Roku Users - Your view of the product

I tested the waters with an early Roku a couple years ago when our local cable outfit (Time-Warner / Spectrum) changed to all digital. I still had a couple old style CRT sets in use and didn't want to buy all new TV's. Wife wanted a DVR, so we got their set top box to run on the living room set. I now run two more modern Roku units on 55" TV's (one smart, one not). I don't think I could ever go without Roku now. It's fortunate for me that Spectrum has an app that runs on the Roku. I can actually watch more Spectrum stations on my Rokus than I can on the set top boxes I got from the cable company.

I'd be interested in hearing other peoples experience / thoughts about the Roku Media Player. So far, I'm unimpressed. I have two TB of FLAC files on a stand alone hard drive. I can't figure out how to search the files efficiently, nor can I find a way to set up a playlist. I can play albums just fine, but I really don't want to create more "albums" just for a play list. I think I'm going to have to set up some sort of DLNA server through a small computer or wired directly to my main computer. (That's Black Magic to me, so advice would be appreciated.)
 
Thanks for the input, gents. I am going forward with the Roku Premium. I may end up cutting the cable cord depending on what I can or can't get via Roku and how much it costs to subscribe to the desired content.
 
I'd be interested in hearing other peoples experience / thoughts about the Roku Media Player. So far, I'm unimpressed. I have two TB of FLAC files on a stand alone hard drive. I can't figure out how to search the files efficiently, nor can I find a way to set up a playlist.
While they can play music, they are primarily video players. I use mine to stream about 300 movies from the music/video server.

For music, I use Squeezelite running on ultraRendu and RPi / DigiOne players. LMS offers multiple ways to group and access tracks, set up playlists, etc. And support pad/phone/watch based remotes.
 
I've found Roku (I use a Roku 3 from a garage sale for $10 or so) most valuable to me as simply an easy to use interface to launch video apps. Their product is rock solid stable.

It seems to me that I could just use the individual apps and leave out the Roku altogether. When I have done just that, I've found the apps misbehave more often that when I'm running them through the Roku device. That's why I said above that Roku's product is rock solid stable.
 
Mea culpa. That's the first app I've heard of with problems. Have you contacted them about it? Since they depend on apps as their bead and butter as opposed to a mere add-on, like other "smart TV's", they would be more prone to act on it.
No, I don't do it much so it's more a minor annoyance than a major flaw. I did just install the PLEX app and am going to give that a shot.
 
My first Roku was built into a newer TV I bought for the bedroom (Insignia 32"). It works great. The Spectrum TV app has some predictable bugs that only see to effect this specific TV, and they can be annoying, but I'm used to it. (If you are interested in the specific bugs: one is that when you first turn it on the spectum app, it's grainy as hell for about 2 minutes, eventually the picture freezes up. You change to another channel and then back to the channel you were on, and it's fine for the whole rest of the session. The second problem is sometimes it gets on a streak of asking "Are you still watching Spectrum TV?" every 10 minutes on the dot. It stops eventually). All other Roku apps work perfectly on this TV, so it's a Spectrum problem for sure.

I bought another external Roku (I don't recall the model) for our spare bedroom TV. It is rock solid. It's connected to an older "dumb" vizio TV.

I bought a 55" Sharp 4k TV with a built in Roku for our TV room. It is also rock solid.

We mostly use the Rokus for the Spectrum TV app and Pluto (I love watching Mystery Science Theater and Rifftrax).
 
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