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Catherine Rubeo
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.
I like to watch what my kids do, particularly as it relates to entertainment, as it gives me a clue about where things are going. And my kids are doing exactly what Jason suggests. They are catching up on prior seasons of Friday Night Lights, The Office, and Weeds.
That would drive me crazy because often one or two or all three kids would purchase the exact same season of shows on their respective computers. I would push them to share their purchased shows and often they would do that, but not always.
So I am happy to report that they've moved on from iTunes and are now watching these older seasons on Netflix Watch Instantly, both via the browser and on Boxee (the photo above is Netflix on Boxee in our family room).
The other interesting development is they are moving away from watching these older seasons on their laptops. They still do that quite a bit, but I've noticed that more and more they are opting to watch on the Mac Minis we've got connected to big screen TVs in our home. When they have friends over, it used to be the set top box was the device they'd watch TV on the most. Now its the Mac Mini.
Last week, some on Wall Street got all crazy about a research report written by a 15 year old intern at Morgan Stanley. I read the research report as it was sent to me by about a half dozen friends who work on Wall Street and indeed it had some interesting insights in it. But not all 15 year olds are alike. Just as it is dangerous to read too much into what my kids do, it is dangerous to read too much into what a 15 year old in London does. But it is absolutely critical to pay attention to what teens all over the world, particularly the developed world, are doing. And one thing they are doing is changing their media consumption habits quickly.
My kids have moved from the set top box to iTunes to Netflix in less than a couple years and are now watching much of their TV streamed over the Internet. I expect they are not alone. It's a trend worth watching.
good point. i was thinking mostly about media consumption when i wrote that. but you are absolutely right. the underdeveloped world might be even more enlightening when it comes to payments and communication.
Do you think that teenagers are a more important indicator than college-age kids at this point? It seems that consumption trends might be spotted with teenagers but that creation still comes from college-age/21-34 year-old.
OK, then make it $50 CPM for simple geotargeting and $100 CPM for subject targeting. I was just trying to point out that Hulu should be able to make a lot more money by making video advertising more accessible to small business and by offering targeting.
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.
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.
To start, I found an (admittedly old) post from someone at Netflix stating that their licensing requirements prohibited them from providing ways to control the player externally (everything needed to be wrapped up in a netflix-branded application, and providing ways to interact with the player externally would allow you to embed the netflix player in places it shouldn't go.) You can find that reply here (although it's four years old, I'd imagine not much has changed.)
I tried snooping around on the 'watch instantly' page myself, and there are objects like netflix.SilverLight and netflix.SilverLight.MoviePlayer (which has a getPlugin() method that returns some details about the plugin, and hookable events, but no methods for control,) but they mostly have to do with exposing the size of the player viewport, among other things necessary to place it on the page. I couldn't really find anything in any of the objects that suggested they interacted with the movie player that would seem to allow me access to it.
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