Review of the Roku HD1000 Media Player

Animaether writes "Digital Producer magazine are running a review of the Roku HD1000 HD media player hardware. Between 'The unit crashed so much while I was testing it, I practically beat a path through the carpet to the unit's location on the shelf...' and 'Roku HD1000 misses by such a wide margin, it isn't worth buying', the review paints a pretty grim picture of this unit, and appears to put part of the blame on its Linux-based OS and software. The Roku HD1000 was previously covered here in December 2003."

Comments

More about design problems than system ones

[Space cowboy]

The story-text is misleading - the author is complaining about the poor design choices in the GUI, not the OS itself, witness:

That leads us to the OS and its foibles. As we've seen with TiVo, it's possible to create a snappy user interface using Linux, a modest processor and a remote-controlled series of screens. But I have to tell you, even though this Roku interface (see graphic above) reminds you of TiVo in the vaguest of ways, it's doesn't even distantly resemble the near-perfect user experience of TiVo.

... at which point he compares it unfavourably with the TiVO experience. All seems fair enough to me.

Simon.

Re:More about design problems than system ones

[BigBir3d]

not just bad GUI choices. everything is slow (1 minute to boot!!!) from start-up to navigating thru a big directory.

just because it uses linux (cost saving measure it sounds like) does not mean it will be a good, or usefull, product.