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netflix
Netflix Player by Roku - Internet TV done right
I just want to say that if the future of Internet TV is anything like the Netflix Player by Roku, we are going to be just fine. I was one of the lucky ones who ordered the Netflix Player by Roku right away and have had the opportunity to play with it for the last few weeks. I absolutely love my Netflix player box – unequivocally 
If you haven't heard anything about the Netflix player, it is a little hardware device (box) that allows instant streaming direct to your TV over the Internet.
The box, made by Roku is a $99.99 one-time purchase which connects to your existing broadband (wired or wireless) connection and allows you to instantly watch content from Netflix web site. This box plugs into the same infrastructure over at Netflix that lets you watch streaming movies and TV shows on your PC. The nice thing is that this is part of your standard Netflix membership and there are no extra monthly charges. The same flat fee DVDs you receive are not impacted by your instant streaming. The Netflix/Roku box connects to any TV using HDMI, component, s-video, composite or good old RCA and you get full DVD video quality if your bandwidth permits.
I've had the pleasure of using this box and I have been completely and totally impressed with the design of box, the software and the actual quality of the content being streamed. Setup/installation was incredibly easy and I was able to get the box to connect to my WPA secured wireless network in seconds. The first thing the box did was download an update from Netflix and automatically update itself – nice feature. Once the box was up and running, I was able to link the Netflix box to my online Netflix account and anything in my 'Watch Instantly' queue was available for viewing on my TV. So I start watching Blade Runner and it's almost an hour before I realize that I'm not watching a DVD on my TV and it's actually being streamed live over the Internet. The picture and sound quality is unbelievable and rewind/fast-forward is decent with the little time-series snapshot of scenes to help gauge how far or back you're going. The box supports HD but Netflix doesn't support that at the moment but I fully anticipate Netflix enabling that feature as they build up a bigger library of on-demand material that is of HD quality.
I only have two complaints with the box and I think one of them will probably be handled in a software update. The first one is the lack of a power button – Once the box is plugged in and turned on, you cannot turn it off. There is no OFF button on the box or the remote and that's just annoying. There is a little light that's always on and it's not blindingly bright or anything but I would like to be able to turn it off. The second missing feature is the lack of Closed Captioning – I think this is a big miss and a must for me as I'm often watching movies late at night while my wife and daughter are sleeping. I can live without the power button but I really want Closed Captioning enabled in the next software release – please!!
In closing, I cannot stress how good the quality of the picture is and I haven't had a single issue with video glitches or slowness or pauses while it's buffering or anything like that. I've seen several long movies along with the most of the first season of Heroes and I haven't had a single issue. I do have a nice broadband connection with 15 Mbps down and 1 Mbp up but that's fairly standard these days and Netflix recommends about 3-4 Mbps for the service. The other nice thing about this box and the use of the Flash memory is that it doesn't have a fan and so its whisper quiet. I am also excited about the future as this box runs on a embedded Linux OS and Roku has released a lot (if not all) of the code under GPL. I can't wait for all the mods/patched kernels and apps that are going to surface in the coming weeks and months.
Tags: internettv, iptv, Linux, netflix, roku, streaming, videoRelated posts
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Daily del.icio.us for June 24th through June 27th
- vmcNetFlix - Official Site - vmcNetflix is an add-in for Microsoft Windows Vista Media Center which allows you to manage your NetFlix subscription, stream NetFlix "WatchNow" movies directly to the Media Center player, or download the movies for playback later from a "WatchLater" ga
- The LinkedIn Blog: LinkedIn is 99% Java but 100% Mac - The post is titled LinkedIn Is Written in 99% Java, so to complete the picture I responded to the community with a message about how LinkedIn is 99% Java but 100% Mac.
- Mercedes to Cut Petroleum Out of Lineup by 2015 | EcoGeek - In less than 7 years, Mercedes-Benz plans to ditch petroleum-powered vehicles from its lineup. Focusing on electric, fuel cell, and biofuels, the company is revving up research in alternative fuel sources and efficiency.
