Is it better to get a Roku or Chromecast to stream tv shows to your television?

1. 73

   toptendealsposted 11 years ago

   Is it better to get a Roku or Chromecast to stream tv shows to your television?

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2. 0

   christiananrkistposted 11 years ago

   I personally would go with roku. I have one and it offers a lot of extra free channels that you can add to it from the roku website. I'm a big horror movie fan and i must have at least a dozen different horror movie channels offered by roku. Its a little more expensive that chromecast, but just from doing a little research about chromecast, the roku seems to offer a lot more for the extra $15 or so. Go here and see all the channels roku offers. most free. some you pay for if you want it.
   
   http://www.roku.com/channels/#!browse/m … by-popular

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3. 0

   delleaposted 11 years ago

   A few years ago I used to have a cheap Dlink media streaming box, the primary reason that I liked that over the Roku (which was also available at the time) was that the Dlink box had Youtube built-in. I had read many positive reviews on Roku but refused to get one because they lacked a Youtube connection. There are tons of old sitcoms and movies available on Youtube, you just need to search for them correctly to find them, and I thought it was a shame that Roku didn't support Youtube, obviously they are more interested in earning kickbacks from paid monthly subscriptions and we didn't want more fees.
   
   All that being said, the Dlink box eventually died, and instead I set up a dedicated Windows 7 tower and a wireless keyboard and mouse with our 40in TV, and we dumped our satellite TV for good. Since my wife and I both work and we didn't want to pay $90/month+ for tons of channels we never watched only to get the few channels that we wanted, we simply got rid of TV altogether. (We live in a rural area with no cable as well.)
   
   We have been more than entertained by using a full-fledged computer on our home TV, not only for on-demand video watching, but it's also much more productive, BIG, and easy to use for regularly checking email, weather, Facebook, playing computer games or planning trips together, and of course even for working from home when needed.
   
   We store all of our music and photos on that computer too through the network, using it as sort of a media server. This lets us play our music library through our 9-speaker surround system, and it serves as company entertainment for showing photo slideshows of our trips, etc. You'd find that DVDs and Bluerays are much crisper as well if the computer you get has HDMI-out and you use the computer as a DVD or Blueray player, even crisper than actual stand-alone players themselves in my opinion, and the digital sound through HDMI from the computer is superb.
   
   All in all, for us old fashioned network TV is in the past, using a real computer in place of it is much more entertaining, and in our case it's less expensive because we only have to pay for internet service.

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4. 58

   hdmiguruposted 11 years ago

   I would also recommend Roku. Chromecast is actually pretty limited in features. You always have to stream content from the cloud. With Roku you could also stream directly from an iPhone to a TV. Btw have you ever considered Apple TV as an alternative? Works quite well with Android smartphones also: http://hdmiguru.hubpages.com/hub/what-c … res-review

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