Posts tagged as:
streaming
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
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- 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
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- 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:
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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
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- 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 Dec 04, 2007 through Dec 06, 2007
- Roller: free and open source Java blog software - Apache Roller 4.0 has been released and is now available for download. This is a major new Roller release which includes easier blog theme customization, a much more simple installation/upgrade process, infrastructure improvements and other small fixes.
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- dev2dev: Using Asynchronous Servlets to Deal with Hung Threads - BEA WebLogic Server 9.2 and later versions expose an Abstract Asynchronous Servlet class, which allows you to decouple receiving a servlet request from sending its response. The class also provides a Future Response Servlet, which lets the server handle s
- Yahoo! Flash(R) Blog » Blog Archive » YUI Got a Little More Flashy Today! - Yahoo! releases version 2.4.0 of the YUI Library and they have been working with the Flash team to help them introduce a new component that leverages the power of Flash Player. The experimental YUI Charts widget brings the Yahoo! Astra Flash Charts
- Yahoo! Developer Network - Flash Developer Center - ASTRA Flash Components - Charts - Charts is a set of visualization components that represent two-dimensional data structures (tables, arrays of values, etc.) in a variety of ways (bars, graphs, pie charts, etc.)
- Yahoo! UI Library: Charts - The YUI Charts Control visualizes tabular data on a web page in several possible formats including vertical columns, horizontal bars, lines, and pies. Features include support for the DataSource Utility, customizable serie, axes, mouse-over datatip
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- NetBeans Magazine - To coincide with the launch of 6.0, this latest issue of NetBeans Magazine features 62 pages of in-depth articles. NetBeans IDE 6.0 features Ruby/JRuby/Ruby on Rails support, enhancements for improved Swing development, a new Visual Game Designer, updated
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Daily del.icio.us for Dec 03, 2007 through Dec 04, 2007
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- Setting up a GWT project in IntelliJ IDEA 7 - IntelliJ IDEA 7 has built in support (in the form of a bundled plugin) for GWT projects. This tutorial will walk you through the steps of creating a GWT project in IDEA 7.
- Marc's Musings: Spreadsheet Component - I'm working on a spreadsheet like component for AgileAgenda that I might end up turning into a general-purpose flex component at some point.
- Tech Per: 10 Tips on JPA Domain Modelling - This post is a collection of tips on what I think is good advice, when domain modelling in Java with JPA as ORM mapping technology.
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