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05/31/2010: "Roku Hack"

OK, this technically isn't a hack, but it's a useful undocumented control within the Roku video player.

Quite often, usually around 10:00 pm Eastern Time, the Netflix streams to our Roku box start having problems. This usually takes the form of the player doing a rebuffering, and will often result in the video quality being automatically downshifted from "4 dots" down to "3 dots" or even "2 dots", in Roku-speak.

I think anything less than "4 dots" is pretty much unwatchable unless it's animation.

But there's a useful workaround. On the Roku remote, hit the following button sequence: Home (5 times), Rewind (3 times), Fast-Forward (2 times). The timing between button presses should be about 1/2 second. It may take a couple tries before you get the timing right. The REW and FF buttons are the lower set of buttons, not the circular arrow buttons.

If you do this correctly a data rate screen should pop up. Select a fixed data rate rather than the default "Automatic". You may find that buffering takes longer than usual, but the player will only stream video at the data rate you select.