Roku's Netflix Player vs. Apple TV: unboxing and first impressions - Page 3

Have you not stopped to think that maybe it's just a total waste of electricity? Why should it be using so much juice that it gets very warm even when doing nothing? The ATV is a very disappointing product from an electronic engineering perspective.

The Roku unit also has no fan. It consumes 5 watts when active, and 4 watts inactive, next to the ATV's 20 watts active and 17 watts inactive.

Yes, the ATV has a hard-drive, but a laptop drive consumes about 2.5 watts max, so the difference between the ATV and the Roku is not justifyable.

The Roku hardware is capable of doing most of what the ATV does, it's just that Roku haven't implemented those things (not sure why - it seems quite likely that the box is subsidised by Netflix and they don't want it to be able to do anything other than stream from Netflix).

Little bit of porn/cock obsession there, LOL.

My XBox 360 is white and silver, my aTV is silver and white, my Tivo Series 3 is silver and black. The only black box in my mix, and coincidentally the only eye-sore , is a Yamaha sound system which actually looks a lot like the Roku on steroids with a couple of knobs and a digital display on it, complete with ugly slots in the top.

When I get around to replacing the Yamaha, I'll be shopping for something smaller and sleeker. When I add a Mac Mini or MacBook to the mix, it will either replace the aTV, or fit in to the silver and white theme.

Admittedly, all of these components are just something to be ignored, sitting on low shelves. Ideally, I think that it would be cool if you could shove all the devices into a closed cabinet, or behind the TV, nicely out of sight, with a single RF remote control to control them all, or if IR needs to be in the mix, maybe a universal IR receiver/repeater that feeds the commands to the hidden devices so they can be tucked nicely out of sight. That would put an end to silly arguments like this.

If I recall correctly, that toaster, while cool lookng, tastes a very long time to toast. Plus, I would imagine that steam and crumbs would make it a very dirty item fast.


There are some major differences that you haven't addressed. For starters, the performance of the processor and amount of RAM affect the wattage used.

Secondly, and perhaps the most important, there is a large variance in how these two devices are utilized. The Roku device is meant to only stream media from Netflix servers upon command. The AppleTV is an always-on device that will auto-sync your photos and media via iTunes so it needs to be in a ready state that doesn't require direct user interaction to initiate. This means it's never truly off.

The heat of the device isn't big deal. If they made the device twice as thick and added a fan we would probably be discussing the noise or the lack of aesthetics, It's hot to the touch, but not dangerously so, and it was obviously designed to release heat through the top of the device through conduction.

IMO, that is a better engineered than having air holes in a device that sits for years unmoved in an entertainment cabinet. These items tend to get covered with dust. Earlier this year I took apart a friend's receiver that was no longer working properly; after a vacuuming of the circuit board it worked. Dust and electronics do not mix well.

To address someone else's question, yes, the Roku, per their FAQ, remembers your playback position from session to session.

I watched some old television programs and a couple of movies on my MacBook Pro hooked up to the 65" television over the weekend. I'm on a 10mb/s cable connection, and gigabit ethernet. The MacBook Pro is 2.16ghz Core Duo class with ATI graphics, and VMWare and Parallels for running the Netflix Windows player. This really should be a system that plays streaming playback flawlessly.

For the most part, I was actually surprised at the picture quality. Some old 60's dramas were sharp, bright and clean, not a lot of compression artifacts. The movies weren't bad looking either, but definitely more compression artifacts, especially in black areas and dark scenes, than I've ever seen on SD channels over cable. At some points the compression and pixelation made the movies unwatchable. Both the television shows and the movies also had frequent frame dropping which was very noticeable, and when the camera panned, there were definite issues with the whole screen keeping up the background (that's probably an issue with the video driver in Parallels(?)).

The Roku box almost certainly doesn't have the horsepower of my MacBook Pro, but I can't confirm what its specs are from their website. The thing's dedicated nature may give it a playback edge, but who knows until they have one in hand. I'll hold off for a while, but it's an interesting concept.

I've been championing such an idea for quite awhile, but have no idea how it could be implemented. I want the TV/monitor to be the only device I see so all these other devices should be controlled via a relay of the TV/monitor's internal RF receiver to these other devices. They are already connected anyway. And the ones that have small displays showing their status can now have a simple video overlay to represent their status; or more specifically, they can send the data back to the TV/monitor which will display it on-screen.