- Jericho HTML Parser - Jericho HTML Parser is a powerful java library allowing analysis and manipulation of parts of an HTML document, including server-side tags, while reproducing verbatim any unrecognised or invalid HTML. It also provides high-level HTML form manipulation fun
- Software Sensation Inc. - jWebApp Web Application Framework, Install&Update, MemSL - Memory Structures Library - jPersist is an extremely powerful object-relational persistence API that is based on the Active-Record and Data-Mapper patterns. jPersist wraps JDBC functionality and can work with any relational database, and any type of connection resource
- Java Entrepreneur: We screwed up on open source, says Sun Chief Open Source Officer - Open source developers have been much more skeptical of Sun; a lot of open source developers don't remember the fact that Sun was pretty much the first open source start-up in 1982. All they can remember is what happened in 2001/2002 when, to be quite fra
- InfoQ: Liferay Portal 5.0 Released, Sun Joins the Team - Last month at JavaOne, Liferay, Inc. announced the release of the 5.0 version of their Liferay Portal product. The Liferay press release highlights a handful of the key tools and uses in the portal product:
- How Hard Could it Be?: Glory Days - Bill Gates - working for Microsoft - Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company's software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out.
- Unit testing with JUnit and EasyMock - Michael Minella - I hope this gives you a more in depth view into JUnit and EasyMock. Unit testing is something that once you get used to it, makes you code better, provides you with a safety net for future refactoring and protects you from being burned by API changes
- Unit Testing With TestNG and JMockit | Javalobby - TestNG is a testing framework for unit test development. JMockit is a framework for mock objects that provides mock object functionality using the java.lang.instrument package of jdk 1.5. Together, these frameworks can provide the tools to create very rob
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Daily del.icio.us for June 1st through June 4th
- Firefox 3 for developers - MDC - If you're a developer trying to get a handle on all the new features in Firefox 3, this is the perfect place to start. This article provides a list of the new articles covering features added to Firefox 3
- InfoQ: Is Google Gears Positioned to Add Features to the Web? - There is no doubt that Rich Internet Applications remain a major battleground for the industry along with and complementary to Ad-based revenue models and cloud-computing. Will Gears take a similar path as Flash and become as much adopted by Web sites and
- Use Flex Builder 3 to create a JavaScript AIR application - I have tried today to create an AIR application. My tool of choice was Flex Builder 3 as I knew you can create AIR applications using it.
- Official Google Blog: At long last, real-time stock quotes are here - We're very excited to tell you that real-time quotes on NASDAQ securities are now available on Google Finance. This is an important (and way overdue) development for everyone who consumes financial information.
- InfoQ: Erlang - software for a concurrent world - How do you program a multicore computer? Easy - do it in Erlang. Erlang is a concurrent functional programming language designed for programming fault-tolerant systems. With share-nothing semantics and pure message passing, Erlang programs scales on multi
- Design Stencils - Yahoo! Design Pattern Library - Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit version 1.0 is available for OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), Adobe Illustrator (PDF and SVG), and Adobe Photoshop (PNG), and covers the following topics:
- DBSight: Instant Scalable Full-text database search platform/engine - Instead of weeks or even months to develop a full-text search for your data, if you know how to use DBSight, you can easily create the full-text search literally in minutes.
- Brain Freeze » Storing JasperReports in a database using iBATIS and Oracle 10g - This article shows how I solved the file system issue by storing JasperReports report definitions in a database. I’ll assume familiarity with the iBATIS “ORM” database framework since I am not showing a full iBATIS setup here.
- JetBrains' Dmitry Jemerov on IntelliJ 8, Flex, and Scala - Dmitry Jemerov is a lead developer on JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA. In this wide-ranging interview with Artima, Jemerov discusses the main focus areas for the upcoming IntelliJ 8 release, as well as his views on IntelliJ's support for Flex and Scala.
- » HOW TO: Use JDBC Batching for 7-8X throughput gains - Using the batched statement capability of your JDBC driver can give you 7-8X throughput gains. Not only is batching significantly faster, it’ll save database CPU cycles and be easier on the network, too
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- Roku's Netflix Player sells out | Tech news blog - CNET News.com - There's more proof that the Netflix Player is a hit. Start-up Roku, the company behind the device that enables Netflix subscribers to watch movies streamed from the Internet to their TVs, has run out of inventory two weeks after launching.
