June 08, 2004
New Roku HD1000
At The Good Guys, for about $270, my dad just bought a Roku HD1000, which is basically a embedded Linux appliance that hooks into the HDTV and shows movies and pictures and plays music from either flash memory cards or off the LAN. In short, it's a high definition networked digital media player. He read a bunch of reviews of similar products and all of them required a program to run on a Windows PC to download files, with the Roku being the sole exception. (That didn't suit us, since we are using a Linux machine as our file server.) Overall, it seems like a nice unit. They even provide an SDK to assist the hacker crowd in writing custom applications on it. (I downloaded it, but have not written anything yet.) A negative is the remote control is rather directional, and if a Compact Flash card is inserted (near the IR sensor), some angles are unusable. My dad has a programmable remote (a Pronto), for which Roku Labs provides a template, and the Pronto supposedly works better than the remote provided. 
I used telnet on one of the computers to log into it and poked around. It is basically a 300MHz MIPS R4000 CPU with 64MB of RAM and about 32MB of built-in flash memory. It supports Compact Flash cards like my camera uses as well as Smart Media, Memory Stick, SD/MMC.