I’ve done several posts about the Roku box product. I’ve really had nothing terrible to say about the little black box, and last night I discovered another awesome feature!
My biggest problem with all of these media devices is that, in the end, I still find myself hooking my laptop up to my TV to watch movies that I have on my laptop’s hard drive. What I found out, is that the USB port on the side is totally functional for pulling and playing files from an external device. What this means is that I can hook up a huge hard drive, right up to the Roku thus attaching it to an entire library of movies! The “downside” is that it only plays mkv or mp4 video files, so you may need to convert some of your videos depending on what files they currently are.
All you need to do is hook your hard drive up to the Roku, and then go to the app store. There is a free app in the music section called, USB Media Player (or something along those lines), the logo looks like this:
My biggest problem with all of these media devices is that, in the end, I still find myself hooking my laptop up to my TV to watch movies that I have on my laptop’s hard drive. What I found out, is that the USB port on the side is totally functional for pulling and playing files from an external device. What this means is that I can hook up a huge hard drive, right up to the Roku thus attaching it to an entire library of movies! The “downside” is that it only plays mkv or mp4 video files, so you may need to convert some of your videos depending on what files they currently are.
All you need to do is hook your hard drive up to the Roku, and then go to the app store. There is a free app in the music section called, USB Media Player (or something along those lines), the logo looks like this:
Once you do this, you can open up the app, and the Roku should be able to read all the contents on the drive and play them. It is awesome.