- InfoQ: Exadel’s Flamingo Project for Rapid Flex and Java Development - Exadel’s Flamingo project is a tool for bootstrapping RIA applications built with Java backends. The tool offers support for both Seam and Spring in the middle tier. On the presentation tier, Flamingo supports both Flex and JavaFX
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Daily del.icio.us for May 18th through May 20th
- Why the Roku Netflix Player is the First Shot of the Revolution - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog - In the small, generic plastic box that is the new Netflix Player made by Roku, I think you can see the future of video.
- Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Formula One Racing World - It was June 2007 in sleepy Surrey County, and Coughlan, a statuesque blonde, sauntered through the door of the shop holding a sheaf of 780 pages. Scan them onto two CDs, she told the clerk, a forgettable middle-aged guy in a forgettable office park in the
- Should we discard Interfaces? | Learning by Experience - Is a class that only has interfaces as dependencies easier to test then classes that have implementations as dependencies? Most of us are eager to say yes, but in fact, frameworks like EasyMock enable us to mock (non final) classes.
- Graeme Rocher's Blog: Grails.org now powered by Grails - We've just launched a re-write of the Grails.org site in Grails. Previously the site was powered by Confluence (the Atlassian wiki), now in the spirit of eating ones own dog food it is a fully Grails powered site.
- IntelliJ Tips & Tricks - Listen to Neal Ford, the software architect at ThoughtWorks and a fabulous speaker, giving you some hints on improving productivity through the intensive use of keyboard shortcuts for carrying out various tasks while coding with IntelliJ IDEA.
- WEB4J - Minimalist Java Web Application Framework -> Criticisms of Spring, PHP, and Rails - The Spring Framework is popular. It has also met with a disturbing lack of criticism. The following remarks are based on Spring 2.0.
- US billionaire Buffett backs Obama for president - Yahoo! News - Warren Buffett, the world's richest man, is backing Barak Obama for US president and thinks current US economic policy will push the dollar lower against other global currencies
- Webmonkey: the Web Developers Resource - The original web developer's resource has returned. Webmonkey has been completely redesigned, and we're ready to rock once more. Also, our entire content library is now hosted on a wiki, so every tutorial, reference page and code example is open for editi
- A conversation Clinton was having…: RE: Java haters, gtfo - Well everyone's favorite potty mouthed blogger is back, slinging poo and doing nothing much to help anything. That said, I've met Hani, and he's actually a pretty cool and down to earth guy.
- Firefox 3 RC 1 full review - Mozilla Links - A year and a half after the last major Firefox release, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is here with a very long list of new features and improvements.
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Daily del.icio.us for February 10th through February 14th
- Zimbra's new Desktop: Look ma, no browser! | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs - It's very cool. You should give it a spin. This is the best e-mail "client" ever built…largely because of its successful marriage of the Web with the desktop. In the future, all applications will be like this–or should be.
- Ext Road Map - Our goals for 2008 are to continue improving the 2.x version line by adding new components and enhancing some of the existing areas of functionality in Ext as shown below. Looking ahead to 3.0, there are some big new areas that we'll be getting into. In a
- The Making of MarkMail: Announcing an Informal Partnership with Codehaus - We're happy to announce we've developed an informal partnership with Codehaus to load all their mail archives and receive automatic notification of new Codehaus lists as they get created.
- A Conversation with Matt Mullenweg (Yahoo! Developer Network blog) - A few weeks ago, Matt Mullenweg (creator of WordPress) came by Yahoo to talk to a bunch of Yahoo! bloggers about the current and future state of WordPress. After the meeting, I sat down with him for our Developer Spotlight series on YDN Theater to catch u
- Andres Almiray's Weblog : Weblog - JSON-lib is a java library for transforming beans, maps and XML to JSON and back again to beans and DynaBeans. It is based on the work by Douglas Crockford in http://www.json.org/java.
- The State of BPM: Top-Five Trends | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog - The results show a number of interesting trends indicating that CIOs and business leaders are focused on improving their processes. Existing customers described how they expect to get their ROI from their BPM implementations, and most expect to see ROI ov
- Starbucks ditches T-Mobile for AT&T | Crave : The gadget blog - The new AT&T plan allows all customers 2 free hours per day, with a $3.99 fee for additional 2-hour chunks of time. Monthly subscriptions will cost $19.99 and will enable access to other AT&T hot-spot locations in addition to Starbucks.