My comments weren't addressing whether the device is green or not. Just that it's going to produce heat, and whether it's radiating that heat out of a fanned/not-fanned vent, or out of the body of the device itself, it's going to radiate that heat. 17 watts isn't a lot, about the same as a night light, isn't it? Kudos to the Roku for being a bit greener, though!

Not sure where you get the wattage, but I won't dispute it. The Roku's over a year behind in development than the aTV, so I'd certainly expect that it would have lower energy consumption CPU than the aTV. If Apple ever upgrades the hardware in a second revision of the aTV, they'll surely put in something less energy hungry.

Laptop class harddrives do only consume a few watts. I just placed my hand on the top cover of my aTV, which is at rest, and the only place it is warm is on the corner where I believe the CPU is. It's certainly not hot enough to "fry an egg" at rest, and not at all uncomfortable to leave my hand on it.

I have no idea what components are in the Roku, so I can't argue whether it's capable of all that you can do with an aTV or not with proper programming. I think, though, that logically, with its lack of a harddrive and very small memory footprint, that it's probably not as capable as the aTV in terms of hardware. Time will tell, though as both companies improve their software offerings.

I was interested in the Netflix box when I first heard about it. The problem is, I don't have any view now movies in my queue. It would only really be useful for watching TV shows. I can watch the same movies over and over, but not TV shows. I think I'm probably going to pass on this device.

I also don't have an AppleTV yet. I think now that Tivo is licensing their software for use in others' hardware, AppleTV should try strike a deal with the Tivo people. If I could use an AppleTV as a DVR, I would buy one today.

Looks like the set-top box wars have officially begun. Sure this is a lame first shot, but the end game is all about content and NetFlix has some interesting deals with the big content suppliers.

BlueRay is never going to amount to much and everyone is starting to see that. The real long term play is in the streaming set-top box area. AppleTV, TiVo, X-Box360, and now NetFlix are all contenders at this point. I've used all of them and right now iTunes has more stuff I actually want to watch. I had some time to kill this weekend and went to NetFlix and TRIED to find something to watch instalnly and failed. Not interested in old Dragnet shows and subtitled indie documentaries. There is potential. But with what they have, it really should be free. But add a firmware upgrade that supports HD and some HD content and it gets a whole lot more competitive. And that's coming.

The good news is that ALL could survive and do well. This is not going to be like HDDVD vs BlueRay since there is no physical storage format to worry about. It seems like the war now is going to be over DRM and who can provide the best catalog of content at a price the market likes.

Apple will probably have a nicer-looking, higher-priced unit and iTunes will have a smaller catalog of highly desireable content that people will pay a premium for

NetFlix will be the low-cost provider with lots of content but maybe not available as quickly as iTunes

TiVo is the a wild card. Amazon has the money and ability to play in this game with Unbox, but right now they are focused too much on sales, not rentals. I would not be surprised to see Unbox extended to really compete with iTunes or TiVo partner with NetFlix. The HD TiVo is a great box, great interface, already connected to the net with HD capability... it just needs the content!

Good real-world example - I wanted to rent a particular movie this weekend. It was out at Blockbuster (never going back), it was not a Watch Instantly choice on NetFlix, Amazon Unbox had it but only for purchase not rental, so again, I eneded up renting it from iTunes for $2.99. This has happened exactly the same way several times. This is why iTunes (and AppleTV which I don't need since I can connect directly from my Mac to my projector) will have the lead for now. They have the content that people want to see.

The main component is a very impressive integrated CPU/Audio&Video Processor from NXP (formerly Philips' semiconductor devision). The chip has an on-board SATA interface for HDDs.

In terms of the capabilities of the Roku box from a hardware perspective, as it stands it is capable of streaming H.264 (up to high profile level 4), MPEG-2, and VC-1, and audio in a variety of formats (mp3, AAC, wma etc.), from any source.

Yes, in order to match all of ATV's features the Roku would need an HDD, but this would be easy (for Roku) to add if they so desired.

I really hope that Apple are looking at this chip - it would enable them to reduce the price of ATV and radically reduce its power consumption. The only question mark is over whether Apple could write CoreAnimation for the chip in order to handle the wizzy ATV GUI.

As far as 17 watts being "not much", it really is an outrageous power consumption for a device in standby, essentially doing nothing. Even the power consumption of the Roku in standby is a little disappointing; there is an intiative in Europe to try and get manufacturers to aim at sub-1-watt standby figures - my 50" plasma uses 0.9 watts in standby and my DVD player is about 0.1 watts.

