchy....saw this in the frys ad....a roku HD streaming player for 59 bucks...you can phone order or online i would think and they can ship it...

http://www.frys.com/ads/page7#AdNavi

http://www.frys.com/product/7072581?site=sa:adpages%20page:P7_FRI%2...

thought you might be interested

[frenchy]

i picked up 2 of their boxes .. one is good up to 1080 and you can use a mini sd card to give the roku more memory to store favorite channels .. i don't know if i'll ever need it or not but it was 4.95 so i got it .. the other box will only do 720 and it won't do the sd card so you can only store about 200 channels .. and it won't use an hdmi cable .. the other one will .. but my other tv don't have the hdmi connection anyway so .. who cares .. the cheaper box was 49.95 and the other one was 69.95 i think .. once i find out where all the good channels are i'll see which ones i'll really use and which one's i won't .. i'd like to get things from pbs like frontline and austin city limits and maybe sessions at west 57th st .. soundstage .. and a few more .. its just findin it all and puttin it all together so the roku can access it .. i'm sure i'll still watch regular tv for some things like news and football .. but for things that i can wait till i'm in the mood or have the time why be a slave to the clock for it to come on regular tv .. i have to be there at 10pm and not 3 minutes sooner or later.. i'm sure whatever it is i'll enjoy it just as much if i see it next week when i'm ready .. and i can stop it in the middle just like a dvr .. its the wave of the future ..   

[crestofwaves]

All I have to say is "Huh?"

But it sounds like this Roku is like the radio receiver I just got.  I picks up all the radio on the Internet and I now have them on my stereo in the living room.  Is that what it is?  something like that?  I do not like sitting in front of the computer to watch a movie or documentaty. 

I love Cable TV, but I don't think we need all the channels my husband wants on it which makes it very pricey.  I love the channel surfing!  I love On Demand! and DVR, but we have the tripple play and it cost around $200 per month.

[frenchy]

eeeeeeee.. cresty thats a boatload of cash .. i have to admit that so far with this roku i'm just gettin started .. so i'm not even close to an expert .. but in the last few days that i've had it i watched a few movies and put on this channel called vemo i think which played music video's one after the other with no commercials . and here's the thing .. i put my request in for one video and it keeps on findin more that are of a similar genre so i don't get one of billybob redneck country and another of ice cube or ice tea or some kinda rapper with the name ice in it .. just pretty much the same genre .. and it went on for about 4 hours like that while i did somethin else and just peeked in from time to time .. so so far i love that channel .. and i found about 5 more music channels and haven't even gone to em yet .. i watched a couple of movies from a channel called crackle and i did get a commercial .. every 10 minutes or so that was not a minute long but about a 30 second comercial .. not even enough time to take a pee ..and i know i can get netflix but at this point i want to try to keep exporin all the free channels because once i get netflix i'll probably just watch a lot of stuff from there and i don't wanna fall into that trap right off ..  i got the syfi channel and i got commercials there too .. about a minute or so every 10 minutes . keep in mind that this is not like regular tv tho in the sense that everyone is used to .. on regular tv you look at the guide to see what they are playin right now and thats your choice .. with this roku and the downloadin you choose whats available and watch what you want to watch ..its like the internet is the worlds biggest dvr and thru the roku you get to access it .. some channels you have to pay for but even if you got say 10 pay channels you wouldn't pay close to 200 per month .. some of the channels will  show old movies and they have a subscription of about 1.99 a year .. some are monthly like netflix which has movies and tv shows which are commercial free and i think its about 8 bucks a month .. but netflix doesn't have the very latest .. yet .. give em another year or two and they will .. i think this is the wave of the future .. i don't think this will hurt regular tv all that much but cable and satelite is gonna feel it .. we should keep this post open and as we go along we can help each other to get the most from whats out there .. the hardest thing now is findin it all cause its so all over the place .. when somebody invents a program that will find it all for you they'll be the next billionaire .. 

[blithe spirit]

So with this box, I no longer need to have cable? Is that what I'm understanding?

I just need an internet connection, yes? Can I still surf the web when this is streaming or would I have to have another computer to do that?

I won't be watching TV on my computer right? If my TV is HD then I need the 1080...if I also have a regular TV then I will need a 720, right? 

I assume if I purchase it I will get instructions on any other connections or setup I need to have?

I don't watch a lot of TV but I do like to get current news...anything else it wouldn't matter when I saw it.

This seems like  something I might want to try.

[ProblemAgain]

the roku is a streaming device to feed your tv from your internet ....some of the new dvd players have the wifi as well...i don't know if the players will stream from the internet ..when i am in the big city, i'll have to swing by a shop and talk with a semismart person