Roku in Canada! A Mini Review

There is another player that just joined the web video to TV game in Canada. Roku, a company that has been around in the US for quite some time, came through on their announcement from the fall and started selling their set top boxes in Canada April 30th, 2012. They join the Apple TV, Xbox360, PS3, LG, Boxee as well as several TV manufactures that offer Internet connected TVs and devices.

This is not going to be a detailed technical review, because their products have been available for some time and there are reviews easily findable all over the web. This review will give a brief description of what boxes are available in Canada and the differences in how they work over their US counterparts.

roku-xs-chart-pics

Roku has so far partnered with 3 resellers in Canada. The devices can be purchased from Amazon.ca, London Drugs and Wal-Mart. Two models are available here. The Roku 2 XS for 109.99 and the Roku 2 XD for 89.99. Both stream 1080P video to your TV, connect via Wi-Fi to your home network and feature a Micro SD slot for additional storage. The XS however comes with a few added features. It has an Ethernet port to hard wire the device to your connection, a USB port so that you can play media from USB devices (flash or external hard drives) and a special RF Remote that can be used to play games (a full version of Angry Birds is included).

I pre-ordered the Roku 2 XS from Wal-Mart and it showed up in my mailbox on April 30th. I was surprised that the box itself was tiny (about half the size of one of the new Apple TVs and about the same size as a hockey puck) and setting it up was a breeze. I plugged in an HDMI cable, plugged in an Ethernet cable then plugged in the AC adaptor. The box turned itself  on and updated itself to the latest software. Next I was prompted to create a Roku Account on their website and link my box via the code on the screen to my account. When creating the Roku account you do have to add a payment method. You are not charged anything and this is to be used to purchase premium channels. The payment method can be a credit card or a PayPal account. Next I visited the channel store from the device and it added some base channels to the box, including Netflix, the Angry Birds game, the USB player and a few more.

On your TV screen you will see the installed channels from on your Roku device and you can scroll side to side to see all of the channels. To use one you just click the OK button. Pressing the back button takes you back to the previous screen and the home button returns you to the main menu. There are 4 arrow keys for most of the navigation. I fired up the Netflix Channel signed in with my account and away I went!

Like I said they do have a Channel Store on the device and many of the apps are free. Unfortunately there are not nearly as many channels available in Canada as there are in the US. I saw about 80 channels in Canada while the US store features approximately 300. In addition the US has services like Hulu and Hulu Plus, HBO Go and Amazon on Demand so the box could be used as a cord cutters only device. Hopefully Roku will continue to negotiate with Canadian TV and content providers and we will see more channels available.

Another disappointment is that there is no YouTube Channel! While we have a YouTube app on our Apple TV and Blu-Ray player (that doesn’t get used) it is still disappointing not to see it as an option (although there is a workaround, see below).

I have watched a few movies on Netflix and the streaming quality is about the same as it is with the Apple TV on our Pioneer 720P TV. The first day I also watched a movie on the Crackle Channel and video quality was very good and there was no pauses in the streaming.

Other content… One way of getting to see other content on a Roku device is to install the Plex channel and then install the Plex Media Server on a network connected PC in your home. This gives you the ability to add additional content (including YouTube) to the Roku using the PC as an intermediary as well as stream iTunes music and Podcasts to the Roku box. Going through the setup for this would make this post too long so I will create another post in the next couple of days describing the process.

Using the special remote bundled with the Roku 2 XS you can play games like Angry Birds on your big screen TV. The remote works very much like a Wii remote and the game play was fairly smooth. There are some other games available on the Roku Channel that you can purchase but I have not tried any yet.

Final thoughts

So far in the testing I have done over the last few days, I like the Roku box. I am still not sure if it will replace the Apple TV that is connected to our primary HD TV. I can watch everything that I would like to in the Roku box including some of my iTunes stuff using the Plex Media Server and the Plex Channel. Should you get a Roku box? Well that would depend on your viewing preferences.

If you are invested in the iTunes world I would suggest instead going with an Apple TV. With the latest Apple TV you can rent and purchase movies from iTunes, Watch purchased TV shows listen to music and if you have an iPad, iPhone or even an Android device with DoubleTwist Air Sync, watch content from those devices on it. Apple TV also features Netflix, MLB and NHL Networks (as does Roku) for streaming. If you purchase movies with Digital copies included you can also watch these via the Apple TV.

If you have a game console (Xbox 360 or PS3) you can do virtually everything that you can do on the Roku on one of those machines. The Roku is much quieter though especially compared to early PS3s and the white Xbox 360s, but you can’t play the games on the Roku. The Roku however is significantly cheaper and you don’t need an Xbox Live account or PSN account to watch Netflix. Over the last couple of years I have been able to pick up the new black version of the Xbox 360 4GB console for 129.00 over boxing week. You also have to add the Xbox Gold account (60,00 per year or 99.00 for a Family account) in order to use Netflix.

