Nintendo Wii To Get Netflix Streaming 213
motang writes "Netflix and Nintendo is set to announce Netflix streaming service for the Wii soon. Subscribers who have the unlimited streaming service can watch non-HD version of the movies on their Wii with a special Netflix disc inserted." The thing I can't understand is why the PS3 and Wii have to require a disc. Both are capable of downloading applications and executing them. Why should I be required to dedicate my disc slot to stream a movie? Of course, my netflix queue is half-filled with Ken Burns documentaries, so if I lost the disc, I think that would just make the wife happier.
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He popped the question to her [slashdot.org] on Slashdot; she knew what she was getting into.
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Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft may have an exclusive deal with Netflix to have built-in Netflix support. Simply giving DVDs out with software for the other platforms *without* the possibility to install it may get around this agreement.
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From what I understand the netflix streaming API is silverlight. So Microsoft easily implemented this on X-Box. However, ps3 is using the blu-ray live feature to access Netflix and I have no idea what nintendo will use.
I'm assuming Netflix is in the process of overhauling it's streaming system to cooperate with ps3 and wii. Since ps3 is slated as having a software version in the near to distant future (possibly with the implementation of a paid for premium version of the Playstation Network).
However, beside
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That doesn't account for Tivo, Boxee or Roku, which can stream it out of the box.
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Exclusive for game consoles, I suspect.
Re:Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know about the PS3, but I know technical limitations for memory on the Wii pretty much make this crap anyways.
The Wii can "download" apps, but its internal (flash) memory is incredibly small. Their "run from the SD slot" is a kludge that doesn't actually run the app from the SD slot, it copies it into part of the internal (flash) memory first.
I'm willing to bet the Netflix app is simply too big to fit inside the flash reliably.
Re:Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
Nah, I doubt that's a problem. The Opera web browser fits comfortably inside flash memory, and that includes flash; unless they're incompetent, a dedicated media player should be much smaller.
The problem with the Wii is probably just the limited ram to buffer the streaming video itself; it might be more dependent on a smooth and fast connection than the other two console. On the other hand, it's not streaming HD video, so that might not be as much of a problem. Either way, it's better to have the option than not have it.
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After they introduced the "run from SD Card" kludge, it actually has less memory to work with. Ever completely filled your Wii's internal flash and then tried to run something from SD? You get problems like this [nintendo.com]. Essentially, in order to manage the "run from SD" area they make you keep your Wii's internal memory open.
Worse, this copy situation copies-then-deletes every time you use the "run from SD" function. Since it can't actually run the program from SD and copies it to internal flash instead, your inter
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So, under the worst case scenario, you write a byte 5 times a day, on a flash drive that has a tolerance of 100,000+ writes? That reduces the expected lifetime to 20,000 days, or 54 years.. Not a problem. Flash drive read tolerances are high enough that wr
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Just FYI - there's an iPlayer channel here in the UK too, so it's certainly capable of streaming video. Didn't seem as nice as using the PS3 somehow though.
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To cache a decent portion, you'd be surprised. And it's the caching that would need to be important. Another reason they're loading the app from disc, rather than eating up space for a program that has to be copied into the Wii's internal flash...
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If the quality is closer to youtube-level, instead of DVD-level, a two hour movie might be compressed down to a few hundred megs, and they could probably hold many times that amount. You're not going to be able to c
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Spot-on. I don't have the link ready, but Microsoft had an exclusive deal with Netflix for an embedded player. Something like one year or so. Of course, a disk isn't embedded, and therefore, not subject to exclusivity agreement.
What I'm wondering is the take-up and pay-out numbers. Is it really that much of a pain in the ass - and therefore take-up hurdle - that it significantly impacts utilization? Or did Microsoft just completely overpay for a very limited exclusivity, that really isn't?
PS3 will go Disc Free in Late 2010 (Score:5, Insightful)
The PS3 will go disc free later this year, but didn't supply details as to why. However, since the Wii has far less storage, this may or may not be possible on the Wii...
http://kotaku.com/5391286/netflix-on-ps3-getting-embedded-solution-late-next-year [kotaku.com]
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even if there was no exclusive MS deal than it would take some months to code the functionality into the existing firmware, test it, etc. there is also a storage limitation for the firmware and PS3 along with the Wii keep adding new features, channels, etc. Could it be that the Netflix software needs more space than what is currently available so that a disc is the only practical solution?
when the consoles were released there was some forward thinking to add features, but it seems feature creep is outpacing
Re:PS3 will go Disc Free in Late 2010 (Score:4, Insightful)
A player does not take much space, and discs can't add storage to a Wii anyway (for caching or what have you). The Wii's ridiculously small storage and lack of expandability does not affect this particular application.
