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Magnhild Mongolo
The first movie I tried to play after updating to 1.08.17 in Netflix was Open Season 3. The movie has some crazy ghosting/pixelation going on. You only have to play the first minute or two and please let me know if you get the same. Other movies I have tried so far play fine. If anyone could report back and let me know how it plays for you on the SMP I would be most appreciative.
EDIT: Just tested this movie in Netflix on a Boxee Box and it plays fine.
EDIT2: My box is wired and I have a 15 megabit connection to the internet
EDIT3: Other movies effected are The Secret of Kells and Open Season 2
Well I found a fix BUT not the kind of fix I wanted. I logged into netflix.com and went to my account /manage video quality and changed it from BEST QUALITY to BETTER QUALITY and the issue is gone. Any thoughts???
After 2 calls to netflix my issue still persists. They are looking into the issue and told me I should receive and email in 24-48 hours. Here is a bandwidth chart from the same movie streamed from Netflix on a Boxee Box using the same ethernet cable. As you can see there is quite a difference in the average transmission rate.
It appears that the Boxee Box is limited to a 720p stream from Netflix while the Live SMP can pull a full 1080p stream. This is why Boxee can stream these movies no problem while Live SMP has issues. There is an issue somewhere with the 1080p encodes or the way the Live SMP handles the stream.
Plugged mine in on Friday despite initial concerns from the Boxee Forum that Ivan Y noted above. My experience has been great. I did not have any set up trouble and the Samba shares with my XP, Vista, USB & Buffalo networked drives just plain worked right the first time.
The QWERTY remote, while a great addition, needs at least have glow-in-the-dark letters if not backlit keys. Kind of a drag to use in a darkened room, but still better and more functional than most remotes.
Bottom line: Boxee Box is a ton of fun to use, especially if you have patience, enjoy tweaking and add other app repositories. Netflix and Hulu Plus will be here soon and then it will gain more mass acceptance. Remember, it is SO much more than an internet TV device. It is a full-on AV powerhouse with a relatively low learning curve. Considering everything it does, $199 is a bargain.
With the planned fixes my only complaint now about the Boxee Box is the remote, its hard to see the keyboard in low light and the biggest issue I have it I use my Boxee Box in my Bedroom and watch things like Revision 3 Shows after my wife goes to sleep. The D Pad and buttons on the front of the remote make a loud CLICK sound when pressed which has my wife not liking me using the Boxee Box when shes trying to sleep. :)
But launching a half baked box was a mistake. A lot has changed in the media streaming space since they announced it and launching without Netflix and other sites really hurts. You never get a second chance to make a first impression and Boxee is not making a great impression here.
Examples of OTT video include online services like Netflix On Demand, Hulu, MLB.TV. The OTT video label can be extended to any video content, so I suppose YouTube might count, but generally OTT refers to episode or feature length content, positioned as an alternative to conventional television.
There is an inherent conflict of interest here, and it is clear that industry wide, OTT video influences the choices by providers to limit speed and cap consumption. This is particularly obvious for cable providers, who have the most video customer and revenue to lose.
The debate about network neutrality is quite clear in the dialog about OTT: why would a provider who sells you TV want to give you enough bandwidth to replace that TV service? This is particularly interesting in light of recent decisions by the Supreme Court, which found that the FCC does not have the authority to censure a major cable provider for tampering with their customers Internet traffic, in this case Bittorrent, which is presumed to be mostly television and movie downloads.
The biggest issue in OTT video seems to be delivery to the sofa rather than the desktop. It is getting much easier today, with multiple solutions to address this problem. A few of of the key enablers:
Netflix on demand can now be viewed on a growing list of devices, some of which you might already have connected to your own TV. Samsung Bluray players, the XBox 360, Playstation II, and even the Wii will stream Netflix today.
Dedicated hardware solutions like the Apple TV, Roku, Popcorn Hour, and the new Boxee from Dlink all promise more powerful and easier access to OTT content. Most TVs today also offer a VGA connection for easy hook-up to a laptop, so buying a couple cables (video and audio) to connect your laptop to your television can be a low cost way to get started.
Finally, TVs are becoming far more connected themselves, which in the long run may eliminate the need for an external box. Samsung, LG and Sony all have connected television products today in various states of usefulness.
