Dropbox Comes To Roku

If Dropbox is your cloud storage service of choice and you happen to have a Roku hooked up to your TV then you’re going to like what the two have to offer. Dropbox has arrived on Roku and it lets you view photos and movies stored in your cloud storage directly on the TV by using Roku’s streaming media player. It’s quite capable as it lets you search for items by name, view thumbnails and slideshows and browse through folders.

There does appear to be a limit on what you can view using Dropbox on Roku. Movie files uploaded in .mkv, .avi and .mp4 formats don’t appear to run beyond 14 to 15 minutes even if the movie is two hours long while the same file plays in its entirety using Dropbox’s mobile app or on the web.

This goes to show that Dropbox may not double as an alternative to the likes of Plex on Roku right now, which means that you don’t have any reason to upload full-length movies to Dropbox for the express purpose of watching them on Roku.

Shorter videos that were uploaded directly through the camera roll of a smartphone appear to work fine on the Roku app so clearly this is meant for small clips and not movies.

Nevertheless it can still serve a novel purpose by allowing you to easy view photos that you have stored in Dropbox up on the big screen.

Roku has reportedly built this integration using Dropbox’s public APIs so it’s not exactly an official Dropbox app for streaming media players because Dropbox hasn’t released one yet for any such device.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: dropbox, roku