Dropbox app for Roku lets you view your movies and photos on a big screen

By Kris Wouk August 3, 2015

Dropbox for Roku — Image used with permission by copyright holder

There are a ton of cloud storage services on the web, but ask most people to name one and the first service that comes to mind is likely Dropbox. While the serviced was more document-focused at the outset, Dropbox is now used to store everything from photo libraries to full-length movies. With that in mind, it makes sense that there is now finally a Dropbox app for the Roku.

The app quietly made its way on the Roku channel store last week, making the Roku the first streaming box on which the service has appeared. There’s a reason for that too: Dropbox didn’t develop this app. Instead, Roku developed the app itself using Dropbox’s public API.

At first glance, the app seems fairly full-featured. Browsing your photos and movies is easy thanks to the thumbnails displayed, and if you’ve got a lot of media, the built-in search should make it fairly easy to find what you’re looking for.

Dropbox Roku app search — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Slideshows are also supported, so you can show your friends your vacation photos with ease. The app supports most common movie formats including .avi, .mkv, .mov, and .mp4 so chances are fairly good that at least most of your home movies should be supported.

Watching longer movies seems to be more problematic, according to TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez. When trying to play movies approaching two hours in length, the Dropbox app would only show 14 or 15 minutes. This could be a way of keeping you from watching your pirated movie collection on your Roku, or it could simply be an issue with how Roku is using the Dropbox API.

If you’re hoping to use this for something like PowerPoint presentations, you’re out of luck. Most non-media file types simply aren’t shown in the Roku Dropbox app.

Since Dropbox isn’t behind this app’s development, it’s difficult to say when or if similar apps will arrive for smart TVs or other streaming boxes, but Dropbox’s API is available to anyone, so all that is needed is for someone to write the app.

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Kris Wouk is a tech writer, gadget reviewer, blogger, and whatever it's called when someone makes videos for the web. In his…

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