Netflix Player

I hope, by now, that you've all at least heard about this nifty little device put out by Roku (the product page can be found here)... streaming video to your TV from Netflix without any additional monthly outlay, just $99 for the box itself. Not surprisingly, there was a rush on the little beasties the day they came out, so I finally received mine yesterday. After playing with it a bit, I can give at least a qualified recommendation to you... if you've got a decent Internet connection, and a Netflix account, you probably want one of these toys. I don't know that everything's "mature" enough for you to go out and get a Netflix account just to use this player, but it's a close call.

Now, having said that, here's the little (and maybe not-so-little) gripes I've come up with about the player so far. The box itself is beautiful to my engineer's eyes, because it doesn't have a bunch of extraneous bits to it, just the jacks necessary for power and various outputs... but I could see how the squat little black box just wouldn't strike some as aesthetically pleasing. One glaring omission, to my mind, is the lack of any power on/off function... it's always on, unless you unplug it or have it on a switched power strip or some such. The box doesn't seem to dissipate a lot of power (it's warm, but not hot to the touch), but, in days of rising energy prices, every little bit counts, as it were. Maybe in the next version of the box?

Apart from that, the rest of my gripes are with the service itself... yes, as has been widely reported, the movie and show selection are limited, mainly due to licensing constraints, but that's something that will work itself out over time. While the quality of the video I've gotten is generally quite good, it looks like whatever compression or recording method they're using doesn't cope well with "jerky" animation, as is often seen in independent/amateur animation (I used "Cartoon Noir" for comparison, since I received the disc from Netflix the day before), but thankfully doesn't seem to impact more polished fare (at least, "Dilbert" and "Heavy Metal" seemed to play nicely). Most annoying of all, since I hoped to use this service to sample some of the TV shows that people constantly talk about, some of the seasons they have online are incomplete, likely for licensing reasons... in particular, I queued up "Dead Like Me", and the first episode isn't available, which I would think would be a no-brainer.

Gripes aside, it's really a very nice system... choose what you want to have queued up through the Netflix website, then watch it on your TV whenever you want. Movies just play, while episodic fare is subdivided into its various episodes first. The box (or the server?) remembers where you left off in any given title, so you can leave it for as long as you like, then come back and continue or start from scratch. Fast Forward, Reverse, and Search are all handled through thumbnail images taken about every 10 seconds for the length of the film, which you can use to find specific parts of a show you've seen before (there is no "chapter select" like on a DVD, maybe in future revisions). You can even rate what you watched through the box when you're done, and remove items from your queue that way too, if you're so inclined.

So, again, if you're on Netflix already, and have a decent Internet connection, you probably want one of these toys... and if you haven't tried Netflix yet, you really should, especially if you don't have a high-speed Internet connection.