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You aren't going to be streaming HD on a Wii anyway. It doesn't have enough CPU muscle to decode HD H.264 (or any other modern codec) and it doesn't have the capability to output HD anyway.
Re:PS3 will go Disc Free in Late 2010 (Score:4, Informative)
Yup. NetFlix dances around the issue (see: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/26/netflix-ps3-disc-must-remain-in-system-until-2010-update/ ). But it's pretty obvious this is the reason why.
I don't think firmware QA is the primary reason here. It's an app. There's not much difference between QAing an app loading from local storage vs. an app loading from disc.
Actually at this point, PS3 Netflix streaming is superior to the Xbox solution... you might need to put a disc in, but you don't need to fork over $50/year for an Xbox Live Gold membership.
Seems like a decent tradeoff.
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I think it's surprising that someone into consoles & interested in Netflix playback would still be ignorant of the likely reason why it requires a disc.
I think that a Netflix app is probably on the order of standard game you'd download on the Wii. Video files aren't saved locally, it's all just streaming.
Unless I'm mistaken... (Score:2)
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Re:Unless I'm mistaken... (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean for gimmicks and population segments? I mean seriously, the 360 and the PS3 fought over the same group of people. the 360 with HDDVD, the PS3 with BluRay, but both cater to more hardcore gamers and didn't really use any 'new cutting edge user interation' like the Wii did. The Wii-mote, the Wii-Fit all were completely new at the time for a console and drove sales. Coupled with the gamer demographics the Wii aimed at (not hard core gamers so much as kids, older adults, etc...) and the game genre's released for the Wii (proving once again that blood and gore are not the only good things in games by warping back to days of Mario and puzzles), the Wii really didn't have direct competition and that fact drove the adoption rates through the roof.
I highly doubt that the insinuation you make (that people don't want to watch movies on their consoles) was the driving force behind the purchase of the Wii.
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I highly doubt that the insinuation you make (that people don't want to watch movies on their consoles) was the driving force behind the purchase of the Wii.
But if a lot of people bought the Wii despite this limitation, that supports the assertion that most people don't care about watching movies on the console...
Personally I haven't wanted to use a game console as a DVD player since my PS2 showed me what a bad DVD player implementation looked like...
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By 'gimmick' do you mean the motion-sensing controller? or something else?
If that is what you mean, I wish to state my emphatic disagreement.
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The Wii was DVD ready until the latest iteration of drives. Nintendo had DVD support in there all along, including in their SDK and firmware. All they would've had to do is release a DVD Player Channel with a system update and suddenly all Wiis would gain DVD playback capability. Why they didn't do that is anyone's guess.
They've since killed the DVD readback ability in newer drives because it was being used for piracy (if you can read DVDs, you can read DVD-Rs. If you can read DVD-Rs, you can use software h
How to reserve your disc (Score:4, Informative)
Go go http://www.netflix.com/InstantStreamingDisc?device=Wii to reserve a disc.
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I presume that worked for you, but for me it re-routed to /MemberHome. If I go to just http://www.netflix.com/InstantStreamingDisc [netflix.com] (without the Wii specifier) I get a page to request a PS3 disc.
I have a Wii, but not a PS3, so I'll continue to wait patiently. Thanks for the tip anyway; I hope to use it soon.
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As many others have already said... (Score:5, Informative)
...Microsoft has an exclusivity deal with Netflix for the time being [microsoft.com]. Either due to technical or legal reasons, requiring the disc is a way to get around this. Considering Sony has already said the required disc is temporary [destructoid.com], this implies the exclusivity deal is nearing its end. This also implies any disc required for the Wii would be temporary as well.
Calm down people. Jeebus.
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To be clear, I'm not miffed that I have to use a disc to watch Netflix on my Wii; I'm miffed that exclusive contracts are legal, and that Netflix signed one with Microsoft.
