[mythtv-users] OT: I'm abandoning Netflix (WD Live Hub too.)

[jedi]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 04:04:17PM -0400, Eric Sharkey wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 3:21 PM, Kris B. <krisbee at krisbee.com> wrote:
> > Well I have heard that the WD Live does have issues with netflix, but most
> > people seem to be happy with the Roku and its' HD.  I only have SD here, so
> > I can't complain - it looks great through my 3mb connection.
> 

   Video streamers are convenience devices. In achieving this, they need
to trade off a bit of quality. It's kind of silly to try and pretend 
otherwise. A lot of stuff doesn't suffer so much for the lack of quality
and the convenience aspect can be pretty cool.

> I tried Netflix streaming of some movie previews from my BluRay
> player.  (I'm not a Netflix customer and only tried the freely
> available content.)  I picked some previews for which I also had the
> exact same preview on a BluRay disc, so I could compare them using the
> exact same player hardware.  The difference was night and day.  The
> content from the physical disc was much clearer than the streamed
> preview.
> 
> I've seen Netflix running on small crt sets in SD and the picture
> quality there looks as good as SD cable tv on the same set, but if you
> have a large HD set, you will notice the difference between streaming
> and having a real blu ray disc.  It's watchable, but I'd say we still
> have a ways to go before it really reaches its full potential.
> 
> Personally, I'd love to see a middle ground approach, where the video
> could download in less than real time, but faster than mailing a disc,
> perhaps using multi-cast or some sort of peer-to-pear approach, but
> I'm not holding my breath.

   I don't see that going over well just because of the "bulk" of material
involved. It's hard enough getting ISPs that are also content providers to
cooperate with the file/stream sizes that we have already. I don't think that
excalating to 20G or 40G for a movie will be recieved well by Comcast and 
TWC and such.

   I would be curious to see how Vodu does in this regard. They're supposed
to have HD stuff. Although some of their stuff is expensive enough that you
might as well just buy the BluRay (and no rental option).