5 Great Roku Features All Cordcutters Have Come To Love

1. Roku Voice Search is among the coolest Roku features

Roku’s last two installments, the Roku 3 and Roku 4, packed a powerful punch by allowing users to search titles and content by voice search.  Nearly all onscreen typing can be a tedious task when searching titles.  Roku Voice Search proves to be one of the coolest Roku features thus far.  It allows you to instantly find a movie or show by name or actor which minimizes the time of searching for something to watch.  Leaving you more time to enjoy your media and less time typing in titles and keywords to get what you want.

2. Roku Hotel and Dorm Connect

With hotel and dorm connect, Roku enabled cordcutters with Roku players or Roku Streaming Sticks to stream and access their media from hotels or college dormitories. Hotel and dorms often have unique identifiers such as room number and last names when accessing paid services’.  Once a WiFi network is established, Roku brilliantly assigns a unique router name and password for your device.  For step-by-step directions on how this works see our previous post on hotel and dorm connect for Roku explained.  Work arounds for Roku features existed before hotel and dorm connect but now connectivity is as easy as pie.

3. Roku Media Player

That hard drive you have with a zillion movies and TV shows on it stays relevant because of features like the Roku Media Player.  Roku Media Player allows you to play various movies, photos and music files via USB connection right through your Roku player.  Family vacations, CDs from your personal collection, and old movies not available on Netflix or Amazon Video can be played directly through your HDTV by connecting your external hard drive to the USB port of your Roku Player.  The Roku Media Player App probably gets the least amount of hype of all Roku features but ships preinstalled on all devices for ease of use.

4. Roku Recommends

Since 2014 Roku Recommends has highlighted many newly released channels available in their channel store.  Most add great content value for a variety of ‘Life Hacks’ from recipes to shopping, fitness and travel.  The Roku Recommends App is great for those new to the Roku community who do not know which channels to add.  Albeit, channels or apps can be added to your device at no cost but may require an in-app purchase to access the content within.  The channels you will likely find on Roku Recommends, often are hand picked and free.  Whats more, it offers a boat load of information and entertainment the whole family can enjoy.  Add Roku Recommends to track whats trending on the best streaming player.

5. Breaking News Highlights

In a twenty-four news cycle across various networks sometimes its great to access whats happening now.  Since many major news networks in the United States and Europe have a parallel Roku channel, offering breaking news highlights, it allows us to stay in touch with whats going on.  Cordcutters make out in this case since all news networks with a Roku channel provide updated content without a paid subscription.  Networks typically upload several one to five minute news segments to their channel everyday.  They often highlight the crux of the stories without the commercials and paid advertising.  This usually comes at no additional cost to cordcutters who stream their content via the internet and are able to get updates on whats going on in the world between programs of their choosing. 

Roku Media Player - Still A Cordcutters Dream For Streaming Media

Roku Media Player App

By now most of us have joined Netflix and a few other streaming channels like Amazon and Hulu to see what entertainment value they offer in this cordcutting environment.  What we were quick to learn is not every oldie but goodie can be found in these extensive movie catalogs.  All of which are subscription based.  But as our DVD players continue to collect dust we wanted to remind everyone of a well known plug and play application that is just as cool as any of the existing channels on your Roku player.  And that is the Roku Media Player.

The Roku Media Player is an application that comes pre-installed on your Roku player and allows you to watch most movie files from just about any external hard drive via USB.  Whether you are connecting a 4TB hard drive with its own power source or a Windows or Macintosh computer, the connection will be the same.  You will use your Roku’s USB port to watch movies, view photos and slide shows of your camera, and listen to music from any portable device or auxiliary outlet.

Add Channel Code: Roku Media Player
Channel Category: All
Developer Info: Roku
Subscription: FREE

Roku Media Player Supported Files

The following media file formats are supported:

• Video — H.264/AVC (.MKV, .MP4, .MOV), on Roku 4 only: H.265/HEVC (.MKV, .MP4, .MOV); VP9 (.MKV)
• Audio – AAC (.MKV, .MP4, .MOV); MP3(.MP3, .MKV); WMA (.ASF, .WMA, .MKV), FLAC (.FLAC, .MKV), PCM (.WAV, .MKV, .MP4, .MOV), AC3/EAC3 (.MKV,.MP4. .MOV, .AC3), DTS (.MKV, .MP4, .MOV), ALAC (.MKV, .MP4, .MOV, .M4A)
• Image — JPG, PNG, GIF (non-animated)

The following USB drive formats are supported:

• FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and HFS+

USB flash drives and externally powered USB hard drives work best with the Roku player. Some USB powered hard drives will not be able to draw enough power from the Roku player to function properly, especially if used with another drive on a USB hub.  The Roku Media Player also lets you access different partitions on a USB drive.