NOTICE: None of the information in this article is intended for the use of pirating copyrighted material.

First off, I guess I should make it perfectly clear that I am no lover of Cable or Satellite TV, with all of the packages and tiers.  But with all of the on-demand content available on line these services are slowing becoming outdated.  It is for this reason I purchased my first Roku set-top box and a $8.99 subscription to NetFlix.

What is Roku: Roku, Inc., is a privately held company located in Saratoga, Calif., and founded in 2002 by Anthony Wood, the inventor of the digital video recorder (DVR). Roku is a leading supplier of innovative and easy to use digital media products. Our best known consumer products are the Roku digital video player and the stylish SoundBridge Internet radio line. In short, Roku; is a set-top box that hooks up to your HDTV and to the Internet to provide a variety of content from NetFlix, Amazon, YouTube and many more content providers.

What Roku has always been missing is the ability to stream or display my own content (Movies, Pictures, Music) across a home network and not have to upload all of my photos, and movies to the cloud.

Enter RoksBox.

Roksbox gives you the ability to play your own videos and movies, listen to your own music, and show your own photographs on the Roku Digital Video player (from now on referred to as the Roku player). Your media can reside on your computer’s hard drive, on an external drive, on a network attached storage (NAS) device located on your home or local area network, or on a USB attached device (XR model only). Although Roksbox requires some initial setup work, once you get your network and media files properly configured, you will be able to enjoy all of your media files on the convenience of the Roku player.

How It Works:

Roksbox is a private channel that you add to your channel list.  The short of it is that this is not a plug and play setup and requires you to set up a small web server on the machine that you will be storing your media on.  Then the channel will give you a list of your content on your TV and allow you to play it.

The Install:

It took me around 60-90 min. to get everything installed and configured.  RoksBox has a very good tutorial that will walk you step by step through the process.  I have listed the software that I used which is all included in the tutorial and is Free. Most of the time you will spend will be on converting your media to work with Roku.

Resources:

Have Fun