- Feb 22, 2007
- 16,240
- 7
- 76
I finally got a roku2 xds and being into embedded electronics one of the first things I did was take it apart 
Inside the SOC ( chip contains ram, gpu, cpu, dsp, etc) was made by samsung. It appears to be a variant that they use in their mobile phone chipsets containing an ARM11 , 700Mhz cpu, OpenGL ES capable gpu. On board you have the lan chipset, bluetooth radio, wifi radio, flash memory and a chip from broadcom for power management. There is also a jtag port if you have the right adapter ( the pinout is odd, it is 20 pin layout but not the standard ARM pins) and exposed I2C bus pads that carry bluetooth and wifi data.
Overall the hardware looks good, board is well designed and I don't see any issues with quality.
The roku itself works well with netflix. Probably the best netflix experience I have ever seen. It starts streaming at lowest quality then goes to the highest the connection will support. That takes about 5-10 seconds so don't judge the playback from the second the image appears. The remote is using bluetooth so no need to worry about line of sight issues, put the box inside a cabinet and forget about it. The wifi seems to work well and I had no issues connecting to my router that was running ddwrt. Wired ethernet is also available . If there is an update it will prompt you when you start up the box.
Content for the box seems pretty good, supports hulu plus, netflix, crackle, pandora , and others. The picture quality is great for the content it supports.
The game angry birds works well and I actually like the remote better than the wii controller. Game works the same as it does on the pc and I saw no slowdowns or performance issues.
Downsides. Well first is the fact that roku wants to be streaming only, they are not focused much on playing local content. There is a usb media channel that plays back local content from a drive though it is limited by the codec support of the roku. Roku only supports WMV, MP4. Everything else that is local will not play. To play avi or mkv you have to convert those files to a mp4 format.
The box chipset can do DLNA which would allow people to use things like playon but roku had the playon channel removed complaining of copyright issues with its providers. This is the biggest issue with roku for me. They are focusing their revenue stream on content providers and not hardware sales . Anything that threatens those content providers seems to get snubbed by the company. It almost feels like a service you are buying into and not hardware.
If you want to stream stuff off a nas or local network you have to go with 3rd party utilities called channels. They are not a breeze to set up and will require doing things like running web servers locally on the pc to create streams the roku can play. Not ideal by any means. The ones I did try worked well but I can't see the average user going through this.
Picture quality is great with one exception. Roku has the box currently outputting pc level gamma. On a display that can't compensate for it that gives the picture a dark black and very bright colors. I had to put my hitachi display on brightness of 86 and color of 35, when normal is 50 for both. My wdtv live looks correct and so do my local channels . I just have to change it for the roku. They are looking into this so it could be updated in future firmware.
The sdcard slot on the device is for channel storage only so don't expect to store media on it. Users have no access to the slot.
Overall if you need a netflix or hulu plus player I highly recommend it. If you want to replace a HTPC look for something like the wdtv live plus.
An upcoming development board called the raspberry pi could be the best thing for many, will discuss that in another thread though.
Inside the SOC ( chip contains ram, gpu, cpu, dsp, etc) was made by samsung. It appears to be a variant that they use in their mobile phone chipsets containing an ARM11 , 700Mhz cpu, OpenGL ES capable gpu. On board you have the lan chipset, bluetooth radio, wifi radio, flash memory and a chip from broadcom for power management. There is also a jtag port if you have the right adapter ( the pinout is odd, it is 20 pin layout but not the standard ARM pins) and exposed I2C bus pads that carry bluetooth and wifi data.
Overall the hardware looks good, board is well designed and I don't see any issues with quality.
The roku itself works well with netflix. Probably the best netflix experience I have ever seen. It starts streaming at lowest quality then goes to the highest the connection will support. That takes about 5-10 seconds so don't judge the playback from the second the image appears. The remote is using bluetooth so no need to worry about line of sight issues, put the box inside a cabinet and forget about it. The wifi seems to work well and I had no issues connecting to my router that was running ddwrt. Wired ethernet is also available . If there is an update it will prompt you when you start up the box.
Content for the box seems pretty good, supports hulu plus, netflix, crackle, pandora , and others. The picture quality is great for the content it supports.
The game angry birds works well and I actually like the remote better than the wii controller. Game works the same as it does on the pc and I saw no slowdowns or performance issues.
Downsides. Well first is the fact that roku wants to be streaming only, they are not focused much on playing local content. There is a usb media channel that plays back local content from a drive though it is limited by the codec support of the roku. Roku only supports WMV, MP4. Everything else that is local will not play. To play avi or mkv you have to convert those files to a mp4 format.
The box chipset can do DLNA which would allow people to use things like playon but roku had the playon channel removed complaining of copyright issues with its providers. This is the biggest issue with roku for me. They are focusing their revenue stream on content providers and not hardware sales . Anything that threatens those content providers seems to get snubbed by the company. It almost feels like a service you are buying into and not hardware.
If you want to stream stuff off a nas or local network you have to go with 3rd party utilities called channels. They are not a breeze to set up and will require doing things like running web servers locally on the pc to create streams the roku can play. Not ideal by any means. The ones I did try worked well but I can't see the average user going through this.
Picture quality is great with one exception. Roku has the box currently outputting pc level gamma. On a display that can't compensate for it that gives the picture a dark black and very bright colors. I had to put my hitachi display on brightness of 86 and color of 35, when normal is 50 for both. My wdtv live looks correct and so do my local channels . I just have to change it for the roku. They are looking into this so it could be updated in future firmware.
The sdcard slot on the device is for channel storage only so don't expect to store media on it. Users have no access to the slot.
Overall if you need a netflix or hulu plus player I highly recommend it. If you want to replace a HTPC look for something like the wdtv live plus.
An upcoming development board called the raspberry pi could be the best thing for many, will discuss that in another thread though.
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