If you are looking at adding a web streaming device to your main TV or to an additional TV and you don’t have any other devices  then you may really want to consider a Roku 2 box. If you have a game console or DVD Player with Netflix I would probably pass on it.

What really hurts the Roku in Canada is the lack of channels and content. Without HBO 2 Go, Hulu and Hulu Plus and Amazon Video on Demand out of the box the Roku can only do what some of the other devices can do. However if you are willing to play a little and set up Plex (an upcoming  post) the little box can do a lot! Hopefully Roku will continue working to get more Canadian services (not that there are a lot) signed and on the device and this little box can have potential.

I haven’t decide yet if we will be replacing the Apple TV with the Roku box yet. I am awaiting for more testing from my family that uses Netflix and other services a lot more than I do to voice their opinions. After they compare quality the quality between the two boxes one will stay and one will be moved to another TV (likely my office).

 

Some of the Channels I have installed

Smugmug, Flickr, CNet TV, Twit.tv, Revision 3, Plex, Tunein Radio, Rdio, MLS Live, Pub-D-Hub, Moonlight Movies, Crackle, Nasa TV, CNBC, Vimeo, Facebook (photo and Videos).

Back Up Primer for Home Users – Part 1 – Hardware

I have posted similar articles in the past on this subject, but it seems that every 3 to 4 months, I end up working on a system that has crashed and the user did not do a backup!

Your PC or Mac can crash due to several different reasons; Malware and Viruses, Hardware failure (most typically Hard Drives) and Operating System crashes. A lot of clients say that they aren’t really concerned about their data until they learn that they can’t just re-download music from iTunes and that all of the digital photos they have taken for the last three years are gone. That’s when they panic!

Not every crash results in a loss of data, for example, a corrupted registry problem can be easily fixed and the data is easily recoverable from the system. However a physical hard drive crash (the only real mechanical part in a system) is a little different. Data can be recovered but it is costly.

I recently sent a 60GB drive into a Data Recovery Center on behalf of a client where the drive was completely dead. It cost the client 100.00 for the company to look at the drive and report what could be recovered. The cost of the Data Recovery for this drive was 1800.00 although almost all of the data was recoverable! Spending a little bit of time and money can save you from large bills like that if you have critical data on your system.

There are a couple of ways you can back up your system, A full system backup (usually an image based backup) that backs up everything or a data backup where you select only your data to back up. This is the method that I usually use because I can always rebuild my system with the original install disks and reinstall my applications.

Next you have to decide where you are going to backup to. Do you just want to keep a local backup or do you want to protect yourself from catastrophe (Fire, Theft, Flooding) and use an offsite backup or both?

Personally I use several methods to backup. I use a lot of local backups and for very critical data I also use offsite backup. The simplest method of maintaining an offsite backup is to keep a copy of the back up media in a secure place outside of your home (locked in your office desk, at a relative’s house, etc).

What You May Already Have

So what do you need to get started? At the very least you probably already have the most basic backup device already in your system. Virtually every system sold in the past 4 to 5 years will either have a CD Burner or better yet a DVD Burner in it. You can use this burner to backup data to a blank disk and store it some where. I have been using this method myself for a long time. If you only have a CD Burner you can put approximately 700MB of information on a single disk. If you have a DVD Burner you can put approximately 4.7 GB of Data on a disk. DVD disks can be purchased very inexpensively especially if you buy them in Spindles. I will typically look for sales and pick up 100 DVDs for less than 20.00.

While burning to a DVD or a CD is a good idea, but I wouldn’t rely solely on it. Cheap DVDs or CDs typically do not last very long and some can even go bad after even just a couple of years. If you plan on backing up this way for the long term, at least plan on buying Archival quality disks. These disks are designed to last more than a few years.

One advantage of backing up on DVD is that you can move the disks to another location to give you the added security of offsite storage. I buy inexpensive generic CD binders and keep copies of almost everything in these binders. Multiple copies can also be made and are ideal to keep a set  locked in a drawer at your office or at a relative’s house.

When I used to sell custom PCs, I usually suggested to my clients to build the system with a second drive installed in the machine. With this setup a client could store data or sync data on to the second drive and install programs and the OS to the primary drive. This gave them basic protection against OS Crashes or a hardware failure of the primary drive. Alternatively the client could use the second drive and some imaging software and run full system backups to the second drive on a weekly basis. I still build all of my personal machines with 2 hard drives for this reason. It is not fool proof though as you can lose your data if the 2nd hard drive fails. Some motherboards offer built in Raid controllers as well where Raid 1 can be configured. With this type of a system your primary hard drive is mirrored over to the second hard drive. This is an excellent solution but does make it a touch more difficult to add additional internal storage if needed and has to be set up (ideally) with the purchase of the system.

