![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the future is now
Jun. 12th, 2008 01:26 pmMy Netflix Roku box arrived yesterday. Today at lunch I took it out of the box, and within about ten minutes I was watching Letters From Iwo Jima in streaming video over wi-fi. I'm really impressed. The setup was painless. The image and sound quality is far better than what I expected. My impression is that it's not quite up to DVD quality but is considerably better than VHS. I haven't watched a movie all the way through yet (it's a workday!) but watched bits of Letters From Iwo Jima, Shampoo, and Evil Dead, and so far have not seen any video or audio dropouts. I'm using my VPN in to work and not experiencing having any significant latency. (The device is connected to the net over an 802.11g base station, which is on a 6Mbps cable modem connection, which surely must help a lot.)
The down sides appear to be: the Netflix "instant watching" catalogue is still very limited. I have 420 movies in my queue, about 50 of which are available for streaming. The choices are kind of spotty, too: Letters From Iwo Jima is available but not Flags Of Our Fathers, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre but not Sunset Boulevard. The Roku box does allow fast forwarding and rewinding, but it's going to take a little getting used to the controls. And it remembers where you stopped watching the last several movies, so when you return to it you can resume from where you left off.
All things considered I'm very pleased. We're living in the future, baby.
Edit: I forgot to check for this at first. None of the titles I've tried have closed captions. That's very disappointing. I'm still impressed but that's a significant omission.
The down sides appear to be: the Netflix "instant watching" catalogue is still very limited. I have 420 movies in my queue, about 50 of which are available for streaming. The choices are kind of spotty, too: Letters From Iwo Jima is available but not Flags Of Our Fathers, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre but not Sunset Boulevard. The Roku box does allow fast forwarding and rewinding, but it's going to take a little getting used to the controls. And it remembers where you stopped watching the last several movies, so when you return to it you can resume from where you left off.
All things considered I'm very pleased. We're living in the future, baby.
Edit: I forgot to check for this at first. None of the titles I've tried have closed captions. That's very disappointing. I'm still impressed but that's a significant omission.
