About me

I've been a computer programmer since I first started typing in program listings on a Commodore Vic 20 when I was about 8. My hobbies include electronics, CNC manufacturing, photography, beer and winemaking.

I live with my wife and lots of left-over parts from unfinished projects in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.]

Blog

31 March 2009, 22:02 UTC

Netflix 'Watch Instantly' problems

Netflix has gotten a lot of praise for a polished experience using their website. Well, "Watch Instantly" could benefit from some polish.

No Linux support
.. in fact, Microsoft Silverlight is now a requirement on Windows, so you can see who they're in bed with
.. which turns out to be such a dog that it can't run in virtualbox without maxing out the CPU and dropping frames (on a Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz with 960x600 display resolution)
No subtitles or closed captions available
No choice of audio languages
"Buffering"? What is this, realaudio in the year 1999? (of course, network logging shows the problem is remote, not local)
.. and after buffering, which can take several minutes, it goes directly back to "play" regardless of whether you've walked away
.. the play/pause button is not available during buffering to avoid this
.. and if you walk away for too long with the video paused, it chews you out for it
.. hitting reload may not actually take you back to where you were, despite the onscreen promise that it will. (this happens when you've navigated to a different episode of a series with the next/previous buttons)
Every seek requires buffering again
.. even if that segment of the video is already watched or is in the preloaded grey bar
The Windows screensaver activates while watching the video
.. and on deactivation, the player leaves fullscreen mode (only in virtualbox)
Inactive buttons (such as play/pause during buffering) are indistinguishable from non-hovered buttons (such as fullscreen)
Video quality is about on-par with a mediore divx rip, not with dvd (on a 3.0mbps connection)

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28 August 2007, 1:44 UTC

Bye Bye Gamefly

With 3 days left in my billing cycle, I finally got around to cancelling gamefly. Instead I'll start heading to the local used games store...

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26 July 2007, 16:23 UTC

gamefly: it's no netflix

I bought a wii a few months ago. Keeping in mind that most games are duds, and because I've enjoyed video rentals through netflix, I decided to sign up for gamefly since it sounded like "netflix for video games".

Well, the reality is that gamefly is no netflix. Let me list some of the shortcomings:

So I got a netflix subscription...