I should have added that I then connected it with wires like I'm some sort of peasant and it still continued to mysteriously just drop the internet

9/3/2013 2:18:17 PM

Perhaps it was due to the method you used to jailbreak it.

9/3/2013 2:41:48 PM

perhaps, i used whatever the free option firecore offers

9/3/2013 5:34:23 PM

Oh wow. This should be fun. Where to begin...

Quote :

"you're either a shill or a troll because the only other possibility is that for the last 5 or so years I've been streaming media to my TV, I've just had other bad products off the line repeatedly"

Or another possibility could be that I've tried out more than just a video game console and a defective Apple TV before deciding that the only other thing that half-assed worked must be the best thing evar by default.

Quote :

"first i had a ps3 and I had to either make sure video files were formatted correctly or were native in the proper format for it to play"

The PS3 is a video game console first, a blu-ray player second, and a media streaming device a far distant third. You won't get any argument from me that it's a steaming pile of shit.

Quote :

"second i got an apple tv with the sole intention of jailbreaking it so it could run as a media center only to have the wifi drop out continuously or run sluggishly whenever fast forwarding or rewinding."

You obviously had a bad Apple TV, and should have returned it. I've had 2 ATVs for myself, 2 for my parents, and one for my sister, jailbroke them all, and never experienced anything like what you described.

Quote :

"the roku's usb functionality is basic? it plays everything you throw at it! I never have to format even 1080p bluray rips. I can have the idea "I want to watch x..." and 2 seconds later I can be watching it on the Roku and through PS3 and aTV, there was an entire process and/or other hardware involved."

Off the top of my head, here's a list of things wrong with the Roku's USB playback:

*The UI for the file selection is horrible. You can only see, I think, 4 items at a time, and only the first ~20 characters of the file name are displayed. So if you have a folder with Showname.720p.s01e01, Showname.720p.s01e02, etc, it cuts them all off to Showname.720p.s01... and makes it impossible to determine which episode you want to select.

*Speaking of the UI, it's just ugly. There's no customization, there's no view options, and there's certainly nothing even close to fancy features like scraping metadata and show/movie information off the internet and displaying dvd covers/movie posters for saved files. Like I said, it's just very basic.

*It doesn't mark the content that you've watched in any way.

*It doesn't allow you to delete files from the USB stick when you're done watching them.

*There's no resume feature when playing back a movie you've watched a portion of.

*There's no way to see the file when you're fast forwarding. Seriously, every media device made since the dawn of time lets you see things going in fast forward or rewind, but the Roku just throws up a black screen, and a timeline at the bottom. That wouldn't be so horrible if you know that you want to fast forward to 22 minutes in a movie, but if you just want to scan something quickly to look for a particular scene, it's impossible.

*There's also no way to jump large amounts of time. If you're watching a movie that's 2 hours and 30 minutes, and you even bothered to remember that you stopped it at 1 hour 45 minutes, there's still no way to get to that spot again unless you fast forward 3x to that point, which takes a good 30 seconds or more. There's no reason why they couldn't make one of the buttons jump forward 10 minutes at a time.

*Nitpicky, but I get annoyed that over half the buttons on the Roku remote will stop playback of a file. Seriously, hitting a direction on the d-pad stops the video for some reason. If you have a small child that likes to play with remotes, or you accidentally lay the remote on the couch and sit on it, it's FAR too easy to accidentally stop a movie from playing. Combined with the previous 3 items, this gets annoying far too often.

*If by "everything you throw at it" you mean "only H.264 mp4s or mkvs" then you might be right. Everything else is a crap shoot. Up until not too long ago, the most popular file format for sharing movies was divx/xvid avis. The Roku simply won't play those. One of the shows I watch is still only uploaded to the internet in divx format, so I have to convert it if I want to watch it on the Roku. And hey, lets just completely forget that WMV, MOV, MPG, FLV, or ASF files exist, right?

*It only does passthrough of AC3 audio. Which means unless your TV can handle decoding AC3(most don't), or you're hooked up to a receiver/soundbar, you won't get any sound coming from those blu-ray rips of yours. Which might be fine if you DO have a receiver that does AC3/DTS, but if you want to take your Roku over to a friends house and all he has is a normal TV, you're going to be having silent movie night.

So yes. I'd consider that basic. If I'm being nice. You can get one particular format of movies you've got stored on a USB drive to show up on your TV most of the time, and that's about it. Sometimes they even have audio too, so I suppose that's a bonus. Pretty much the definition of the word basic though.

Quote :

"Maybe YOU have no idea what you're talking about and you're thinking of previous experiences with earlier rokus but the new Roku 3 is simply the greatest wave of relief I've experienced in my media center setup in years."

That confirms my suspicions then. You've tried to get a game console to do something it wasn't designed to do, had bad luck with an Apple TV when you tried to get it to do what it wasn't supposed to do, and then you've stumbled onto a Roku and it looks like a shining diamond in comparison.

Me? My first media streamer was a modded original xbox running XBMC. It wouldn't play HD content (not that there was much to be had back then anyway) but the UI was excellent. Once you've experienced that, just about everything else is going to be a letdown in comparison.

Then about 5 years ago I replaced it with a Popcorn Hour A-110 NMT. It really will play absolutely everything imaginable that you throw at it from USB or a SMB share on the network. As far as local media playback is concerned, it is definitively better than the Roku is in every way imaginable, and if mine hadn't been struck by lightning 2 years back, I would still be using it to this day as my primary Media Center device. It has none of the drawbacks of the Roku I listed above even though it is now 5+ years old. It doesn't do any sort of Netflix or Youtube or really hardly any internet streaming, but that's simply not what it was designed for. I think newer versions of the PCH have added such features.