Today there are more and more OTT video offerings, and more mainstream content. For movies and many television shows, there is good availability from Netflix and iTunes (Apple TV). Sports are becoming available, for example the subscription offerings from MLB.tv.
As a result of all of this confusion, I think that most users first experience with OTT will probably be Netflix, but once viewers get a taste for content on demand without a $75 cable bill, I suspect that more and more of us will jump through the hoops required for a relatively complete OTT video viewing experience.
There is also lots of free content, and solutions like the Roku and Boxee make it easier to find it. You can also play most content that you download to your PC, plus videos you make yourself, because these hardware boxes will play back a multitude of video file types.
For a while now we've had a computer hooked up to our large screen television and stereo system. A couple months back I upgraded the motherboard, CPU, and memory so that we could start using the Windows 7 release candidate and Windows Media Center on it. The new hardware also meant we could play back high definition video.
Aside from playing back photos in Picasa and various video files, we also stream music using Pandora or play from our library using WinAMP or Media Center. For streaming video, we'd been using Hulu a bit (which is Flash based) and Netflix (which is Silverlight).
Yesterday we tried out Hulu Desktop and attempted to watch the Glee pilot. Hulu desktop crashed on the first run after install (could be a Windows 7 issue) but then ran fine upon restarting it. But the video quality was low and quite jerky. It used a lot of CPU too. This made me wonder if it was really taking advange of the video capabilities of our system.
It was bad enough that we switched to watching the show using the browser-based streaming. Hitting the full-screen high quality version acually played better there and used less CPU. So the desktop application clearly needs some performance tuning.
I compare all of this with Netflix streaming which uses Silverlight and the difference is clear, even in 720p resolution we tend to keep our display set to. Microsoft has done a good job of tuning Silverlight for video. If I recally, they have very good H264 support built-in.
I find your blog entry interesting, because IMO the Silverlight netflix browser plugin is unusable in full-screen mode due to screen tearing issues under both Vista and Mac OS X. This was never a problem with their previous version that I believe was flash-based.
Flash also has built in H.264, so that shouldn't matter too much. I'm curious if this is a Win7 thing, or just a Microsoft thing, because it's the exact opposite situation on OS X. Flash video runs great, Silverlight video makes me want to shoot myself in the face.
Hulu desktop isn't exactly what it should have been, I believe they're love hate relationship stems from Hulu wanting to make it an open platform but being tied down by NBC and other major broadcasters who want more draconian type restrictions.
I tried Hulu Desktop too on my Mac Mini connected to my TV. I did not care for the black UI and small thumb nails, I much prefer using a hand held mouse (gyration) and enjoying Hulu through a browser.
I had numerous issues with the Hulu Desktop. While Flash may look good because of the H.264 support, it is a horrible technology. Flash cannot make use of multiple cores (I hear that is changing in future releases... I hope it's true), and it's CPU utilization is through the roof. The instant I start watching Hulu shows (through the browser or the new Hulu Desktop), the temp goes through the roof and my fans start running like crazy. When watching Netflix movies, CPU utilization and heat are not an issue. I wish people would give Silverlight more of a chance and not hate it simply because it's a Microsoft Product, in 2 releases they are where Flash was in 5 or 6.
Another note, I am currently using XBMC on my computers, and it was nice when Hulu was working with it. It drives me nuts that they want you to use an entirely different program (that doesn't work very well) just to watch their content. I had no problem with them playing their ads when watching in XBMC, that's fine, but since they removed support for XBMC, I just use the NBC-Universal plugin to watch TV programs and they don't have commercials.
I found that removing the check from the box labeled "Enable hardware acceleration" under SETTINGS in Flash inproved performance quite a bit, both in the Hulu desktop app and through the Hulu website.
And now this, Roku skillfully lines up Hulu Plus as a content partner. Actually, from my perspective, this is a bigger win for Hulu. As of now, I had held off of getting a Hulu Plus subscription but now, seeing that it will be on my Roku, I may just sign up!
GoogleTV and Boxee promise a more active experience, with more features, web surfing etc., but also with a more complicated remote/UI. AppleTV and Roku look to be more of lean-back experience of just watching content via a simple remote/UI.
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