chaalli irette amelindah
Martta Borromeo
If so my douchie friend from across the pond, you are a shill and you drive to my mothers house every 2 days a reset her unit so she can watch movies. I bought it for her because it was supposed to be simple and I relied on the WD name.
However, yesterday afternoon while I was at work my wife called and told me that the Instant Queue was no longer available. I told her to use the Wii instead and it worked fine. I performed the reset procedure I found here and got it working again.
im having this issue as well now. i wanted to know if everyone here has blu-ray added to their netflix accounts? i just added blu-ray and now im having this issue. looking forward to the firmware update. i have no other complaints except the long startup times when the wdtv starts up. its much longer than the normal wdtv live.
another thing for those of you who are havng probelms reaching the deactivate option within wdtv. make sure you start pushing the arrow sequence once the netflix window opens up and starts to load up the queue. u should see the circular progress indicator when you push the buttons. if it reaches the queue error screen you were too slow.
I recently purchased an Xbox and I must say, considering that have yet to acquired a sports game, that I am very impressed. I got the Xbox 360 pro (with the 60gb hard drive) and this allowed me to take full advantage of the recent updates for the New Xbox Experience (NXE).
There is a metric ton of videos, demos, pictures, community games, themes and online goodness that really extend the entertainment experience of the Xbox. The interface is really intuitive and looks great in 1080p.
Netflix Instant Watch is a really significant addition and adds a really solid value, if you are in fact a Netflix subscriber. The only problem with Netflix Instant Watch is that there is a really limited movie list and it can take quite a while to find a decent movie for your Instant Queue. The HD movies streamed consistently without interruption and the picture quality was pristine.
The other problem is that you cannot add movies to Instant Queue directly from the Xbox, you have to go online via a PC, but the instant queue will update almost immediately. There was an announcement of a Netflix app for Windows Mobile so this should relieve that bottleneck (or maybe I could create a Media Center app).
The only real unresolved disappointment was the poor performance of Windows Media Center. While it only took a few minutes to connect to my home PC, once I got it up and running the controls were really slow (I mean in the order of 10-20 seconds per click). My network is running fine, it handles high def streaming with ease. So right now am I assuming there is some contention between the various apps that can share data from my Vista PC (Zune, Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center).
Thanks to the folks at Microsoft and Netflix, I've gotten the new Xbox 360 console upgrade and have started watching Netflix movies on my Xbox this morning. A couple gaming sites have been doing some reviews as well and have raised a bunch of questions, some of which I have already asked Microsoft and Netflix and will update this post if I get answers.
The new Xbox 360 console update, which will be release to the public on November 19th, includes the highly anticipated ability to stream Netflix content to the Xbox 360 console as long as you are a Microsoft Live Gold customer and a Netflix customer.
After downloading the new console update and then downloading a small Netflix update, you active the streaming functionality by entering a code from your Xbox 360 into your Netflix account via the computer. From there, you can add Netflix videos into your watch now queue and they instantly show up on your Xbox 360. Navigating through your movies is done by going to the Netlfix box in the "Video Marketplace" channel which takes you to an app that allows you to very cleanly and very quickly flip through the movies in your queue. The movies are represented by cover artwork of each movie and even when you have a hundred or so titles in the queue, the app is super fast. I would compare the experience to being almost identical to flipping through albums in iTunes using Cover Flow. The only major downside here is that movies still have be added via the computer first, before they can be played back on the Xbox 360.
Once you select a movie, you get a screen with details about the video and the ability to rate the content as well as the ability to start, resume or remove the video. When you select play, the app checks your connection speed and buffers the video. For me, the videos buffered very fast and I never waited more than about ten seconds for any video to start. That may not be the startup time for the average consumer though as I am on a 20MB FiOS connection. While most movies are in SD, Netflix has to date made about 300 videos available in HD, many of which are TV series and not actual movies. Watching the SD movies on a 50" plasma screen looked amazing and HD is really incredible. The quality of the stream is all based on your connection speed and I am waiting on Netflix to hopefully give me details on the encoding bitrates being used. But the bottom line, the video quality is really, really good and in my eyes, is DVD quality with no frame rate issues.