How many ATVs has Apple sold? let's be conservative and say 250,000. So, 250,000 ATVs are needlessly using 16 watts each of power, that's 4 MW of power being wasted 24/7.

If that's true, then that's horrible. Standby should be negligible.

You people arguing about which unit throws off more heat are missing the obvious difference. The ROKU uses an external power brick; the ATV uses an internal power supply (110V cord right to the unit). All this nattering about power consumption is completely misguided.

Take your choice: external wall wart that shifts the heat away from the unit, or a cleaner direct-cord design with more heat at the unit. You can't have both.

Looks like 17 watts may be a high-side estimate, but standby consumption is definitely over 10 watts:


http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=296699
http://discussions.apple.com/message...sageID=4408276
http://willmonwah.blogspot.com/2007/...nsumption.html

No, I'm not missing that.

Have you seen the Roku's power adaptor? It's tiny. It almost certainly has an efficiency well over 90% (there's no way being that size that it could use a transformer; it's a switch-mode PSU). I don't know if the power consumption figures provided by Roku include the PSU power losses, but if they don't it still doesn't get anywhere near the power consumption of the aTV.

If the figures quoted by Roku don't include PSU power losses, you can basically add 0.5 watts to the figures they quoted - so 5.5 watts in use and 4.5 watts in standby.

I wasn't aware of that at all. It seems like an official explanation, if there ever were one, would be to allow syncing at any time. Not that it's really an excuse. IMO, a much better way would be to have the device sleep and have iTunes send a Wake-On-Lan packet to wake it up.

If I want to watch a new HD movie I'll just go rent one and return it. I'm within a half mile of 4 movie rental places.

Until they actually have a selection of content that's compelling, this is nothing more than a novelty. Their 10000 number is mainly TV episodes, the number of movies is very small and no recent mainstream hits.

I have over 400 discs in my Netflix queue. 27 are available for viewing with this box.

That's about in line with my numbers, and I think bolsters an argument that it's not mostly TV episodes, as all of my "immediate viewing" titles are movies. I only have one TV series in my queue right now.

I don't want to get into the global warming debate, and I actually agree with most of what you say, but we're worried about one little device that coulda/shoulda done a better job in designing it's green-quotient?

If that 10 watts is such a concern, how many watts is the big screen TV drawing while it's sitting in standby keeping the projector lamp warm for instant on viewing? What about the cable box and the TiVo sitting there receiving TV signals and recording buffers all day long? How about the audio receiver. That's just the Home Theater. How many power bricks are sitting in walls doing nothing but sucking up juice while waiting for the iPod, cell phone, PDA, battery charger, whatever else to get docked for a recharge? What about clock radios all around the house telling time while someone's not even in the home?

Someone really concerned about the issue should be unplugging all these appliances when they're out of the house. THAT might make a difference, until then I may not hand out a 10 watt appliance a carbon footprint reducer award, but I'm not going to worry about it either! ;-)

By the way, could the aTV be programmed through software to reduce that standby draw? Something like going to sleep and doing a wake on lan as suggested by another contributor?

I guess nobody knows exactly how many are TV episodes, but it's not like they could have 10K movies available with such a paltry selection, could they really have close to that number with mostly documentaries, foreign films, and indies? I suspect that a very large percentage is TV stuff. Along the same lines, do they count a disk with six half hour sitcom episodes as one title or six? With most shows having 20+ episodes per season, it wouldn't take that many shows to get them to their 10K title...for a number that includes TV episodes, that's actually not that big a number.

Looking again at my queue, out of 26 titles available for streaming, only four are TV series...but between those four, there are forty episodes available. Initially it looks like hardly any is TV, but it turns out that well more than half is.

Every little bit adds up. If all those power bricks consumed 10W, then you would probably see it in the electricity bill, though they would probably also be very hot to the touch. Mr H did make a good point that if 1/4 million of ATVs were never sleeping when they should be, 4MW is enough to power a town. Audio receivers probably don't consume a lot of power when they're off, most HT devices seem to consume less than 1W in standby whenever I look in the manual's spec page.

I can't speak for TiVos, but my EyeTV powers up my HT Mac just in time for a scheduled recording, then it shuts down after a recording. But at least it's doing something when it's on, and it's not on when it's not doing something.

