Netflix and the Roku Box Part 2

Netflix started out as home delivery DVD service but these days we use it mostly for Internet streaming. For as little as $8.99 a month you can access a catalogue of movies and TV shows and stream them to your PC. The Roku box is a very convenient way to take that same content and stream it to your TV.

Last time I posted I predominately discussed Netflix and how we started out on a 3 disk plan but are now happily and cheaply on a 1 disk plan with unlimited instant streaming. Check this out in Netflix and the Roku Box Part 1. The Roku box easily and cheaply enables you to stream Netflix instant content to your TV screen. We got our Roku HD Box in January 2010. It is available on Amazon for $100.

The box itself is pretty simple and comes with a small remote that is easy to use:

The installation was straight forward. From my view from the couch it was just a matter of plugging it in and it was up and running. It is WiFi enabled but as ours sits alongside our network router we just plugged it in using ethernet.

The top button on the remote (looks like a house) takes you to the main home screen which is shown on the first image in this post. From there you just use the arrows to select the Netflix icon using the select button on the remote. This brings up your Netflix Instant Queue as a listing of titles with cover art and time durations across the screen. They appear in the order of your Instant Queue on your Netflix account.

You select the title you want to watch and can then choose between:

• resume playing (from where you left off last time)
• play from beginning (you want to start over again)
• stars (to rank how you liked the show)
• remove (to remove it from your queue when you are finished with it)

I find the quality of the play back great. We have a 16 Mbps cable broadband connection and the box hooked up to a 32″ Samsung LCD TV via HDMI.

I manage my instant queue on my computer, but Roku have now added software to the box so you can do that directly on the TV. I will still mostly use my computer as it is faster to type on a keyboard and if I find a title I want but it is not available to watch instantly I can add it to my disk queue, which I can’t do from the box. On your computer you can also re-order the queue which is handy for grouping content together, like keeping all the kids stuff grouped together.

What I do like in the new software is that under the search function on the Roku box there are options to look at different categories of online content. Use your down arrow on the remote to scroll down and you get New Arrivals, split between movies and TV, plus the usual content classifications: comedy, sci-fi, romance, etc. Really handy when nothing on your instant queue matches your current mood and you want to quickly find something else that does.

For just $99 the Roku box is a great solution to get a lot of good TV and movie content to stream to your TV inexpensively.

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