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The vast majority of the time, I would agree with you...but in this instance, considering the majority of Netflix's streaming services used Silverlight when Netflix Streaming arrived on the 360, this didn't suprise me at all.
Not saying it's right, just saying I understand why it happend in this case.
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Actually, the PS3 currently uses BD-Live to stream Netflix [betanews.com], but other than that I fully agree with what you say.
Looking forward to this, it will mean we will have Netflix streaming on all floors in our townhouse (PCs upstairs, 360/PS3 in the living room, Wii in the basement).
This May Be dumb but... (Score:2)
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I would say because the bulk of what Netflix currently streams is only available in standard-def anyways...the amount of HD content they stream grows on a regular basis, but it is still a small percentage of their overall offerings.
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... my Wii does not output in 1080p, will movies streamed by Netflix display in HD? If not, why bother?
The majority of the Netflix streams are 480 (DVD). The best ones top out at 720, and even those require permission from the studio to use.
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I'm willing to bet that a significant number of Wiis are not connected to televisions capable of 1080p.
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And that matters because?
I'm willing to bet that 100% of Wiis cannot output content at 1080p, or even 720p.
You missed the point.
He was saying that if the Wii is connected to a TV that can't display hi-def, then it doesn't matter if the Wii hardware is incapable of output in hi-def...
My knee-jerk reaction to the news of a Netflix player for Wii was that the display resolution would suck - but then I thought about it for half a second and remembered that Netflix streaming resolution probably isn't any better anyway...
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... my Wii does not output in 1080p, will movies streamed by Netflix display in HD? If not, why bother?
Because, believe it or not, most Wii end users would rather have Netflix streaming in 480p than nothing at all. The vast majority of end users still do most of their at-home movie-watching in 1080p and are ok with that.
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The vast majority of end users still do most of their at-home movie-watching in 1080p and are ok with that.
Did you brainfart there, and mean "480p and are ok with that" or did I miss something in my pre-coffee haze?
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will movies streamed by Netflix display in HD?
No. From the summary:
motang writes "Netflix and Nintendo is set to announce Netflix streaming service for the Wii soon. Subscribers ... can watch non-HD version of the movies on their Wii ..."
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My guess is that it's because 1080p is not the exclusive way to enjoy movies.
I'm actually a little surprised the question got out of your mind and through your fingers before you realized that obvious conclusion.
Would be nice outside USA (Score:2)
Netflix: Does not work
Hulu: Does not work
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I think the problem with Hulu is about licensing.
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Microsoft has an exclusive deal (Score:2)
Back in August when this was news:
http://www.crispygamer.com/blogs/post/2009/08/11/NOT-NEWS-Xbox-360s-Netflix-Exclusivity.aspx [crispygamer.com]
The exclusivity was tied to an online delivery service integrated into the console. Netflix gets around this with Wii and PS3 by essentially selling a "Netflix Game" that streams the video from the service.
Wii has difficulty with streaming (Score:2)
I don't know whether I've just got one from a bad batch, but my Wii is terrible at streaming Flash video in its browser. Both BBC iPlayer and YouTube stop frequently to buffer.
I guess it could be lack of memory to buffer in. Or it could be a bad WiFi connection -- it's close to the AP and other nearby devices do fine.
I'd be mightily upset if I got this sort of performance on video that I'd paid for.
BDJ (Score:3, Insightful)
The reason the PS3 currently uses a disc is that the entire netflix program is written in Java. Specifically a BDJ. So the PS3 treats this disc as a Blue-Ray movie and runs their Java program as any Blue-Ray player is required to do. It really doesn't use any specific PS3 only code. They are working on a version that won't require the disc and will hopefully have it out soon (this year). I would "guess" it might be possible to take the PS3 disc and put it in to some modern BlueRay player and get it to work.
In my opinion this is pretty impressive what they have done with BDJ, and it shows what it is capable of. It also shows exactly why Microsoft didn't want this as a standard.
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I'm still waiting for Hulu support (Score:2)
Re:The disc is DRM (Score:4, Interesting)
No..
NetFlix uses a password. You could give that to everybody and there dog and they could use NetFlix on their PC.
The Wii has limited space for applications it could be that the streaming is too big to store on the Wii.
