[TriLUG] OT: Anyone Have A Roku?

[Dewey Hylton]

> From: "Maxwell Spangler" <maxlists at maxwellspangler.com>
> To: "Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion" <trilug at trilug.org>
> Sent: Friday, October 4, 2013 11:06:23 PM
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] OT: Anyone Have A Roku?
> 
> On Fri, 2013-10-04 at 20:00 -0400, Dewey Hylton wrote:
> 
> 
> > i have 3 rokus; two gen2 and one gen3. i absolutely love them.
> 
> 
> 
> > though i use netflix and amazon prime, my biggest usage by far is
> > plex. the plex media server runs on linux; you feed it all your
> > media, and it indexes everything and populates its database. i
> > connect to pms with the plex client on the roku (also available
> > ios/android/whatever) and enjoy my movies on my big screen. high
> > definition, 5.1 (dolby digital and dts both work), you name it.
> > the new remote has a feature that's great for me - a headphone
> > jack. if headphones are connected to the remote prior to playing a
> > movie, the roku only sends sound to the headphones. i don't have
> > to bother muting anything else, and i can watch a nice loud action
> > movie while everyone else is doing their own thing (or asleep)
> > without bothering them.
> 
> 
> My 2012 era Samsung SmartTV has Linux embedded with a proprietary
> Samsung operating environment that allows apps.  I've got apps for
> Hulu,
> Netflix, Youtube, HBO Go and most of the others, including Plex.  I
> was
> investigating a Roku but after getting a "SmarTV" I found it met my
> needs and stopped looking.  It'll also play a variety of media
> formats
> including x264 using USB connection with memory sticks or actual hard
> drives connected.  I use sneakernet and use a 500G 2.5" Seagate
> external
> drive for a lot of my viewing despite having the TV and everything
> else
> on wired gigabit ethernet.
> 
> The quality of fast-forward and reverse scanning with a directly
> connected USB device so far has been far superior to any of the
> streaming agents like its built in DLNA server.  I think I tried Plex
> initially along with some other DLNA servers but found their quality
> in
> scanning through video files to be frustrating.
> 
> Can you comment on how a Roku3 feels when streaming large media files
> from a Linux Plex server in this regards?
> 
> Thanks!

the plex app for roku has changed several times over the past year or so, but mostly in the menu/search areas. playback is nearly flawless. the one thing i've found is that if subtitles are enabled manually, the video quality suffers during playback. i believe this is because the video is being reprocessed on the fly in order to stream video to the device with subtitles being part of the video stream - meaning the roku is still just streaming video and the quality issue is due to the plex media server's reprocessing. this is just a hunch, i haven't looked into it.

as for fast-forwarding and rewinding, video isn't displayed - instead, you are presented with a horizontal bar graduated with timing marks, and an indicator approximating your current location on the media timeline. this works very well, as one can skip ahead (3 different speeds) or backward a huge chunk of time, and when play is pressed again the video comes up immediately. but if you're wanting to scan the video yourself, as you would when dragging the control in vlc, this simply isn't going to do it for you. if however you just want to jump from point to point and not visually scan the video in between, the plex app on the roku will do a great job.

in most cases, i'd say the roku doesn't actually do anything other than display the video - which is does very well. i love watching my high definition bluray rips with dts audio. i believe the hard part is executed by the plex server itself; i believe this because my iphone and android tablet both work beautifully with the plex app - and i don't think either of them are really capable of doing the job by themselves. my pms is currently using a 4-core i7 with hyperthreading and 32GB of ram, so it's a fairly stout box - but the system as a whole works flawlessly even while i'm completely consuming all cpu cores and a big chunk of ram when processing video with handbrake. i do suspect however that the reason it works so well is due to the way i've processed all my video - it's possible that neither the pms nor the roku have much real work to do when displaying my media because there is no real need to change anything on its way to the output devices. streaming to the iphone/android would require processing, but the screens are so small (relatively) that i'm guessing the job is fairly easy for pms.