External Devices

With the popularity of laptops and netbooks today, or if you buy a prebuilt machine and don’t want, or can’t install a second hard disk there are still several options available to you. At the very least, consider a USB key or two. These have dropped in price significantly as well as increasing in capacity over the last little while. You can pick up a couple of 8 GB USB keys for about 40.00 CDN. With these keys you can copy your important documents over to them periodically (or use a little utility I will describe soon) and at least your most important stuff resides in a couple of places. A warning about USB keys however, these devices have a limit to the number of reads and writes they can handle so I don’t suggest relying on them for backup only. Also because they are so small, they can easily be misplaced and or lost and you don’t want your data ending out in the public if lost.

Hard drives have also considerably dropped in price significantly over the years. Along with this external USB drives have dropped in price as well. Some of the brand name drives come with backup software pre-installed on the drives. For example a 500GB Seagate Free Agent Drive sells for about 125.00 CDN and has software that can do backups for you automatically (Windows Only). If you are a Mac user look at a Western Digital My Book drive. Several other manufacturers offer external drives so shop around you may find some at a better price.These are desktop style drives and are not really portable as most require AC power. So if you are a notebook user and want to take the drive with you look at a 2.5” form factor drive. These are available again from a variety of manufactures but are smaller and generally can draw required power from the USB ports on your system. If you are lucky enough to have a FireWire or eSata port on your system consider an external drive that also offer these features. FireWire is as fast as USB 2.0 but is less draining on your system’s CPU during transfers and eSata is as fast as internal hard drives.

You could also make your own external drive by purchasing an enclosure and then buying an OEM hard drive. Currently the sweet spot for hard drives are the 500GB size. You can pick these up in Canada for about 75.00 (OEM Drives). You can pick up an enclosure for 30.00 or so and add the drive. The advantage of doing it this way is if you later want to increase the size of the drive as prices fall on the larger drive sizes you can easily replace the drive you purchased. The same thing can be done for smaller sized notebook (2.5”) hard drives for portable storage.

Personally on my desktop systems and my own and client servers, I have been using USB 2.0/eSata Hard Drive Docks. These are similar to the enclosures above however instead of opening the enclosure up and installing a drive, you can simply plug in a 3.5 or 2.5” Sata drive in the bay and away you go. I typically have these connected via eSata so they are hot swappable and when I want to change drives or one fills up, I eject it and plug in another drive. I have found a manufacturer that also makes Drive Boxes (similar to DVD cases) so when I pop a drive out I stick it in a box and on my shelf. The docks sell for about 50.00 and I found this this is a great way to rotate storage device around.

Another type of external enclosure I highly recommend is the Drobo. While not inexpensive the Drobo can do things that other types of enclosures just can’t do. The Drobo sells for 499.00 for the Firewire 800 / USB 2.0 version and 349.00 for the USB 2.0 only version. This does not come with any hard drives at all, but 4 drive bays. The Drobo is unique because it replicates the same type of functionality as a high end Raid 5 system most often found in servers and enterprises, but in a much simpler and flexible format. Where Raid 5 requires a fair bit of knowledge, hardware and specific hard drive configurations to work, the Drobo makes this very easy.

Raid 5 requires at least 3 hard drives of identical size to implement the original array and increasing the size of the Raid requires backing up all of your data, installing new drives of equal size, reformatting and then restoring data. The Drobo eliminates this completely. With the Drobo you can use up to 4 (minimum of 2) SATA drives of any size in the enclosure and it will give you storage and data redundancy where a part of each drive is used to backup parts of the other drives. With the Drobo if a hard drive fails or get’s full, simply swap it out with a drive of equal or larger size. Currently the Drobo can support up to 4 4GB drives. It also works on both PCs and Macs. You can learn more about the Drobo here.

Due to the amount of photos we take as a family, I currently store most of them on one of two Drobos (1 USB only, 1 Firewire) both filled with 4 500GB drives. Sysguy Consulting is a Drobo Authorized Reseller so if you are interested in seeing a demo of this device or to order please contact us.

Network Attached Storage Devices

If you have multiple PCs on a home network there are a couple of other hardware devices you can consider. For 250.00 you can add a device called the DroboShare to your Drobo unit. This device allows you to connect up to 2 Drobo devices to it and share them on a network via Gigabit Ethernet. You will take a little of a performance hit as the Drobo only connects to the share via USB but it allows you to share this device and take advantage of it’s data redundancies capabilities over your network and by multiple computers. We have recently received our DroboShare unit here in our labs but have not yet had a chance to set it up and test it. The new Drobo Dashboard software program (currently in Beta) comes with a utility called Drobo Copy which will allow you to set up folders and files to be copied or synced to the device.

