Yesterday my new Roku (http://www.roku.com) device arrived. For those of you living in a cave somewhere, the Roku player is a movie player device, which works together with your Netflix account. Netflix lets you watch some of their movies using a streaming video service, and the Roku is built to be used for this only. I figured, for $99, how bad could it be?

Well, this is just a short "review", but the short story is this: The Roku Rocks! First off, the device is tiny, and comes with a minimalistic remote:

The setup was super easy, since it supports HDMI I simply hooked that up to my receiver, and a CAT5 network cable, and that was it. Once booted up, the Roku takes you through a few simple setup steps. The only "snag" here was that network only seems to support DHCP, there is no way (as far as I can tell) to statically configure the IP, network mask and rout information.

Once the Roku was up on the network, I went through the software upgrade process, since I knew there was an update available (from reading the forums). This new version supports some HD content (720p), and has a new menu layout. The software upgrade went very smoothly, and very fast, and the Roku was up with the new features in minutes. A quick reconfigure now allowed me to specify that my TV is an HDTV capable system, and voila, we got HD!

Using the Roku is very easy, you simply pick a movie from your Netflix Instant Playlist. This is both good, and bad. The good part is that it's really easy to navigate and select movies (or episodes from a TV show). The bad news is, there's no way to add a new movie selection from the Roku GUI itself. This is quite disappointing, since you can't just search for a movie by name on the Roku, you'll have to bring your laptop to the TV room (or walk back to your office). I'm hoping / assuming that some future version of the Roku software will allow me to search and/or add movies to my Netflix Instant play list from the comfort of my Lazyboy (without having to drag my Powerbook over there).

Now, what about the quality? I've only watched a few movies so far, the quality differs a bit depending on the movie (like, Excalibur is pretty blurry for some reason). The HD content (like 30 Rock) looks fantastic on my 52" Plasma TV, and so did the SD version of Meet the Robinsons. Overall, I'm definitely more than happy with the quality of the Roku movies.

All in all, I truly love the Roku. My only concern is if Netflix changes their service to be less useful at some time later. I hope not, because this is definitely a big carrot for me to stick with Netflix (instead of say Blockbuster). In any case, I'm just about ready to order my second Roku unit, for another TV room.