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Roku XD first impressions

April 5, 2011 by Aaron

I’m always trying to improve my home media experiences, and until now, I’ve been happy with my Original Xbox running XBMC and my 1st Gen Apple TV running XBMC & Boxee.   I keep most of my media on a 1TB network storage device, and it works great.

But yesterday, I was at Best Buy picking up some accessories for my iPad2, and I ended up buying a Roku XD.   I have a Hulu+ subscription which I enjoy with my iPad, and a co-worker clued me into Amazon’s instant on-demand videos which are actually cheaper than the Charter on Demand videos I get through my cable service, and since the Roku XD supports both of those, I thought I would give it a spin.

So far, I am very impressed.  With Hulu+ I have access to more TV shows than I could possibly watch, and a subscription to Amazon Prime will give me even more, including movies.  I was also pleasantly surprised with some other channels available on the Roku device, like Crackle.com which has free movies on demand.

The UI on the Roku is a little meh.  It’s functional and thats about it.  I really like the remote, and performance wise, while the menu changes are a bit sluggish, the video playback on my TV is excellent.

For a $79 device, the Roku XD gets my approval.  I actually am considering getting a 2nd Roku for another TV in the house, and I’ll play around with a server software called Chaneru which should let me play/stream my current media library off the network to the roku devices, eliminating the need for a 2nd XBMC/Boxee device for downloaded media.

As much as I love apple products, I cannot forsee or justify spending the prices Appple demands for media in iTunes.  Why buy a TV season for $36 in iTunes, when I can get the same thing from Amazon for $19?  Or included in a monthly subscription from Hulu+ or Amazon Prime?

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