Fixing a Roku Setup Problem

I recently installed a Roku HD-XR streaming media player and had a minor problem with the network setup.  Since I was able to figure out a solution to problem, I want to share it here to save anyone else some time if they run into the same thing.

If you’re not familiar with the Roku, it’s a streaming media device that allows you to stream a number of different Internet channels to your television.  You can use it to view or listen to content from Netflix, Amazon Video, Pandora, TWIT, MLB.Tv and a whole lot more.  The list of available channels is growing all of the time.

Connecting the device to your television is simple enough, simply connect audio and video cables from the Roku to the appropriate connections on your TV.  The type of cables you use will vary based on the type of television you have so you will have to consult your manual.  It should be fairly straight forward.

The Internet connection may be a bit more differcult for most people.  You have a choice of connecting the box using either a wired connection or a wireless connection.  If your television is setup anywhere close to your Internet connection or if you don’t have a problem running cable throughout your house, the wired connection is the way to go.  In most cases this will be faster and more reliable.  Roku supplies information on setting up your Internet connection and if that isn’t good enough, there are plenty of other sites that will help you with it, so I’m not going to repeat that information here.  What I will do is tell you about the problem I ran into and the solution that I found.

I setup my system using a wired connection and attempted to run the setup program on the Roku box.  The software first asked for the connection type.  I selected “wired”.  It then displayed another screen showing the status of the box as it attempted to connect to the network.  It was able to get past the first step, “detecting Ethernet cable”, but would hang on the second step, “connecting to your local network”.

The first thing I did was unplug the box and try the setup a second time on the assumption that the first time was an abboration.  No luck.

Next, I connected to the network router that I use on my home network and checked the DHCP Client List.  I compared the MAC Address found on the back of the Roku with each of the entries in the list and found that the Roku was being assigned an IP address.

The next step I took was to open a command window on Windows 7 and ping the Roku box using the IP Address that it was assigned in the DHCP Client List.  That worked too, the Roku was responding to the ping.

I tried a whole bunch of other things at this point, such as shutting down the firewall, placing the Roku in the routers DMZ zone and even restarting the router.  Nothing worked.

Getting desperate, I decided to try something else.

When you try to access a website, your computer or web device first attempts to locate the IP address of the site by querying a DNS server.  For example, if you wanted to access http://www.google.com your ,computer would send the string “www.google.com” to the DNS server and the server would return an IP address such as 100.23.43.102.  Your computer would now commuicate with the website using the IP address.  This is equivalent to looking up someones name in the phone book and using their phone number to get in touch with them.

My routers DNS entry was setup to get the DNS address automatically from my Internet Service Provider.  In my case this is Comcast.

What if the Roku box was trying to communicate with some site such as Rokusetup.com and the DNS server wasn’t returning the approriate IP address?

I did a Google search and found I could use the OpenDNS server instead of the one from Comcast.  I unchecked the entry “Get the DNS address automatically from my Internet Service Provider” on my router.  Entered in the DNS address 208.67.222.222, saved the settings on my router and retried the Roku setup.  Like magic, everything worked.  The Roku went through all it’s setup steps successfully and displayed it’s home screen.

After the initial setup I was able to change the router back to using the Comcast DNS and everything still worked normally.

The question is “Why did this work?.”

Is Comcast intentionally doing this to make setting up a Roku box difficult?

I could see them wanting to discourge video streaming on their network because it uses a lot of bandwidth and also competes against their cable service, but doing this would be pretty low of them.  Maybe this was just a freak thing and will never happen to anyone else.

Anyway, this worked for me.  I hope if you’re running into a similar problem, that it works for you too.  If it does, please send a comment because I’d love to know about it.

By the way the Roku box is great.  Picture quality, while not up to HD level is good enough and being able to stream content my TV is a blast.

Posted by Al on 09/06/10 at 12:23 PM in Cool Stuff