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Comment by snowpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Roku does a great job of combining sources however it doesn't support DVR or local storage (i.e. Downloads)

Boxee also did a great job of combining sources and did a good job with local storage. It also didn't support DVR.

To be honest DVR is an animal that I've seen nobody crack successfully.

See, here's the thing about Roku and competitors (like the WD box, etc): they all require you to start different "apps" to browse different sources of content. I don't care where the content comes from, I just want to watch it. So, when I say "DVR", what I mean is a DVR-like interface to combine all content from various sources.

Roku supports a unified search now, though unified search doesnt support all apps/channels. It does support Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Vudu, and Crackle though.

Also, most (all?) Roku's support local storage, but it isn't ideal. Usually, I need to throw some content on a thumbdrive and stick it into the Roku. Not horrible, but I wish I could use the Roku to download content to use it to stream via DLNA.

You should try http://www.plexapp.com/ with the roku. It's what I use and it is great.

plexapp is decent, but it really could be a lot better... I use it myself.

I tried to get it setup once, but it doesn't work for my situation (for instance, my laptop is usually in hibernation when I'm at home. I have a connected disk that supports DLNA and I wish I could stream from that.) With this considered, just plugging in USB storage is fine. Not ideal, but fine.

Also, when I last tried to use Plex (though, this was more than a year ago), it was extremely clunky. Maybe things are different now, or maybe I was expecting it to behave differently, but I didnt like it.

The search part is good, but I want to then put that search to good use to allow me to subscribe to "seasons" of shows so that when I turn on the TV, I see a date-descending list of shows (and their watched status). A la DVR. If the Roku had that I'd be all over it. But it still sticks to the silo app model at the end of the day. Just not my cup of tea.

I use a combination of mythroku (https://github.com/ear9mrn/MythRokuPlayer/tree/master/mythro...) and plex channels for playing local content on Roku.

What about Tivo? Tivo does the DVR perfectly.

My experience with TiVo (quite recently) has been sub-optimal at best. Slow, incomplete, and 15$ a month. Bad codec support. Crashy.

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