Our Roku Netflix Player arrived the other day and I set it up yesterday. One line review: KILLER!
The physical footprint is about the size of four or five CD cases, stacked. It’s small. The basic idea behind the player is that it pushes your Play Instantly selections on Netflix through your TV. It does this via your Internet connection, naturally. It’ll take a connection via WiFi or Ethernet. There’s no fan, so it’s totally quiet.
Setup is probably easiest with an unsecured WiFi connection, but if you can add a MAC address to your WiFi router, you’ll have no problem setting up a secured connection. Or you can run an Ethernet cable.
It’ll connect to all kinds of televisions. We’ve got a super old school TV with an integrated VCR (I know, BLING!), and it works fine with the included composite video cables. If you want S-video or HDMI or some other fancy thing, you’ll need a different cable, but all the right outlets are built into the box.
You add movies to your Watch Instantly queue using your computer and the standard Netflix Web site. Pretty much what you’re already used to. When you add movies to your queue, they’re instantly available through the Roku Netflix Player interface on your TV.
The included remote (they even give you the necessary two AA batteries) is small and simple to use. Very intuitive, even for knuckleheads like me. The interface on the television is a lot like Apple’s iTunes coverflow action. You scroll through your Watch Instantly movie queue using the left and right arrows on the remote. New movies are added to the far right of the queue. The interface is pretty simple at the moment, but it does the trick. As my queue grows, I’ll probably wish for at least rudimentary organizational options. My bet is that future software updates will allow for this feature.
When you watch movies, you can pause them and scroll through scenes. Just like with your DVD player, you can turn off a movie and return to the same place you left off. Very convenient.
This is great for folks with Mac-only households, since the web version of Netflix’s Watch Instantly is only available to Internet Explorer (and no, User Agent spoofing doesn’t work, I’ve tried). It’s great for households with kids–your kid movie collection just exploded! It’s killer because it overcomes the physical constraints of DVDs via mail–thousands of titles are instantly available.
If you love Netflix, this is the best $99 upgrade you could hope for.