The real reason I think is that Microsoft got an "exclusive" on putting Netflix "on" a game console.
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You could give that to everybody and there dog and they could use NetFlix on their PC.
Only if "everybody and there [sic] dog" amounts to no more than 6, because that's how many devices netflix only lets you register.
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Computers don't count as a "device" for the sake of this discussion.
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Hope they let me reset that. Preferably on a per-device basis. I use whatever computer I'm in front of.
Re:The disc is DRM (Score:5, Informative)
The real reason I think is that Microsoft got an "exclusive" on putting Netflix "on" a game console.
This is 100% correct.
Netflix has even stated so.
There will be a downloadable application (no disc needed) for the PS3 sometime this year.
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So we just have to wait for their agreement period to end and we should get a sane version on Wii as well :)
Re:The disc is DRM (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, putting discs in drives is madness!
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I use Netflix streaming from my PS3, my Windows PC and my Macbook without any real difficulties. I will admit I only watch the content they offer in HD, the normal stuff looks so bad that I would rather acquire it... another way... than stream it from Netflix.
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Err OK Silverlight is on version 3 so by your arbitrary method doesn't suck.
It has a poor take up rate but does a lot more than flash can do but is generally considered harder to work with.
Windows Media Player stolen from Apple! Blimey something build for a different platform and even different processor architecture and running a different proprietary file format is quite a steal.
Re:The disc is DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
Every new multimedia technology Microsoft creates sucks until the second major revision (at least).
While I don't think that's an untrue statement in general, it applies to many technologies, both hardware and software. As for hardware, that goes for many things outside the computer industry (car models, washing machines, whatever have you) as real-world use reveals shortcomings the original design and testing didn't take into account.
Re:The disc is DRM (Score:4, Funny)
But... on the internet, everybody is a dog. Besides, their streaming service is so shitty on the PC that many subscribers of the service still pirate online just because it's easier than trying to convince Silverlight to work.
And that's the real reason for the disc requirement - piracy. If you take a closer look at the disc you'll notice that it has a jagged edge, but an average person wouldn't normally notice the difference when handling the disc. Now imagine someone reporting you for pirating movies and your little disc spinning at 25,000 rpm then being shot out at 200 mph.. DRM now stands for Decapitation & Radical Maiming.
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But... on the internet, everybody is a dog. Besides, their streaming service is so shitty on the PC that many subscribers of the service still pirate online just because it's easier than trying to convince Silverlight to work.
And that's the real reason for the disc requirement - piracy. If you take a closer look at the disc you'll notice that it has a jagged edge, but an average person wouldn't normally notice the difference when handling the disc. Now imagine someone reporting you for pirating movies and your little disc spinning at 25,000 rpm then being shot out at 200 mph.. DRM now stands for Decapitation & Radical Maiming.
Or... Digital Rights Murder...
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Or... Digital Rights Murder...
Can you say that again, but in James Roday's voice?
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i googled it just to make sure, and you sir win a cookie for the day.
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Re:The disc is DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
THe problem I have with netflix streaming is that on Silverlight it's buffer is so shallow that on my crappy evening comcast connection the movie frequently chatters and stops to rebuffer and degrade resolution.
I asked comcast why they don't have a large buffer mode. I'd be happy to wait 20 minutes for a movie to start if I could get fluid high res playback. It's far more frustrating to watch for 20 minutes and then have to abandon a movie as unwatchable with all the interruptions.
Netflix told me this has to do with some agreement with the studios on what they can deliver, and also in part do yo what silverlight is able to do.
I've been wondering if Roku or now Boxee might have different buffer rules or if it sucks on Silverlight it will suck on Roku too.
Perhaps if they have some new DRM on a closed hardware system they might get concessions that would allow movies to be pre-downloaded at high res. I'd be pretty happy about that.
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It will suck on Roku, too, if you have a crappy/inconsistent connection. If it ever drops below a certain threshold, it will just degrade the quality to the next lowest stream it thinks it can support. Roku is worse than xbox/ps3 in that it seems to remember the resolution you usually stream at so even when the connection gets better (other times of the day, for example), it takes it a while to realize it and start getting the higher quality streams.
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Just stop the show and resume where you left off, it seems recalibrate the network speed every time you start a show.
