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

Amazing

[erick99]

When you read this article you wonder how all of these problems can be possible with this product. It seemed to me that the reviewer was competent and very patient. It makes me wonder if there was any user testing and quality control in this process or was it someone's "good idea" and rushed to market? There are just too many electronic gadgets on the market that are poorly designed and frustrating to use.

Take care!

Erick

Quality Assurance

[millahtime]

There are just too many electronic gadgets on the market that are poorly designed and frustrating to use.

Engineers have a lot of great ideas and can even make them happen but there are a lot of angles they don't see or even think of. Many of the engineers aren't even the target users and don't really understand how something gets used.

This is one place I will give props to the military. They require Quality Assurance and testing by the user before they will sign off on something.

Re:Quality Assurance

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of the engineers aren't even the target users and don't really understand how something gets used.

Having worked as an engineer in product design for many years, I resent this statement. Frankly, if an engineer designs something without understanding how it gets used, he just isn't much of an engineer in my opinion.

Beyond that, I've been involved in far too many of this kind of debacle to let that statement pass unchallenged! Every time, repeat every time I was involved with this kind of product disaster it was not the fault of the engineers working on it. It was the combined fault of:
1. engineering managers who shrank development schedules to ridiculous extremes, creating death-marches that still had no chance of succeeding.
2. mid-level managers who then signed off on abysmal products and shipped them regardless of problems, usually after forcing the aforementioned shortened schedules on the engineering department in the first place.
3. upper-level managers who force all of the above down the chain of command and then brag about how they pushed a product to market in ridiculously short time-frames (usually while filling out their resume so they can move on to the next company whose reputation they will destroy).

Is it really Linux' fault that it sucks?

[YankeeInExile]

It seems clear from the review that the application stack in the Roku is not ready for prime time, but that is not really the fault of Linux.

Other embedded-Linux applications have successfully made boot-time a non-issue.

Unfortunately, in an embedded application, the presentation is monolithic -- it either works or it doesn't. So, this is going to seriously adversely affect the image of Linux in Set-top-box applications.

But, But...

[christopher240240]

Linux doesn't crash! Seriously, if this company has that much of a problem with designing their interface to be stable, perhaps they shouldn't be in the consumer electronics game.

Re:Linux underpinnings

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you read the article that really is what he is getting at. The slashdot spin has really been getting worse and worse.

Linux based OS

[monkeySauce]

He does harp on the fact that it runs Linux pretty often, even when it's insignificant-- like the OS has something to do with a poor user interface.

Odd...

[Anonymous Coward]

At the beginning of the article, they blame the problems on "the awkwardness" of Linux. Then at the end, they say that Tivo has proven that the problem isn't Linux. Am I missing something here?

Roku good, Roku bad? Don't ask Charlie.

[gordguide]

The review is by Charlie White.

Now, it may well be that the thing is not ready for prime time, although some other reviewers seem to think it is.

It's just that, I've read Good Old Charlie's stuff before, reviewing things I'm intimately familiar with.

His experiences, conclusions, and pretty much everything else conflicted with mine so much that I now simply trash anything with his byline without reading it at all (I didn't notice his byline on this article until the bottom of page 2; in other words, the end. I wish I'd noticed it earlier, coulda saved some time).

Customizable?

[n17ikh]

I wonder how hackable this thing is. If it's possible to install a *different* version of Linux on it (or even Win98SE for the mostly non-Linux literate folks like me)and how fast its processor is and what amount of RAM it has. and I wonder if the extra cost would be worth all the component outputs, or if an Xbox would be better for that sort of thing... It would probably cost more and be harder to hack, but might you get better performance? Or would you be better off building your own sub-$300 PC with decent specs or even getting an Xbox for the performance/cost tradeoff?