Who should buy the Roku or (WD Player)?

In the letter the church sent out regarding the new curriculum, they mentioned playing media off of a USB drive as being the preferred choice. They suggest a Roku or the WD box as viable solutions.

My question is, who should provide this?

-- Our FM Manager seems to feel that it falls in the category of custom cables for iPads etc. (mentioned in the letter as a member responsibility). Consequently the Stake or individual members should supply these.

-- I read this an FM responsibility to retrofit older TVs so that they meet a minimum standard (of being able to play a file off of a USB drive). That way they can get another 30 years of life out of the TV instead of replacing it.

What is happening in the rest of the church?

Thanks!

If you watch January's broadcast, the answer I remember was:

• FM is not responsible
• Follow the handbook

Personal translation: Wards and stakes who do get it are taking it out of their activity funds.

Note that it doesn't make much difference if it comes from the ward or the stake. It's two slices from the same pie.

Now for a observation: Back when MLS first came out, it was optional. Units that wanted on had to find a computer that met the higher specs. Units that couldn't would have to stay on the DOS MIS/FIS program. A few years later, the church started supplying computers on a 5-year cycle.

When Internet came out, it was first: "You can tap into the FHC network", then "Wards and stakes can fund their own" and now "Church pays".

This could follow the same pattern.

Additionally the Roku or WD devices will connect to TV's over the RCA or HDMI they will support the gambit of what's available in our meetinghouses.

My preference would be the Roku for the following reasons.
-- Many people will already be familiar with it (small learning curve).
-- Slightly cheaper (looking into bulk rates with Roku as well).
-- iOS and Android remote control app (could come in handy if the remote is lost?).

The only real advantage I see for the WD player is that it supports more video formats (Roku only supports .mp4). However, I'm not sure when I would ever need any of those other formats.

Any thoughts on this?

1) Wasn't only one of them usable for webcasts? I would be nice if we could use it for stake conferences as well.

2) Personally, I 'd like to find something that doesn't require a remote. They tend to get lost.

Our Stake has done a lot of testing with these two devices, we have decide to go with the WD TV Live version. It plays pretty much what ever you throw at it. It works great with the Plexapp server software. It has great parental controls which means you can lock it down pretty good.

Never seen it buffer in any test, the Roku did.


The Roku 1st strike, requires an active credit card account for the various things that can be bought online, and the box WILL NOT function with out the CC for validation. 2nd strike, very weak parental controls, you cannot lock out all the online channels. 3rd, it will not play from a NAS, and only Plex has a media server with a channel app for the Roku. 4th, pretty much every screen other than when the video is playing, you have to look at various advertisements.

Roku does have the Mormon channel, do they play General Conference on that?

rolandc wrote:The Roku 1st strike, requires an active credit card account for the various things that can be bought online, and the box WILL NOT function with out the CC for validation.

We've been told in other threads that that can be worked around. But the other issues remain.

The Church live broadcasts are streamed to the Mormon Channel - Yes. Works really well.

JohnShaw wrote:The Church live broadcasts are streamed to the Mormon Channel - Yes. Works really well.

That is good to know, Now if we could get a PlexApp Mormon Channel.....

Plex Media server combined with the WD TV Live is very powerful and so simple. Our FM group managers are coming up Monday with some regional managers for a Demo. Could be fun.

One thing I just found out.

This involves the Roku's and one of the big computer magazine found a new model in browsing through some FCC filings. Didn't have much detail, and it has been indicated by the magazine that found the filings for the new device that it will be slightly smaller than the ones out now, and rumors say it will have a faster chipset to support new features and improve performance overall. But that is all we know. We don't even know a release date, but that may likely follow within weeks if last years announcements of the Rolu 2's were any indication.

This will also render obsolete most Roku 2's.

rolandc wrote:The Roku 1st strike, requires an active credit card account for the various things that can be bought online, and the box WILL NOT function with out the CC for validation.

While it does require a credit/debit card or a paypal account to activate it, immediately after activation you can login to your Roku account, go to "My Account>Payment Method" and click "Remove Payment Method". I don't see this as a show stopper.

rolandc wrote: 2nd strike, very weak parental controls, you cannot lock out all the online channels.

Login to your Roku account, go to "My Account>Channel Store PIN" and select "Require a four-digit PIN to add any channel, even free channels." We allow only 3 channels: Mormon Channel, BYU-TV, and Roku USB Media Player. No other channels can be added without the PIN or a factory reset.

rolandc wrote:3rd, it will not play from a NAS, and only Plex has a media server with a channel app for the Roku.

