Roku is so cheap

by partytime71

Help! I love my NVIDIA shield we have on our main living room TV. I really like the Jetsteam box we have in our home theater room. But the wife just made me add a TV in our bedroom so she can watch her lady shows for a half hour per night when she does her treadmill workout. I'm thinking about just getting a cheap Roku express for $24 from Walmart.

Talk me out of it.

Edit: I went ahead and bought a Roku HD Express at Walmart for $24. How can you beat that? It works just fine for this purpose. It's fast enough to flip through channels, and really, we're just putting on a show for a little while, not keeping an eye on three college footballs games on the weekend.

shadywhere

I'm not going to talk you out of it. The Roku is both easy and simple, and has most of what you want to watch on it.

For the price, it wins.

niuguy

While I would personally avoid the bottom end just because I'd want a bit faster CPU even the top end Roku is stupid cheap.

I'm a big fan.

CuvisTheConqueror

What do you want to do with it that the Roku can't do?

Amerique_du_Nord

The top of the line Roku Ultra will be $50 during Black Friday.

NedSc

Roku is shit. The apps are web page wrappers around a system video player that has very limited support. Roku doesn't give a shit about fixing their video player (which every "app" has to use) so long as the most popular streaming services work with it, so if you are ever in an edge case, forget about it.

PalebloodSky

The Roku is a great buy for the money. The Fire TV stick probably is too. Keep in mind they are both going to be pretty slow. Shield TV is awesome but too expensive to run everywhere I don't blame you.

starslayer74

Check out brickseek, you can probably find a brand new Roku Express for $7 at Walmart on clearance.

I have one that I use when I travel, because it's easier than lugging my Shield around with me. I originally was going to use my old mibox for this purpose but I discovered that it won't output any video now for some reason. So Roku Express it is - which is nice because it has HDMI and Composite so it even works if the hotel room has an old tv.

All that said, you will be infuriated by the Roku because it is slow, antiquated, and the video player is not as smooth as ATV.