Roku HD 1000 questions

[flizzo1]

Hey guys ive been reading a bit about the Roku HD 1000 and im quite confused. I was hoping someone could help me figure out a few things.

1)First of all i have all my music on Musicmatch Jukebox, does the HD 1000 support it or would i have to retag everything ?

2) Does it support playlists and can you create playlists on the fly ?

3) Does it display album art while playing songs ?


Thats it really. If there is a machine that does all this well as well as display images in HD, i would be one happy bunny.

Cheers lads

[jimre]

Originally posted by flizzo1
Hey guys ive been reading a bit about the Roku HD 1000 and im quite confused. I was hoping someone could help me figure out a few things.

1)First of all i have all my music on Musicmatch Jukebox, does the HD 1000 support it or would i have to retag everything ?Currently the HD1000 doesn't use tags AT ALL for navigating thru your music. You just navigate thru the physical folder hierachy you have set up. Only when you get to the folder you want, then it will use ID3 tags to display the title & artist info in the song list. Very lame.

For the upcoming 2.0 software release, Roku has said the HD1000 will be a UPnP/AV client. That means you can run one of several different UPnP/AV server applications on your PC - which will get you much richer sorting, viewing, and searching using tags. I believe MusicMatch has a UPnP/AV server of some kind built into recent versions of their app. Microsoft also has their free "Windows Media Connect" UPnP server app available for download.
2) Does it support playlists and can you create playlists on the fly ?It supports .pls and .m3u playlist formats, although one catch is that the file names in the lists must be "relative", not "absolute". Again, the upcoming support for UPnP/AV servers should give you much broader support for playlists.

You can't create playlists on the Roku - at least not use the built-in Roku software. The closest thing is a 3rd-party jukebox app that lets you "queue up" songs to be played, jukebox style. See the Roku 3rd-party apps (http://www.rokulabs.com/developers/thirdparty.php) listing.
3) Does it display album art while playing songs ?Nope. The 3rd-party jukebox mentioned above can display album art, but only if the JPEG image is actually embedded in the tags for each track, not kept as a separate file (eg, folder.jpg).
Thats it really. If there is a machine that does all this well as well as display images in HD, i would be one happy bunny.

Cheers lads For more detailed discussion, you can check out the forums on Roku's web site (http://www.rokulabs.com/forums). At this point frankly the HD1000 is a pretty mediocre music player (Roku's own SoundBridge blows it away). I suggest you wait until Roku releases their final 2.0 software release, and then check out whether it has the features you need.

[flizzo1]

Thanks a lot mate. I appreciate all your help. I think im gonna wait for the Media Receiver that RCA are bringing out this year instead.