Roku + ip driver by Diamond Design

November 20, 2011

While you could control the Roku with a simple ir driver since there aren’t many buttons, an ip driver gives you more control. That is where James at Diamond Design comes in.

I have the original Roku XDS. The newer units only have an hdmi out. I have a component switch, and knew I wanted the ip driver so I bought the original XDS.

All you need to do with the roku is connect it to the internet, power, and to a video source. Follow the onscreen commands to set it up and add whatever “channels” you want. During the setup it will tell you the ip address which you will want to make note of for the driver. You can’t set the roku to static ip, so I reserved the ip based on it’s mac address with my router so it will stay on that ip.

The Roku has hundreds of “channels”. I won’t bore you by listing all of them, but you can check them out at http://www.roku.com/roku-channel-store To name just a few of the main ones: netflix, amazon, and huluplus.

With the ip driver created by James he has programmed the number buttons on the Control4 remote to auto select 9 channels and the 0 to select the main roku menu. Here is a list of the channels he has assigned to the number buttons.

Number 0: Channel Store
Number 1: Netflix
Number 2: Flixster
Number 3: Amazon
Number 4: huluPlus
Number 5: Pandora
Number 6: UFC
Number 7: Roku Newscaster
Number 8: CNET TV
Nubmer 9: Facebook Photos

Within Composer you can program the color buttons to select some other channels as seen in the image below.

What is really nice with the ip driver, is say netflix is the main channel you are going to watch on the roku, you can program via composer to go to that channel automatically when the roku is selected as a video source for that room. Here is an image showing the program event.