- Anthony Park :: 100% Geek Content by Volume » New Vista Media Center Plugin - MyNetflix (beta) - I’ve kept this pretty quiet, but I’ve been working on a new Media Center plugin for a little while now. It is now ready for beta testing, and I’ve decided to run a public beta for this one. MyNetflix features * View your Netflix queue * Browse movie
- Humanized > Our Products > Enso Launcher - Enso Launcher is designed to give you instant access to your applications and windows. With a few easily remembered keystrokes, you can launch an application, switch to a window by name, and control the state of your windows.
- Martin Wolf : Advanced Java 5 Generics - Here's an article about a few of the more subtle aspects of Java 5 Generics. This is hardly the 1st article about this particular subject, but none of them explain it quite the way I would have wanted to see it when I was wrestling with this issue myself.
- Panopticon: The Power of Pre-Attentive Processing - Our visualization software is easy to use and is a great way to explore large datasets, identify outliers and find hidden patterns.
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Amazon Unbox Video - More of the same
Amazon launched their latest offering entitled Unbox Video which is essentially a video (TV shows, movies, etc) download to buy or rent service. Rumor is that Amazon rushed this out on Friday, September 8th to beat some super secret announcement coming from Apple later next week.
The Unbox video service doesn't offer anything new and is in fact more of the same. I can buy a movie but I can't burn it onto a DVD to watch it on my TV. Media center PC's are exceptions if you have a Media Center PC hooked up to your TV or are using something like Media Center Extender to broadcast the output to a TV. The videos that you download from Amazon are DRM'd Windows Media (WMV) files and so you cannot put in on your video iPod. Apple essentially works the same way with their DRM but you since they control the mobile music and video player market; it's less of an issue. I'm guessing you've probably already got the sense that Unbox video is only for Windows and you would be right. No MAC or Linux support at this time.
There are 2 new concepts introduced that set Amazon Unbox video apart from iTunes and other similar services. To my knowledge, Amazon is the only one that will let you rent a movie by downloading it to your computer. You have 30 days to watch it and 24 hrs to complete watching it before the video is automatically deleted. I know Netflix is working on a download-n-rent but I don't believe that's available at this moment. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Another concept that I consider a move in the right direction is the concept of the Media Library. Everything you buy or rent is in your Media Library on Amazon and so you can buy an item on 1 machine and download to watch it on another registered machine. Both machines must have the Unbox video player and be registered on Amazon as your machines. As an experiment, I bought a TV show on my laptop and downloaded it. I then copied the video over to my desktop and dropped it the directory where Amazon would expect its videos to reside. The Unbox player didn't see and I wasn't able to play it directly without downloading it from my Media Library to the desktop. The video player was smart enough to realize that the file was already there and started playing in seconds after it marked the video as downloaded on the desktop. The subtle point here is that if your computer crashes and you lose your purchased content, you will be able to download it from your Amazon Media Library. It would be interesting for Amazon to make this a paid-service and use their S3 service to automatically back-up your purchased content for you.
The video quality of the TV shows that I purchased was good and the sound was fine as well. I guess a true test would be to buy a widescreen movie and see if the Dolby 5.1 surround-sound works as advertised. All in all, the video service is nice but nothing earth shattering and left me wanting more. Another major issue with this offering is the licensing agreement that you agree to as part of the software installation and it requires you to apply all patches from Amazon whether you want them or not and Amazon can delete your movies if you uninstall their video player. Yikes! Doesn't like a lot like that Amazon we know and love, does it? More information at the uninnovate blog and CNet.
Why is it so hard to come up with a video service where I can buy a movie and burn it onto a DVD to watch it on my TV? I hate DRM but I understand the need to protect copyrights but there has to be a way to protect content and allow me as the purchaser fair-use of that purchased piece of content. I guess the key here is purchase - I am paying for something. Don't put limitations on my personal usage of that. Anyone that can produce a service that allows that will eat everyone's lunch. I hope Apple or Netflix or YouTube or dozen of the other YouTube clones/wannabe's out there come up with a way to legally distribute video content but allow the purchaser some flexibility on where they can view that piece of content. It would also be great if they could include some future-proofing on your purchase and so if you bought 2nd season of The Office with some proprietary DRM, you could exchange or upgrade it for any future format that's different without having to repurchase the movie all over again. Ah to dream…..
Tags: amazon, download, drm, dvd, ipod, itunes, netflix, s3, Tech, unbox, videoRelated posts