Another device I can highly recommend is the DLink DNS-323. The DNS-323 is a network connected storage device. It allows you to install up to 2 SATA hard drives in it, and configure them as mirrored drives, a single large hard drive, or as two individual drives. I have been using one of these devices with a 400 GB and a 500 GB drive installed in it for a couple of years now and it has been great. I store things that I need access to from my multiple machines from on it as well as backing up Music and other documents to it. With recent firmware the device also servers as a Media server allowing us to stream Music, Pictures or Video to Xbox 360’s in the house or to the PS3. You can get a DNS-323 for about 160.00 CDN in addition to the cost of adding SATA drives. D-Link is also offering the DNS-323 bigger brother the DNS-343 that holds 4 Sata Drives at an MSRP of 658.00 with no drives.

There are other Network Attached Storage Devices available but many of these do require a little knowledge of Raid systems (unless you buy pre configured) and start at around 750.00 CDN.

Windows Home Servers

If you have multiple systems at home you may also want to consider a Windows Home Server. This is designed to be a headless device (no monitor, keyboard or mouse required), that connects to your home network. Windows Home Servers are available from a few manufacturers or can be custom built for you by a system builder. HP has one of the most popular WHS devices with it’s Media Smart Server line.

The HP Media Smart is a WHS with 4 drive bays, a low end processor and 1 GB of RAM. There are several models available and the most recent also offers support for Mac users (apparently this is coming for owners of the older versions). In the older 1 TB version of the WHS, 2 bays are available for expansion. So you can easily add additional storage to the device. I recently picked up the older 1 TB model of the HP Media Smart Server (EX475) in a clearance sale at half price (350.00). I haven’t set it up yet but soon will be replacing the WHS Beta box I was using as well as upgrading this machine to 2 GB of RAM and 2 additional 500 GB Hard Drives. I will post a complete review after it is set up and running for awhile.

With Windows Home Server there are different ways that you can configure the hard drives. You can have everything run as a single large drive or mirror the drives. Similar to the Drobo you can change the storage size by changing or adding drives. You can also add additional storage via USB and if available eSata docks. You can also set up some dedicated external drives for backup of your WHS device which is new in the latest update from Microsoft.

Once connected and set up (using the web interface) you install the included software on the PCs in your home. This will set up all PCs where the software is loaded to be backed up nightly to the home server box. If the PC crashes, simply insert the Client recovery disk into the PC and you can restore the entire device from the WHS. The only stipulation is that the computers have to be left on during the scheduled back up time in order to be backed up. One of the really great things about the WHS system backup is that it uses a single instance file storage system to save space. What this means is that if you are backing up 2 computers and it sees a file in the first one with a specific date, time and version if when it backs up system two if and sees the identical file on it, it will place a pointer to the file it already has, saving space on the storage device. Your first system backup on the WHS will take a while to complete as it has to back up everything on the system. After the first backup however things should be much faster as it will backup only changed and new files.

The really cool thing about the WHS is that it can do a lot more than just be a Networked Attached Storage Device. The server becomes a web server in your home so that you can access your files and shared files on the server from any Internet Connected PC. If you are using XP Pro or Vista Business or better on your home machine, you can use Remote Desktop and connect and work from your home PC also across the internet (this is a feature borrowed from the MS SBS team).

Because the architecture has an SDK (Software Developers Kit) several third party programmers have written numerous add-ons for the devices that also extend the functionality. There are add-ons that allow you to back up the server offsite (I will discuss this in the next post on backup), use it to stream media in your home, create web pages and photo galleries that friends and families can connect to and more. new add-ons are being created every week for these devices.

You can connect up to 10 client machines up to the WHS so for virtually any home the out of the box configuration works well.

WHS is also perfect for a small office. It gives the users virtually all of the features of a full server (no domain security though) but allows them remote access, backup and shared files.

Sysguy Consulting can custom build a WHS for your home or office as well. Contact us if you are interested.

Conclusion

When I first started this post I had planned on writing everything up. Then after I finished about the hardware required I realized it would be too long for just a single post. I will write a separate post about software you can use for backing up your system next.

While there is a lot of information provided here, I hoped to show that you really don’t need much in the way of hardware to backup your system. You can get the basic hardware for around 100.00 and with some free software I’ll discuss in the next post you can institute an easy back up routing.

If you have any questions please feel free to email us at sysguy at sysguy dot com.