Screaming Monkey Research Laboratories

I bought a Roku HD to play NetFlix streaming movies.  This thing is great.  Probably the most painless piece of electronics I’ve ever hooked up.

Just tiny.  It hooks up through HDMI.  (An optical out is available for sound if you want to use it.)  Fire it up.  It downloads any updates.  Type a couple of codes in at Roku and NetFlix and your instant queue is available to you.

Whatever is in your NetFlix instant queue is available to you on the Roku.

Here is the installed device.  I have it paused in an episode of Ken Burn’s National Parks documentary.

It is the barely visible device on top of the Blu-Ray player: just under the Cheshire (not the real) cat.

Quality is good.  Much better than my analog cable.  I’d put it under the HD channels I get.  Still, very watchable.

There are a bunch of other “channels” the thing will play — Pandora being one of them.  I think one can jump through a few hoops to get it to play my music collection.  Haven’t looked that up yet.

It doesn’t do everything however.  It does not, by default, play music streamed from my PC.  It does not play Hulu or YouTube videos.

Even so I’m very pleased.

The Creative X-fi (at the back left of the simpsons chess set) seems to be working fine.  I have it hooked into the front of the Marantz.  I’ll sort out the digital connection later.  I’ve a media center remote hooked up to it now.  Works nicely.

Presumably that is a volume control on the X-fi.  Doesn’t seem to work.  Maybe I should read the manual.

Edit: I bought a toslink cable for $15 at Microcenter.  The X-fi works fine with it.  The volume knob works if you install the creative software.  I warn you, however, that software ends up downloading about 500mb of updates.  Takes forever and who needs all that?

I’m doing just about everything except what I need to do today.

Microsoft offers Windows 7 starter edition for netbooks. The only feature that I care about (for a netbook) is the ability to change the background.  You can’t change the background with Windows 7 starter.  Microsoft decided that changing the background was an advanced feature.

It is $80 to upgrade Windows 7 starter to the next version of windows.  I’m not about to spend 30% of the cost of the netbook ($280) just to set a background.

Microsoft will not break me!

Otherwise I like this thing.  It is small enough to carry around or leave in the living room.  Work great for getting podcasts at work.  Works great for keeping private (email and whatnot) stuff private at work.

Battery life is amazing.  Great screen.  Lots of disk space.  I wish it had a SSD but I get more space instead.

I can hook it to the Marantz and play my music.  I do not even have to copy my music over.  I can just attach to my desktop’s library via WMP.  I can also play some videos but connecting it to the TV is a PITA.

Pretty pleased with it.

I just wish I could change the f’ing background.

I’ve been working on my HTPC setup.

I swapped out the cable I purchased from Radio Shack the other day.  It connects nicely enough but it should really be a 75 ohm coax cable.  I found such a cable to MicroCenter which I attached to a single mono mini RCA plug.  So that works fine.

I eventually want to add a Blu-Ray drive.  The aging processor (AMD dual core 2 or 2.2 GHz Socket 939 I believe.) in my HTPC can’t decode Blu-Ray.  Just not powerful enough.  At 1GB of memory I’m probably hosed there, too.

Instead of updating memory, motherboard and cpu I picked up an AMD HD 4550 based video card.  $40 after $10 rebate.  If you don’t need gaming these things can be had for cheap.  I’d pay more than that for the audio alone. (AMD/ATI includes audio on their latest video cards.)  It is supposed to offload 100% of the video decode from the CPU.  I’m not sure if it will do it for everything but it claims to do so for Blu-Ray.

One area of immediate improvement is in reduced noise from the PC.  This is because the 4550 doesn’t require active cooling.  So I went from a pretty quiet video card to a silent one.  Because it has such a low power draw (Less than 25W under full load.) it just doesn’t generate that much heat.   The previous card was a power hungry (for its era) 6800.  That’s the card that baked a fan inside my PC case.  Just got too hot and the fan died.  Removing that heat source from the PC case should slow the other fans.  Now I just need to figure out how to silence the hard drive.  I think when I can get a Ocz vertex SSD disk for less than $100 I’ll put that in there.

I may end up with a digital cable or direct tv box but right now I only have a TV, receiver and PC in the room.  One wire from PC to the TV, another to the receiver and two from the TV to the receiver.  Pretty clean.

I’m driving this with J. River Media Center 13.   I have two zones setup.  One for TV that outputs to the 4550 and its built in audio.  The other for Audio that is connected to the digital out on the Audigy 2.  I’m leaning towards setting up a second audio zone that I’ll run to the basement.  (I wonder if I can dump the sound to separate channels on the Audigy 2’s digital outs and just run speakers to the basement off of the Marantz’s rear channels.)

This setup lets me :

• Play my entire music collection stored on a WD World Book NAS in my office.
• Play any video from there.
• Play other media like LensWork extended.
• Play Hulu.com or any other web hosted shows.
• Play DVD’s from the DVD ROM drive.
• Rip DVDs to the local disk for a much more silent setup.
• I can also use the whole thing to go online to check things out while watching TV.
• If I hooked up a TV Tuner card to the PC (and an antenna) I would even be able to use it as a DVR.

Pretty pleased so far.

The only problem with doing all this is that the PC is no longer the weakest link.  Now I’m looking at the TV, receiver and speakers.  Unfortunately any improvement there will cost me many times what I’ve currently spent to update this setup.  ($50 so far.)

It is just a mono minijack on the Soundblaster.  So a simple mono minijack to RCA phono plug is all you need.  Or you can just use the left channel of a stereo minijack to RCA cable.

Easy.