2. home-theater
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I picked up a ROKU, I am wanting to cut the Cable TV cord.

I first tried the ROKU hooked up to the TV with an HDMI in the Great room/Living room and it worked well. We even watched a couple movies on Amazon Prime. No dropouts or buffering. (ROKU is connected to 60mbps speed internet through a switch with CAT5e.)

Last night I thought I would try it in the HT room and see how it worked and how the picture quality looked there.
Hook up of the ROKU to the switch again by CAT5e. From the output of the ROKU I connected the HDMI cable to an HDMI input on a Marantz SR8002 HT receiver.

I then turned on the equipment and set the Marantz to the correct HDMI input port and the ROKU home page came up just fine. I checked YouTube and it seemed ok. When I tried Amazon Prime it loaded fine. But, when we found a movie we wanted to watch, it started to load, but then an info block came up on the screen of the TV saying there wasn't enough bandwidth to load the movie. I tried again 2 or 3 times, same thing. I knew the problem was not the Ethernet cable. Works fine when using it for Netflix.

So what the heck was the problem? I even tried a different HDMI input port on the Marantz. Why? I don't know but I did....
 For a test I disconnected the ROKU HDMI cable from the Marantz and connected it directly to an HDMI input port on the Samsung LED TV. I then attempted again to watch the same movie on Amazon Prime as I tried earlier. Movie loaded without a glitch. Not a dropout or buffering glitch once throughout the entire movie.
What gives?

Jim
jea48

Showing 1 response by timlub

timlub
2,039 posts
 
Few things different subjects within the thread:
There are plenty boxes available that are like a Roku or Firestick.  
The best that I have seen is called a Yundoo Y8... There are 2 versions of this,  1 is a 2gb ram, 16gb drive,  the other is a 4gb ram, 32gb drive.... Don't mess with the lower unit..... With this and a free service,  I believe someone mentioned Plex earlier, this works well as well as Kodi or Emby.  With this combination, you can watch hundreds of sites with all kinds of shows, movies etc.  
Price of internet.  I have found that unless you are truly willing to drop a service and leave it off for 30 days,  you won't get a better price.  Some of these great deals that you see quoted are for the 1st year only or include slow internet.  I currently have 200mb service and it cost me $74.  If I dropped it, waited 30 days and re subscribed, it would cost me $50.  Or I can get a much different DSL type variation up to about 25mb for only $30.... that sucks.  Basically, a new customer gets a deal,  they are buying your business.  If you are in, you lose.  You must be willing to walk away to get back in at that (normally 1 year) deal. 
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