That isn't really a solution to his problem. He wants high-quality, uninterrupted playback. Having a show suddenly stop and stutter because the bandwidth gets thin partway through playyback won't be fixed by stopping the show and hoping it selects a faster network speed. His issue is that the buffers are too small to allow playback at a high resolution on a slow connection.
Unless the buffe
Re:The disc is DRM (Score:5, Informative)
I used to have DSL through TDS until I started having problems with nexflix buffering. The movie would play fine for 1 hour and then start to have buffering issues.
I did some network speed tests using dslreports and a local speedtest server. If I was just doing normal web browsing and then did a speed test I would get a decent speed, plenty good for netflix streaming. Then I tried watching a movie, one hour into it buffering started, I shut down the movie and immediately ran a speed test and found that my bandwidth had been cut exactly in half.
I repeated this test a number of times and then switched to cable internet and told TDS to get fucked - they wanted me to switch to a more expensive plan but did not admit to throttling my connection. Now I have higher speed cable(charter) and haven't noticed any throttling or had any trouble with netflix playback(HD).
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Re:Q&A (Score:4, Insightful)
Think about it -- why do we have BluRay, which has a maximum capacity of 50GB? They already have solid-state memory devices that only weigh a few grams and have that much storage capacity -- and they don't degrade, scratch, or fall apart after a few months.
They only cost $100 more per unit. Who needs cheap media anyways?
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Do you really want to pay $200/movie just for the media? That's the biggest reason we are still using optical media. It's CHEAP to make in huge quantities. We're talking a few cents per unit cheap here. Flash memory, even mask ROM, can't match that price point. That's also the biggest reason that the console guys moved from ROM to optical. More space, less production cost. DRM has little to do with it, it's just as easy to crack DRM on optical media as it is on other formats. Just google for the piracy scen
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...and they don't degrade, scratch, or fall apart after a few months.
Which is exactly WHY they have not transitioned to a "stick" format that you could plug into your player. They prefer to have the media to be a little fragile...that way you might have to replace it if your 3 year-old or your drunk friend mishandles your disc.
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Um from my understanding, the DRM is in the username... No I think the reason is far more likely that they have an exclusive agreement for the 360. Remember Sony AND Netflix has said the Disc is a temporary solution. I'm assuming it's temporary for the Wii as well, temporary until the end of the agreement with MS.
Why am I still relying on optical media? The only viable alternative is online. However not only can my ISP not sustain the Bitrate for audio and video that Blu supports (or even HD-DVD suppor
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It amazed me that people closely watched the HD-DVD vs. BluRay "format war", and never once did they stop and think -- wait, why are we still relying on optical read-only media in the 21st century?
The same reason that CD beat out DAT (digital audio tape). For a tape to be loaded with content each tape had to be run across a record head which is relatively time consuming compared to stamping a CD. Flash memory, even some sort of write once version, still has to be loaded with content and is still orders of magnitude slower than stamping a disc. Plus the huge capacity solid state memory devices are much more expensive.
Re:There goes the market (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been going back and forth on getting a roku player and this makes it a lot easier to hold off. What I like about this is that it pushes the set top box folks to go ruther to justify their systems. Roku has Pandora, that's nice. If they support playing local files that would help too, and I'd be interested in getting one again.
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The Roku is an excellent little device. It just plain works. The only downsides to it is that it takes up another input on the TV (I've only got 3 to work with) and it's another remote to deal with. The good new about this little annoucement is that I'll be able to move the Roku down to the rec room so I can watch things while I workout.
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I like my Roku--I've got one of the fancy XR's. I got the PS3 disc, but I have yet to bother going and setting it all up because the Roku already does almost everything what I need it to without sounding like every movie was filmed on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
If Roku would deliver on letting me browse all their movies and add them to my queue, I'll never use my PS3 for Netflix.
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I agree. Right now I don't have an HD tv - so it's a non-issue for me at the moment. I was going to buy the top end Roku player, as when my current tv dies my situation will change. But this is great for me because it buys me more time to get the capability I wanted without having to buy new hardware now. By the time I get a new TV, there will probably be all kinds of alternatives that don't exist yet. Or I'll have saved enough to put together a very nice multimedia pc.
