A few days ago our ROKU player (the larger original ROKU player) stopped working correctly. We regularly switch our box between our bedroom and living room. But when we plugged it into our TV via HDMI, we saw the startup screen just fine, however as soon as it finished loading and went to the menu screen, all I saw was this jumble of static and colors (like digital distortion, only not moving at all). I could still click left and right and the box would respond, however the picture would not change. I even managed to blindly find Pandora and start playing music. I tried this on two TVs, using HDMI, composite and component connections all with the same result.
So it doesn't seem like a video card problem as I could see the startup screen just fine. And it doesn't seem like any sort of hardware problem as it seems to function just fine in all other ways other than the display. My mother has a ROKU and so I called her to have her try and walk me through the steps to reset the player to factory settings, but that did not work (I do not know if I just kept hitting the wrong selection or if it was just not allowing me to reset).
I emailed ROKU a couple of days ago and was told by them to try and hold down the reset button on the back for 30 seconds, or if that didn't work, to unplug it for 30 seconds and then plug it back in. Those options didn't work. So I came here to the forums to see if anyone else has this problem, and it doesn't look like it is common. However, I saw that they pushed out a firmware update to Firmware 3.0 b2227 just a few days ago on October 12th. I'm not sure the day that our player went bad, but I believe it was on that day. That sounds like too much of a coincidence to me.
Does anybody else have this problem? Also, I am clearly out of warranty, but I would rather not pay $19.99 to get support from ROKU if it was their automatic firmware update that broke it in the first place.
I'm addicted to many, many shows on Netflix & Hulu right now and am going through withdrawals. Please help!!!
-nate