Do projection TVs really constantly keep a bulb warm?

None of the "instant view" titles in my queue are documentaries, foreign films, indies or TV shows. And it's pretty close to the 10:1 ratio with my movie queue too, pretty close to the ratio of 100,000 DVD catalog: 10,000 "instant view" catalog they claim.

TiVo Series 3 is constantly on, because it never goes to sleep and is always recording the 30 minute "pause live tv" buffer to hard disk, on two different tuners, no less. The TiVo has no way of knowing you're not watching TV. Plus, depending on how diverse your viewing habits are, it's probably almost always recording some "suggestion" anyways. That's part of the device's appeal to many.

As far TV's keeping the bulb warm, on some of my sets it's a user configurable option. I think the default is for "instant" on, so people don't hate their TVs for taking so long to give a picture when they turn it on. This could very well be brand specific. I have a Toshiba and a Samsung (65" and 50" - both DLP).

Ive been using the Roku since last Thursday and have to say that this thing CRUSHES the apple tv.

It like trying to compare the Amazon river to a mud puddle.

What are they? Mainstream movies, but old ones?

Most likely, their 100K catalog of DVDs is weighted pretty heavily toward TV shows as well. How many movies are released a year, and how many episodes of TV shows are released per year?


In what way? It's cool that the box is cheaper, but they seem to offer very little of the content I'm interested in watching. It's completely useless to me if it can't even stream content I already have on my computer.

So there's no way to put it on standby?


OK. I've owned a couple front projectors and never seen anything like that.


All mainstream movies, some are maybe about a year old, some are older.


That, I don't know. I think a typical movie is more likely to make it to DVD than a typical TV series. I have several season 1 DVD sets from the 90's, a couple were highly rated prime time shows, which were not followed up with more season sets.

I find that hard to believe, because when I go from one computer to another, I resume where I left the movie at. Doesn't that mean it is not using a cache for the content? Also, if I do have a connection problem or interruption, I never have to restart the whole movie, it just continues from where I left off. Might be same technologies that HULU (www.hulu.com) is using, or HULU got it from Netflix. Think different? Just think before you speak. That is my three cents worth of information.

What highly rated prime time shows haven't been released on DVD? Seems like most are, at least fairly recent ones. And downloads often include shows that aren't on DVD.

Just to get ballpark numbers, if four movies are released every weekend, that's 200 per year.

With most TV shows doing 20 ore more episodes per year, only 10 series would have to get released on DVD for TV episodes to outnumber movies. If you look at iTunes, it even includes things like talk shows and soap operas, which generate hundreds of episodes per year (netflix doesn't seem to have these yet).

It's too bad NF doesn't have a way to search for just downloadable titles. Browsing through them, it seems to be far less than 10%. Some of that is probably because it's not - they list 100K disks, but their 10K number is movies and episodes. In their DVD numbers, the number of episodes/movies would be much higher since a TV disk typically contains 3-8 episodes.

But, they do have a way to search for just download titles, you just have to try the service to actually know what it does. This is another reason to try before you buy, they offer a free trial. You should try it, then see what it is actually like.

Remember, I said the '90s. I have NightCourt (mid-'80s to early '90s), only one season out. Murphy Brown only has one season out, no new ones coming that I've seen. Just Shoot Me is a favorite of mine, but I can't find any ratings info, there is only one set out, seasons 1 & 2.

Now, I think most new prime time shows are out, whether or not they were cancelled.

NOPE, NO LIMIT

Way to jump to conclusions there, I have netflix as should be obvious from my posts (if I didn't have it, what exactly do you think I meant by talking about "my queue"?)

I found their page for just download titles, it looks like it's browsing only and no searching. Looking at the top 50 downloads, it's heavy on TV (even before you consider that they list entire seasons as one item on that list when they count them as 10-25 episodes).

And looking at that list, you see how many of the movies are things you've never heard of. Looking at that selection, it's hard for me to imagine getting excited about.

The TV Shows are what interest me. I just got into The Unit and watched the entire first 3 seasons, but had to purchase them from iTunes Store since they weren't adequately available by other means.

I have no interest in buying it just yet, but it sure could save me some money. If I plan to watch Law & Order from the beginning this device could save me some money.

For watching TV shows, I've been doing netflix (DVD) for a while now. Great way to see a ton of shows cheap. This box would be handy, but even with TV content their selection is very limited.

