I just scored three refurbished Roku 2 XS boxes for $55/ea shipped. I've had one in my main system for several months and we use it all the time. These will go in the bedrooms. The Roku boxes are mainly used for streaming video from Vudu, Netflix, Amazon, HBO Go, Crunchroll and Drama Fever. They are also used for streaming local media from my PC. This includes some video content downloaded from torrents (mostly BBC stuff I can't get here yet), family photos, home videos and our entire music library. The question you may be asking is, "What do you use for local media streaming and how do you make it work with music?" The answer contains good news and bad news.
The good news is that the Plex Media Server is generally excellent and is free (so far). There is also a pretty good Plex client for Roku. It works absolutely great for video content. Music appears to have been a bit of an afterthought. The biggest challenge I had was that the Roku cannot play Windows Media Audio Lossless and the Media Server does not transcode music. I ended up importing my entire library into iTunes, which transcoded everything to M4a format. Judging by the file sizes, I'm guessing 256kbps. I still have my lossless library, which I use with my Squeezeboxes. The iTunes library is just a hell of a lot more convenient to use with my portable devices and with the Roku boxes. It took a LONG time to retag everything and I hate the way Apple sets up the physical folder structures.
Plex is designed to look at the physical file structure in the absence if ID3 tags and does not appear to read Apple's tagging scheme beyond artist, album and track. This drove me crazy until I realized that I could directly update the metadata in Plex itself. I didn't particularly want to go back through and do another huge retagging effort, so I was really pleased when I learned about the iTunes Channel in Plex. The iTunes Channel is a Plex Channel plugin that navigates your non-DRM iTunes library using the metadata in iTunes and it works pretty well. This actually made my music library useable while managing the metadata in iTunes.
I have a Squeezebox and a Squeezebox Boom, so why do this? I did this because I wanted to put music in the bedrooms and did not want to spend a few hundred bucks a pop on Squeezeboxes, which are now discontinued anyway. Roku boxes are cheap and Apple's lossy encoding is done at a high enough bit-rate that I'd be hard pressed to tell on my main system, let alone a secondary set-up. I would have preferred keeping the music lossless and I may have found away if I'd spent another twenty hours banging my head on the desk, but this works great and gives me a music library that I can load my portables from without doing any conversion.
Another advantage is that Plex has clients for Android, iOS and Windows Phone. These clients allow you to access your media from anywhere you have internet access, so I can stream my entire music library to my hotel room when I'm travelling via my iPad or my Nokia 920. Plex also allows you to share your media library with a friend. My best friend and I have our libraries shared, so we can both enjoy the combined content of our collections. Did I mention that I really like Plex, despite it being very much "music second?"
The good news is that the Plex Media Server is generally excellent and is free (so far). There is also a pretty good Plex client for Roku. It works absolutely great for video content. Music appears to have been a bit of an afterthought. The biggest challenge I had was that the Roku cannot play Windows Media Audio Lossless and the Media Server does not transcode music. I ended up importing my entire library into iTunes, which transcoded everything to M4a format. Judging by the file sizes, I'm guessing 256kbps. I still have my lossless library, which I use with my Squeezeboxes. The iTunes library is just a hell of a lot more convenient to use with my portable devices and with the Roku boxes. It took a LONG time to retag everything and I hate the way Apple sets up the physical folder structures.
Plex is designed to look at the physical file structure in the absence if ID3 tags and does not appear to read Apple's tagging scheme beyond artist, album and track. This drove me crazy until I realized that I could directly update the metadata in Plex itself. I didn't particularly want to go back through and do another huge retagging effort, so I was really pleased when I learned about the iTunes Channel in Plex. The iTunes Channel is a Plex Channel plugin that navigates your non-DRM iTunes library using the metadata in iTunes and it works pretty well. This actually made my music library useable while managing the metadata in iTunes.
I have a Squeezebox and a Squeezebox Boom, so why do this? I did this because I wanted to put music in the bedrooms and did not want to spend a few hundred bucks a pop on Squeezeboxes, which are now discontinued anyway. Roku boxes are cheap and Apple's lossy encoding is done at a high enough bit-rate that I'd be hard pressed to tell on my main system, let alone a secondary set-up. I would have preferred keeping the music lossless and I may have found away if I'd spent another twenty hours banging my head on the desk, but this works great and gives me a music library that I can load my portables from without doing any conversion.
Another advantage is that Plex has clients for Android, iOS and Windows Phone. These clients allow you to access your media from anywhere you have internet access, so I can stream my entire music library to my hotel room when I'm travelling via my iPad or my Nokia 920. Plex also allows you to share your media library with a friend. My best friend and I have our libraries shared, so we can both enjoy the combined content of our collections. Did I mention that I really like Plex, despite it being very much "music second?"