Also about 5 years back I bought a WD TV HD for my bedroom. It's very basic as well, but again, at 5 years old it plays back files from USB better than the Roku could ever dream of today. It also doesn't have any of the negatives I listed above, with the exception of not doing metadata/movie posters. I bought a new WD TV last year for $59 that is completely redesigned, and does to the movie poster/show info thing as well. It also has an HDMI port as well as standard RCA cable output, meaning when I took it on the family vacation this summer I was able to hook it up to the old TV in the rental house we stayed in and have Netflix for the kids as well as movies for the adults on a USB stick. There's two separate reasons why that wouldn't have worked with a Roku 3.

My point is, there are tons of other devices out there, many for far less money, that do so much more than the Roku. It all depends on what you want to do with it, and what features are important to you. The Roku has name recognition and ease of use going for it, and that's just about it. Everything else about it, if you took the time to actually educate yourself on the topic, is really subpar.

9/3/2013 10:01:47 PM

It sucks that this post has gotten lots of attention, but no actual replies.

Did I just win that hard?

9/15/2013 8:03:13 PM

tl,dr

Pity reply.

9/15/2013 9:05:26 PM

Nah, I pity you if you actually didn't read that masterpiece of ownership.

That post has a fanclub already, I just actually would have minded it sparking some actual discussion.

9/15/2013 9:27:15 PM

I pity the fool!

9/15/2013 9:42:00 PM

the real victory here is that we're both happy owners of whatever hardware we own

9/17/2013 10:00:03 PM

Finally set up the Plex SSL Fix as detailed in the link below. not very complicated actually, longest part was downloading the various pieces of software and installing them. Got a little tricky with the 2nd ATV3 but I figured it out...

https://langui.sh/2013/08/27/appletv-ssl-plexconnect/

10/6/2013 8:04:55 PM

Quote :

"The Roku simply won't play those. One of the shows I watch is still only uploaded to the internet in divx format"

Just out of curiosity, what show?

10/6/2013 8:55:49 PM

^^I've yet to attempt that Plex fix, but do you have to have your laptop on all the time? If so, is it possible to configure on a NAS(synology to be specific) so I don't have to?

10/9/2013 2:01:55 PM

Huh? Whatever machine that's running Plex Server has to be on all the time if you wanna access your Plex whenever you want. A NAS would work if it's running an OS you can install Plex Server to...

10/9/2013 10:34:27 PM

You can run plex media server on some NAS setups.

http://www.plexapp.com/getplex/ --- click NAS.

keep in mind that if you need Plex to do any transcoding, a NAS may struggle to keep up. You'd probably want to make sure all of your video and audio is encoded with something that is native to all of your clients.

If you're expecting it to have to transcode, I probably wouldn't run the media server on a NAS.

10/10/2013 7:22:37 PM

I got it up and running....Luckily I don't need Plex to do the transcoding.

10/14/2013 2:11:44 PM

is anyone using an apple tv with windows? I'm curious if it works or if its laggy.

10/14/2013 3:03:04 PM

^ in what way?

The only interaction my Windows computers have add with my Apple TVs is using the Air Parrot app (AirPlay for Windows) and that works just as well as AirPlay does on macs. Well I also stream from Windows for Plex but that doesn't have much to do with Windows.

10/14/2013 3:31:09 PM

just curious how well air parrot worked, some of the reviews i read said the lag was pretty bad so i was curious about first-hand experiences

10/14/2013 3:35:39 PM

It's worked fine for me, though I usually just stream these days.

10/14/2013 4:18:18 PM

http://slickdeals.net/f/6373462-apple-tv-3rd-gen-refurb-for-75-fs?src=tdw

10/31/2013 11:19:20 AM

Has anyone Jailbroken their Apple TV 3 yet?

Also is XBMC Kodi any better than Plex?

[Edited on March 9, 2016 at 9:08 AM. Reason : http://lifehacker.com/home-theater-software-showdown-kodi-vs-plex-1746501974]

3/9/2016 9:03:38 AM

Are you talking about the Apple TV 3 which was the updated version of the 2, or the new Apple TV with the siri remote?

Either way, as far as I know, neither one of them is jailbreakable, although you can sideload Kodi onto the new one. Pretty sure there's no way to get Kodi onto the 3 though unless I missed a pretty big announcement.

[Edited on March 9, 2016 at 9:14 AM. Reason : Nevermind, found a tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tygTY6ea2tQ]

3/9/2016 9:13:12 AM

This one: http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-tv/apple-tv-3rd-gen

And I assumed it was JB'able because of this: http://tinyurl.com/ztblcms but further reading suggests it hasn't happened yet, and won't, so nm

3/9/2016 9:47:33 AM

My understanding is that ATV3 cannot be jailbroken.

3/11/2016 3:16:58 PM

I have a ATV2 that i would trade for ATV3 or whatever. previously jailbroken but not anymore.

3/13/2016 8:05:52 PM

Does anyone have the new Apple TV and care to give a review?

3/16/2016 1:53:36 PM

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/03/mini-review-tvos-9-2-fixes-all-the-apple-tvs-biggest-problems/

I have the new Apple TV and this should make the extra features youre paying for worth the cost.

The old AppleTV is almost over priced for its feature set compared to competitors, but still a pretty useful device if you have iOS devices around your house.

3/21/2016 2:47:43 PM