There are NAS channels, and other media servers. I have not investigated these in detail. We usually stream from a USB Flash drive. I have not played with the WD Player, but agree that the WD seems to have a better solution than the Roku in this area.

rolandc wrote:4th, pretty much every screen other than when the video is playing, you have to look at various advertisements.

While I agree this is an issue, the advertisements only appear before you select a channel. Since we use the Roku USB Media Player (or the Mormon Channel), they don't show up after you select that channel. And, there are ways to block the banner ads in your router...
(BYU-TV also places 15 second "bake and serve" commercials if you live in Utah, and car/truck ads if you live outside Utah, at the start of each video on the BYU-TV channel.)

I'm sure there are many good features in the WD Player.

We have 11 of the Roku XS players in our stake. They have both HDMI and composite video outputs, so they work with almost any TV. They are easy to use, low cost, and in high demand.

rolandc wrote:Plex Media server combined with the WD TV Live is very powerful and so simple.

I would be interested learning in how you configure the Plex Media server. It seems to shine in transcoding, organizing commercial movies, TV series, and music along with cover art for them, etc.

I gave up after I spent several hours trying to have a clean easy to use menu setup for "Come, Follow Me" videos. A few experts on the Plex form that I talked to seemed to indicate that was not what Plex was best at.

rknelson wrote:

rolandc wrote:Plex Media server combined with the WD TV Live is very powerful and so simple.

I would be interested learning in how you configure the Plex Media server. It seems to shine in transcoding, organizing commercial movies, TV series, and music along with cover art for them, etc.

I gave up after I spent several hours trying to have a clean easy to use menu setup for "Come, Follow Me" videos. A few experts on the Plex form that I talked to seemed to indicate that was not what Plex was best at.

I spent a bunch of time researching this one of the larger problems is the church metadata of the mp4 files. I spent hours updating the metadata so the menu collections can build themselves. I researched adding the data to the online open source databases the plex agents look at to build their menus. I was hoping to simulate the TV episodes and each high level category like Mormon messages, youth messages, etc... Youth curriculum came after all my work.

We use collections to browse, and then search to find specific titles.

It looks like the mp4 video files do have mp4/aac style tags in them but not id3 tags. Some applications see the tags and others do not. I don't know if we can get the group that builds these to include both styles of tags. Can you see if you can read the tags in different applications and come up with a proposal for what works? I think the current mp4 tags would be read by iTunes, but I did not test that. What are you using that does not see the current tags? What would it see? id3v3 I presume? More research is needed here before we could make a proposal to whoever provides these files.

I tested the download here:

<https://www.lds.org/broadcasts/archive/ ... ng/2012/02>

I tried the 360p version of "The Gospel Answers Life’s Problems and Challenges" and found valid tags there in my media player, but my id3v2 editor sees no tags at all.

Note: Someone™ is likely sending you this same reply from our feedback system.

Tim,

I took some time and looked at this. Without knowing the specifics about id3 and mp4/aac I only know what I see in the programs I use on Windows computers. It seems the data is there in some of the files, so somebody, somewhere includes this data with the files.

here is the quick notes I put together https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8558507/Tag-Examples.pdf

Of the following downloads:
2011-10-044-peter-and-john-heal-a-man-crippled-since-birth-1000k-eng.mp4 ***File Contains metadata
2011-10-045-peter-preaches-and-is-arrested-1000k-eng.mp4
2011-10-046-peter-and-john-are-judged-1000k-eng.mp4
2013-01-001-your-potential-your-privileges-1000k-eng.mp4
2013-01-002-earthly-father-heavenly-father-1000k-eng.mp4
Political Neutrality - Whiteboard Animation.mp4***File Contains metadata

It seemed odd to me that one of the Bible Video downloads had the data, but the other 2 didn't. This has been my experience, sometimes it's there and sometimes it is not - Though I'd say it's about less than 20%. Anything I've downloaded from http://medialibrary.lds.org is inconsistent... and I've downloaded every video available there.

The Roku DOES NOT require a credit card for account creation if you call them up and do it over the phone. This is by special arrangement with the church. I have completed the process.

Regarding the Roku, Has anyone been able to successfully block the ads via the new firewall? The ads are brief, but can be distracting to some.
Do we need to contact the Global service desk to make it work if it is possible?
Earlier it was noted that "there are ways to block the banner ads in your router"

Also, with the Western digital TV live device can it be locked down to the USB option and the ability "Play to" from Windows 7 and 8 options only?