Roku HD1000

My brother-in-law recently showed up on our doorstep with a CompactFlash card choked with more than 1100 digital photos, taken with his Canon PowerShot G3 digital camera while on a 4-month sojourn in South America. By lucky coincidence, I happened to have recently gotten my hands on a Roku HD1000 media receiver, with which we could view the photos on my 65” Mitsubishi HDTV. The HD1000 supports high-end playback of audio and video through HDTVs and digital sound systems, but what it’s best at is showing digital photos like these. By far, the most impressive of my tests occurred while viewing those 1100+ vacation pics.

First Impressions
A sleek, flat, slate-gray slab, the HD1000 is less than 2” high and weighs less than 6 pounds. Otherwise, its dimensions are pretty similar to those of typical audio/video componentry. It has broad front-panel buttons for easy operation, but the majority of both the front and back panels is dominated by various input and output slots. The front panel gives you flat navigational controls and several flash-memory slots—CompactFlash, Secure Digital (SD), MultiMediaCard (MMC), Memory Stick, and Smart Media cards. (You can connect as many as four cards—of differing types, of course—to the unit at one time.) And that’s it for the front panel. No readout of any kind, just utilitarian slots and flat buttons. You perform all visual navigation on your TV screen.

On its back panel, the Roku HD1000 offers an array of audio and video inputs and outputs—everything you’ll need. You get RCA audio in/out, Sony/Philips Digital InterFace (S/PDIF) digital audio out, component video in/out, S-video in/out, and VGA. For connecting the HD1000 to your computer network, you can use either the Ethernet port or the provided USB port, to which you can connect a wireless adapter. Finally, the back panel includes an RS232 port so that you can control the HD1000 with other home-theater devices.

The HD1000 is a surprisingly quiet machine, since there’s no hard disk or fans. It’s got a 300MHz MIPS CPU and features 16MB of flash memory and 64MB of DDR DRAM. The unit is built around a Linux-based OS platform called the Roku OS. It’s an open-source platform that lets developers craft new applications for Roku products. Interestingly, the HD1000 is totally programmable, and Roku will soon offer a Software Development Kit (SDK) to anyone interested in developing applications.

Hooking It Up
Connecting the HD1000 to my HDTV was straightforward. After plugging in component video cables, the unit gave me a menu screen, on which I could choose the proper resolution for that setup. The default setting is 480i, not an entirely impressive resolution, so I tested both 720p and 1080i settings. I had to go back and forth from my TV to the Roku device to get resolutions balanced—a manual process. One feature that really impressed me—a feature that all DVD players should include, for example—is its menu that lets you size the image precisely for your TV, thus avoiding overscan of the image.

I also connected my home network to the unit, through an Airlink wireless bridge that provides 802.11 wireless capabilities. After I entered the requisite configuration information, the HD1000 recognized my network immediately, and I was able to send media from my Windows XP Home computer to my HDTV—pretty slick. With the Roku remote, I could navigate media directories on my home-office PC and open assorted image and audio files. (The unit supports XP, Windows 2000, Windows Me, and Mac OS X 10.2 or later.) You can also use the unit’s 10/100 Ethernet capability for a connection.

The Roku remote is a simplistic little thing, and its navigation feels a bit clunky, a bit slow to react. It’s a little temperamental. There were quite a few frustrating moments when the unit simply wouldn’t react to the press of a button. Only by leaning forward and ensuring that I was pointing directly at the HD1000 could I make it work. On the plus side, it’s pretty user friendly, letting you easily find what you need on its face.

Digital Photos
Brother-in-law’s photo card in hand, I decided to first test the unit’s image quality. I plugged the CompactFlash card securely into the left-most slot, and the HD1000 immediately began reading it, counting through more than 1130 photos. Oh, no, I thought. As much as I wanted to show off the unit, I dreaded an 8-hour slideshow. Nevertheless, with the touch of a button, I instructed the HD1000 to play the pictures in slideshow format, and that’s the way we began—before I decided that manual progression though the photos would work better (considering the length of time my brother-in-law wanted to talk about each pic). So we switched to individual viewing, through which we could simply skip from one photo to the next.

Our first impression, at either 720p or 1080i, was that image quality was outstanding. Fine detail was fantastic, and color accuracy was splendid. Black levels looked spot on. Much of this outstanding image quality is due to the fact that the HDTV itself is professionally calibrated, but the source unit is no slouch. This is fine imagery. One feature I particularly enjoyed was the remote’s zoom functionality, which let us get deeper into high-resolution imagery without a great deal of detail loss. Very impressive. And the unit’s Info button let us gather information such as the date the photo was taken and the image size.

However, we encountered a few problems—well, more like mild disappointments. Images that my brother-in-law took in rotated, “portrait” orientation appeared on their side. I’m not sure how feasible it would be for the unit to automatically recognize portrait and landscape modes, but rotating so many pictures proved time-consuming, particularly with the unit’s relatively slow remote. The second hiccup occurred after we moved through a few pictures and noticed that the HD1000 wasn’t automatically adjusting aspect ratio for the widescreen set. The images appeared stretched. I had to manually change the TV’s 16:9 mode to 4:3, adding gray bars to the left and right sides of the image. I would have preferred the unit to sense the aspect ratio and generate its own bars. Finally, we experienced one instance—following a portrait rotation—when the HD1000 froze and wouldn’t respond to any commands, either from the remote or from the front panel. I was forced to unplug the unit, restart it, and navigate laboriously to the point at which we’d left off.

In the end, I find myself more impressed with the digital-photo functionality that I thought I would be. Going back to viewing images on my 16” computer monitor is going to be a drag. This really feels like a leap forward into the future of digital photography.

I should also mention that Roku also offers Art Packs that hold vast arrays of high-rez images and animations. As I’m writing this review, I’m letting the HD1000 present a slideshow of classic art. The Mona Lisa, looking brilliant and bright and highly detailed, just flashed her smile at me.

Audio/Video
Although the bulk of the enjoyment I got out of the HD1000 is its ability to display high-rez digital photography, it can also play video and audio files. I decided to test this functionality while hooked up wirelessly to my home network. From the TV screen, I attempted to access video of my 4-year-old daughter playing in the back yard, as well as audio files ripped from several CDs. (The unit supports MP3, .wav—Wave file—and Audio Interchange File Format—AIFF file—formats.)

Unfortunately, my video tests proved short-lived. The unit recognized no video files on my system. Turns out, the HD1000 supports only Advanced Television Systems Committee- (ATSC-) compliant MPEG2 transport streams—the type of signal typically broadcast over the air by local digital TV stations. I don’t have access to such content. I experienced some disappointment when I realized I wouldn’t be able to view those clips of my daughter.

As far as audio, the HD1000 alphabetizes the audio files it recognized on my network, and I found that I was pretty much left with that organization. The unit depends on the folder scheme that you’ve built in the source directories. (Otherwise, the unit flattens directory structures and provides one big list.) You can’t move things around through the HD1000—for example, by artist or album. I experienced no problems playing songs from my computer through my home-theater setup, although sound quality was no match to that of my CD player and SACD/DVD-A setup.

Photos in the Theater
Although the HD1000 isn’t as perfect as I wanted it to be, I found much to enjoy in the department of digital photography. My main complaint is the inability to play much in the way of video. The HD1000 costs $299, and for that price, it’s a more-than-welcome addition to your digital-photography hobby alone.