[mythtv-users] Netflix's new Roku product.

jedi jedi at mishnet.org
Wed May 21 14:47:32 UTC 2008


On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 06:03:45PM -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 4:37 PM, Scott D. Davilla <davilla at 4pi.com> wrote:
[deletia]
> > It only
> > has 64MB of ram with no other temp storage so pure streaming. Their
> > software will detect your bandwidth and you need better than 2Mb for
> > 480p. Only 480p is supported right now. HD content is promised
> > (there's that word again) for when Netflix moves to HD content and
> > Roku provides the firmware update.
> 
> I will only compare my AMD64 machine running Myth vs Watch Instantly
> using our PCR-150/250 back end. No comparison in picture quality -
> Watch Instantly's quality crushes ivtv/Myth recordings off of analog

      It's pretty easy to aggressively compress a good signal. Any sort
of dirty signal will quickly degrade. This same sort of comparison can
be done with ripped DVD content. You will get similar results to what you
are seeing with the Roku from ripping DVDs and compressing them 4:1 with
either xvid or h264.

       There's a lot to be said for transocoding from a pristine source.

> cable. It's a very different beast as it takes 20-30 seconds to jump
> around where Myth can do it almost instantly, but for watching
> streaming media front to back as in movies without commercials it's
> far, far better. We've gone so far here as to stop recording movies
> almost completely with Myth and just take what we can get from Watch
> Instantly. Additionally since the move to 0.21 Myth stutters a lot
> whereas the same hardware works flawlessly with Watch Instantly.


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