Netflix and Microsoft have clearly thought about the experience, the ease of use and the quality of the videos being delivered and overall, I expect users will be very happy. That being said, this hands on review leaves me with three main questions that will dictate how successful the offering will be.
For starters, what is the business relationship and model behind the new service? With three parties involved, Microsoft, Netflix and content owners, whom is paying whom to make all this happen and how will money be made? I know this is a new service to start and hence, a clear business model has not yet been established. But over time, one will have to emerge.
Second, does the availability of getting movies on the Xbox 360 now mean that more content owners and in particular, major movie studios, will start giving Netflix the rights to encode and deliver more first-run movies? Hopefully so, but they still control the content and have a big say in the success that the Netflix service will have.
From time to time, I have confessed my love for the Vudu set-top box that instantly streams up to 720p quality HD movies (or 1080p quality non-instant) over the Internet to your TV. The Vudu player is not subscription-based, so in addition to ponying up for the hardware, you have to pay an average of 3-5 each time you want to rent SD or HD quality movies. After a while of spending over 50 a month with the Vudu box, I decided check out the instant streaming landscape and take a look at the popular subscription-based Roku player. While the Roku player is often called the Netflix player, that is starting to change as it supports more services, most recently with the addition of Amazon Video on Demand.
Notice: During my review of the Roku player I was using an 80Mbps down Internet connection. Obviously this plays a huge role in the performance of a bandwidth-dependent streaming device. Your mileage may vary.
Ergonomically-speaking the Roku remote gets the job done and is the perfect size for natural placement of your thumb in the middle of the control. While I slightly miss the scroll wheel of the Vudu player's remote, the large Roku remote buttons provide ample tactile feedback with a soft yet noticable clicking feel. Only 9 buttons inhabit the Roku remote and all are self-explanatory.
The next step is linking your Netflix account to the Roku player. I was supplied with a confirmation code to link to my Netflix account. That required logging into Netflix on my computer, but was all of a 15 second affair. A similar procedure is also required for linking the Roku player to Amazon for Video on Demand support. Regardless of these requirements, setup took just a few minutes.
After doing a bit of research, Roku's decision to not allow Netflix browsing on the player was almost intentional. They wanted to keep everything about the Roku simple, and leave the complex bits to the Netflix website, which it's very capable of handling already.
Roku's implementation of Amazon Video on Demand is a bit different. You have some limited browsing ability but not searching. Filtering options include sorting by new releases, genre, popularity and alphabetically, but if you're looking to find something that isn't really popular you will have to do lots of annoying side-scrolling.
Fast-forwarding and rewinding through both Amazon and Netflix movies and TV shows can be burdensome due to the streaming nature of the Roku player. Whereas the Vudu player would buffer the entire movie on its hard drive, making rewinding and fast-forwarding quick and seamless, the same cannot be said about the Roku player. To get around this issue, Roku engineers implemented a visual timeline of sorts. After selecting the frame you want to jump to, there is a 5-10 second loading delay, obviously dependent upon your connection. It's an innovative solution, I'll give them that.
As you would expect with a digital video player, the Nexperia media processor has support for hardware H.264 video decoding as well as WM9 among others. You can blame Netflix's sub-par streaming quality to the Windows Media 9 codec they're using, presumably to take advantage of its DRM features [sic].
On top of that set-top box platform, it appears that Roku expanded to a daughtercard via a USB header to introduce 802.11b/g Wi-Fi support with the Atheros chip. Interestingly enough, there are connections for external antennas. If you are getting bad wireless range with your Roku, you could try hooking up two antennas to those (you'd likely need two U.FL-RSMA pigtail cables).
I give the Roku video player 8.5 out of 10 Stammys. It has its fair share of drawbacks but damned if it isn't cheap! The Roku hardware itself supports 1080i streaming, so hopefully a future software update will bring this to fruition.
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