Mrs. EG and I just ordered one of the new Roku
Netflix players. If you haven't seen one of these before, it's a
hardback book sized appliance that ties into your Netflix account
via your home Internet connection (ethernet or WiFi).
I ordered it on Sunday after seeing one at
Terence Spies's
house.
The fulfillment and out of box experience is pretty good. I ordered
it on Sunday and had it on Wednesday morning. I pulled it out of
the box and had it wired up to my TV and Internet in 10 minutes.
The box booted up, asked me whether I wanted wireless or wired,
downloaded a firmware update, and then gave me an access code.
You log on to Netflix's web site, enter your code, and a few
minutes later, the box announces it's ready, offers you
access to your Netflix instant queue, and you're watching
video on demand. I spent more time figuring out where to
plug in the wall wart, routing the cables through my audio stand,
and getting an ethernet jack live in
the room than I did getting the box running.
Video quality is pretty good, even through S-Video (my DVD
player is using my only component jacks), and it's really
nice to be able to just decide you want to watch something
and be watching it a minute later. The selection is kind of
limited, and slanted towards older movies and cheesy 80s
TV shows (plenty of Magnum and Quincy), but if you just
want to relax and watch something, there's plenty available,
and the fact that browsing is so low impact means you
can take a chance on stuff that you ordinarily wouldn't
be willing to accept Netflix's latency to try.
Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter,
anyone? An additional benefit, at least for now, is that
there's no additional charge over your basic Netflix account—actually,
I dialed down my subscription because I wasn't really keeping up
anyway. I wonder how long that will last.
That's the good news. The bad news is that it's clearly a first
generation product. For starters it's slow. From the time you select what you
want to watch it takes about 20 seconds of waiting before the video
shows up. I know that sounds nitpicky, but since that happens pretty
much every time you want to change what you're watching, even fast
forward or rewind by a minute, it starts to get annoying after a
while. At some level you're limited by the speed of the network, but
you could also do a lot better with more buffer and lookahead. For
instance, the box could download the first 5 minutes of everything in
your queue, so it would always be 5 minutes ahead. This would allow
instant play and limited fast forward. And if you kept the entire
movie as it was being watched, you could do complete
rewind. This delay is doubly irritating because once it's started
streaming stuff into the buffer you can't interrupt it until
it's started playing.
Obviously, this would require a lot more storage than the box has
(256
MB from what I understand), but that could be easily fixed by
adding an external drive. Easily, I say, except that the Roku
doesn't have an external USB or Firewire jack, so it won't accept
an external drive. This is too bad, really, because if they had
just added a jack, external storage would just be a software update.
You could still use a network-based NAS, I suppose, but that's not really
as cheap or convenient1.
The other (sort of strange) problem I've found is this weird
interaction with my TV. I have one of the early Sony WEGA
TVs with the anamorphic squeeze feature.
For some reason, the TV decides that the Roku is sending out anamorphic
images and squeezes everything down, making everyone look just a tiny
but fat. If you tell the Roku to emit in 16x9 rather than 4x3, the
aspect ratio comes out OK, and stuff in widescreen looks fine, but
stuff in 4:3 comes out centered on the screen with about 3" of black
border on each side. Not terrible, but sort of annoying. Not sure
if this is a problem with the Roku or a problem with the TV—though
my DVD player works fine. I don't see any additional settings in
the Roku, but maybe there's some way to reconfigure my TV:
a little web searching shows some potential angles to try, though
I can't say I'm super-excited about putting my TV into service mode.