Well, I'm somewhat biased towards the stuff produced by http://www.slimdevices.com/ , but mostly because I was one of the original developers (I think my name is still in the code and a hidden display easter egg somewhere).
The basic premise is that you have the device connected via Ethernet or wireless, and connected to your home stereo system (or speakers, or what-have-you). Your music is stored on a server elsewhere, along with your playlists, lists of streaming audio sites, etc. You serve your music from that computer, and one or multiple devices can use the server simultaneously.
If I remember correctly, the Roku device is basically a rebuild of the Slimdevices hardware. It even uses (when it launched, it relied upon) the Slimdevices server software as the backend. So, for all intents and purposes, they're the same thing.
However, the Slimdevices people are local (they're somewhere up the peninsula a bit...I visited their production facility a while back) (though I think one of the big companies...Logitech? just bought them a month or so ago), and quite friendly. And there's an active developer and user community w/mailing lists for devs, users, etc.
The Slimdevices products are remote-controlled, as well.
All you need to set them up is a network connection (wired or wireless), and some sort of connection to an audio output device (stereo w/speakers, stand-alone amplified speakers, etc.). The important bit is the amplification, since it outputs line-level audio.
As an added bonus, they've been around since around 1999.
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The basic premise is that you have the device connected via Ethernet or wireless, and connected to your home stereo system (or speakers, or what-have-you). Your music is stored on a server elsewhere, along with your playlists, lists of streaming audio sites, etc. You serve your music from that computer, and one or multiple devices can use the server simultaneously.
If I remember correctly, the Roku device is basically a rebuild of the Slimdevices hardware. It even uses (when it launched, it relied upon) the Slimdevices server software as the backend. So, for all intents and purposes, they're the same thing.
However, the Slimdevices people are local (they're somewhere up the peninsula a bit...I visited their production facility a while back) (though I think one of the big companies...Logitech? just bought them a month or so ago), and quite friendly. And there's an active developer and user community w/mailing lists for devs, users, etc.
The Slimdevices products are remote-controlled, as well.
All you need to set them up is a network connection (wired or wireless), and some sort of connection to an audio output device (stereo w/speakers, stand-alone amplified speakers, etc.). The important bit is the amplification, since it outputs line-level audio.
As an added bonus, they've been around since around 1999.