That is what I used to do. I have grown accustomed (you can figure out how) to not having commercial interruptions so I don't watch much TV as it aires. I usually wait for a series to get into several seasons or to finish before picking it up.

With so many shows in the 21 century having series long hooks and cliffhangers at the end of each episode it's a nice way for me to watch it.

But I am on the road to much now and don't have a set mailing address for Netflix to reach me. Though I should see about get their streaming system to work on Mac using CrossOver.

Hmmm...not at home to check, but thinking through all the menus, I believe there is a way to put the TiVo into standby...If I recall correctly, under the settings menu, there's an option to place the unit in standby or restart it. I'd have to play with it to see if it impacts operation of the device. I don't know if it would put the thing to sleep until you turned it back on, or if it can wake itself up for recording suggestions. Either way, I'd wager most people don't know it's there since it's buried pretty deep in the menus. Also, if it won't wake up for suggestions/recording on its own, it defeats the whole purpose of TiVo.


The Watch It Now selection of TV shows is huge. There's 23 categories of TV shows from BBC to cartoons to drama to reality to politics and everything in between. In the TV crime drama section, there are 45 1-season offerings. They are Adam -12 (7 seasons), Kojak (5 seasons) Dragnet (3 seasons), Miami Vice (5 seasons), The Rockford Files (4 seasons), Dexter (1 season), Kennedy Criminoligist (1 season), Brotherhood (1 season), Law & Order SVU, CI, (7 and 3 seasons).

i think that's it without drilling any deeper. If you check out the 60's and 70's shows, they had like 26 episodes per season back then (confirmed with Dragnet), and modern shows probably have 20-22, so a little quick math, just for the TV Crime Show category they're offering 37 seasons of shows at an average of say 22 shows per season = 814 titles.

Wow, of the "10,000 titles" they're offering, over 8% are TV Crime shows, which is only one of 23 categories of TV shows, and honestly, looking at the selections listed above, it mostly Law & Order and 60s/70's television shows. Is this really quality content to drive you to the service if getting a Roku is what you have in mind (which is what I had in mind when getting the free trial)?

Checking out TV Action and Adventure, we have the following Must See TV series offered up: Knight Rider, Airwolf, The A-Team, Emergency, Xena, Hercules, Seaquest 2032, She Spies, Sleeper Cell, The Incredible Hulk, Simon & Simon, Conan, Pain Killer Jane, Heroes.

Only three of those shows are less than 10 years old, and most are from the 70s. Again, at an average of 22 episodes per season, and the 57 seasons of episodes offered in that list, we're looking at another 1,254 TV episodes in our 10,000 offered.

We're up to 20% of the offerings being old TV shows in just two categories.

Now, some of those old shows interest me for nostalgia's sake (Adam 12 was a favorite of mine as a kid, and was filmed in my neighborhood, so it's fun to look at how the neighborhoods have/have-not changed. But most of it is just crap in my opinion. YMMV.

The movie offerings seem to be older flicks.

Bottom line, you really can't judge the service in and of itself until you go through and look at it and see if the offerings interest you.

Someone said you can't search, but that's not true, type in the name of a TV show and it will bring it up.

It looks like you can't search just the downloads, I only see one search box and it brings up all shows, download and dvd. Am I missing something?

Nice analysis. There's no question that the downloads in general favor older, less popular material. And lots of TV episodes.

Now you're just being silly. The main point of my argument relies on the fact that both devices are often placed out of view. The Roku unit might as well look like a PC jr. For things that aren't in places where they can be admired, it's all about functionality. Case in point: the usage is bound to a remote. Toasters are certainly in places that allow them to be admired, and used directly.

Then that almost doesn't count if it's so hard to get to. Standby should be a red button on the remote. It shouldn't be hard to make a device that goes to standby / sleep when it's not in use, it's quite unfortunate if it can't.

Screw the environment! I use baby seals for fuel.

Seriously, if it's in standby it can't record shows. If you don't want to record anything then why not just turn it off completely.

The only way to turn a TiVo off is to unplug it. I just read on the TiVo forums that all standby mode does is turn off the OLED display.

edit:, but I just tried it and it also cuts off the video out signal to the TV. The recorder is still recording a suggestion, and one of the red LEDs that indicates a recording in progess is still on. I have no idea how much energy this saves like that; and I'll leave it to others to research further.