Squeezebox vs Soundbridge

I am thinking about upgrading from the netgear mp101 (well, use it elsewhere) and was wondering why everyone gets the squeezebox over the Roku?

The roku is £150 (for the M1000) so £50 cheaper than the squeezebox (I have a very limited budget) or I get the M500 for £100 from America but would then need shipping and an UK wifi card (its not due over here until March)

My question is, is the squeezebox £50 better than the Roku?? I'll only be using MP3's at the moment as thats all the netgear supported so thats all I have!

If anyone knows of any cheap sources of either, I'm all ears!!

Thanks

Andrew

 

I bought a Squeezebox because the weight of opinion here favoured it over the Roku. The best price I found was www.broadbandstuff.co.uk - it arrived the day after I ordered it. After a few days use I'd say it was worth the money - I went for the wireless version.

FR

 

looking at the specs they seem pretty evenly matched. i do seem to remember 1 advantage of the squeezebox over the roku but cannot remember what it was.
for me though the fact that the squeezebox is constantly undergoing development by the main company and by others thanks to it's open source nature means a big advantage imho. if you just want a plug'n'play thing that's cheap and looks good the roku may be the way to go. i'd stil go for a squeezebox though.
cheers


julian

 

I have the roku and I'd say there are "issues" with it (compared to the squeezebox):

1) it was a pain in the ass to upgrade to the latest firmware (a repeated download failure) which I couldn't resolve at home (I ended up fixing the thing at work). I needed the latest firmware for the 5.4 slimserver (recommended).

2) the volume control cannot be disabled in the same way as the squeezebox. (Using the appropriate checkbox on the server doesn't work).

3) the remote doesn't have the numeric keypad (on which you can enter letters). This makes searching somewhat painful as you have to use up arrow/down arrow starting from the letter A. [It's painful, and I'm going to hack it ] I'm not sure if the roku can work with an extended remote control command set (or whether it's compatible with the Squeezebox remote (eg for universal remote cloning)).

The roku is a neat design, but having cables coming out of BOTH of the end caps rather than than from the center of the back is IMHO a little messy.

I'd also add that the display is a bit small on the M1000, but the price of the M2000 (with the big display) is eyewateringly expensive. If the Squeezebox has a larger display it might be the best choice.. You probably won't be able to read the M1000 display from 10 feet away unless you've got eye's like a hawk. The BIG font stuff I tried was ugly, but I should look at that again.