Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsUpdate-I have upgraded my star rating to 3 due to finding solutions for it's short-comings. PS, This ain't your grandma's Roku.
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2016
Update-I have upgraded my star rating to 3 after finding work-arounds from the buffering and lockups. Although it now performs flawlessly due to the solutions that I have found, the every day user with no IT administrator experience would struggle to love it. I still hate the remote. (I use my Logitech Harmony 9000 RF remote which is much easier to use) I had setup a return with Amazon and had printed a return label and before I decided to give up and sent it back I did the following work-arounds. I created a firewall rule on my Asus RT-N56U router that will force YouTube and other streaming apps to push the content directly to the user rather than delivering slower, cached content. There are 2 steps which will also increase your connection speed for streaming content on your PC as well. Use at your own discretion!!
1.) Click Start, type cmd, right click on the icon and Run as Administrator to open the command prompt.
If you see a UAC prompt, click Yes.
Copy this command: netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=”YoutubeBufferTrick” dir=in action=block remoteip=173.194.55.0/24,206.111.0.0/16 enable=yes
Right click in the command prompt and select Paste.
Hit Enter.
If you ever want to remove this alteration from your network, do the same thing except use this command instead:
netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name=”YoutubeBufferTrick”
Since this trick blocks a wide range of IP addresses, you may run into a site every once in a while that’s blocked by this trick. Use at your own discretion!
2.) Go into your router's setup page and choose the "Firewall" option. Under "URL Filter" add the following addresses, clicking the add icon (Plus Sign) for each. 206.111.0.0 and 173.194.55.0 and click the apply button. This will add the blocking rules to all devices on your network, including phones, tablets and other streaming devices. The technology behind it works like this. In an effort to preserve bandwidth, some ISPs will throttle bandwidth and download speeds on connections to servers that deliver cached video content, e.g., YouTube. The following command blocks IP addresses on this content delivering network, which forces YouTube to push the actual video straight to you (not the cached version) without any ISP throttling. Now, for the lockups: I have found that when this device heats up, it tends to slow down and lock up. I used a remarkably low-tech solution. I placed a saucer upside down on my media cabinet and placed the Roku on that. The added height seems to give it more breathing room. I haven't had a lockup since.
Old Review: I want to love it.....I really do. The concept is great and when it works, the 4K resolution is stunning. I simply can't get over the constant buffering on 4K material and the lockups when streaming directly from my PC using Plex and the Roku Media Player. I have an extremely fast Internet connection-105 mbps and 350 mbps on my internal network, yet, I still get buffering issues when streaming 4K on Plex and many other formats on Roku Media Player. Plex is blazing fast on my Samsung HU9000 on Smarthub so it's not a PC or Plex issue. I have tried moving the router and the Roku directly next to the router and still experience buffering. I will be sending this back and waiting for the new Samsung 4k Bluray player to be released in a few weeks.