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Re:Deaf and Hard of Hearing still snubbed (Score:5, Informative)
I Googled "why no captions netflix streaming". Here is the very first entry listed in the results:
http://blog.netflix.com/2009/06/closed-captions-and-subtitles.html [netflix.com]
You're welcome :-)
Re:Deaf and Hard of Hearing still snubbed (Score:4, Insightful)
Gee thanks. It's not like I haven't already researched the issue.
No need to be sarcastic or rude, I was just trying to help.
If you read that post, it's a bunch of nonsense gobbleygook and FUD that works out to, we don't want to do it.
I did read the post, and that is not at all what it sounds like. It sounds like they have to figure out a way to overlay a secondary stream on top of the video stream. Obviously, you seem think this is easy to accomplish, so why don't you contact them and tell them how to do it?
He says they would have to reencode the entire library with subtitles enabled in order to stream the captions. This is of course BS because the captions are not video data and do not need to be encoded.
That is the exact opposite> of what he says. He says that reencoding the entire library would be time and cost prohibitive, as well as angering a lot of non-hearing-impaired english speakers. As a result, they are working on laying a secondary stream that contains only the subtitles over the video stream. He also says that they looked around for existing tech to do this, and found nothing.
Did you even read it, or did you just skim over it because you are pissed off?
He says that they are developing special display technology that would display the text as a separate stream in silverlight. Again FUD, I have written programs that display text in silverlight. It's quite easy, as you would expect.
As I said, if you already have the answer, why not stop bitching and contact them with the solution so they can implement it faster?
The data for all of the captions for a movie is usually around 100 KB and is freely available for use on nearly every dvd.
See above comments about submitting your idea.
The bottom line is that they do not care to have their programmers waste even 10 minutes on the Deaf community
The bottom line is that unless they release something RIGHT NOW, you are going to be pissed off. Calm down, read and understand what is written, and stop with the knee-jerk reaction.
They are going to give you what you want, and likely at no additional cost to you. Either submit your grand idea to them or stop complaining.
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That is the exact opposite of what he says. He says that reencoding the entire library would be time and cost prohibitive, as well as angering a lot of non-hearing-impaired english speakers. As a result, they are working on laying a secondary stream that contains only the subtitles over the video stream. He also says that they looked around for existing tech to do this, and found nothing.
Did you even read it, or did you just skim over it because you are pissed off?
What he says is FUD. The reason he says that entire thing is to try and confuse people out of the real issue. Of course reencoding the entire library would be cost prohibitive and expensive. Of course doing it that way would annoy the rest of the population. Of course, that is not the way that captions are done, so his entire point is moot. If the captions were encoded along with the video stream, then they would be subject to compression artifacts and buffering issues and all sorts of other problems. No ot
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What he says is FUD. The reason he says that entire thing is to try and confuse people out of the real issue. Of course reencoding the entire library would be cost prohibitive and expensive. Of course doing it that way would annoy the rest of the population. Of course, that is not the way that captions are done, so his entire point is moot.
Did you ever stop to consider he may have been addressing an issue raised by multiple people that don't have an understand about the technology the way you do? Netflix has literally millions of subscribers...they aren't all geeks, you know.
If the captions were encoded along with the video stream, then they would be subject to compression artifacts and buffering issues and all sorts of other problems. No other captioning technology works that way. You simply read the time encoded text file and display the text on the screen at the appropriate time in the movie. It's easy, most everyone does it.
And most everyone doesn't have to get it to work on multiple devices that use different delivery methods.
He hasn't found the technology available for what he describes because that's not the way it's done. If he doesn't know that, it's because he hasn't researched the issue beyond a 5 minute conversation with someone who has.
So, adding the text to a secondary stream, overlaying it onto the video stream, and giving the user an option to turn it on or off isn't how it's done?
In the tech demo SDK for silverlight there is an example for placing text on top of video. I don't need to submit any grand idea to them. Netflix is not an Open Source company, and as such is not looking for code submissions.
If it really we
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What he says, specifically, is:
1) We don't do it.
2) We can't do it the same way we do subtitles for foreign language films.
3) We're going to do it and we have chosen a subtitle format.
4) The subtitle format is not well supported by our various viewing devices/software.
5) It will be done soon anyway.
So maybe it could be done faster. So maybe they didn't even try to do it until recently. Oh, horror!
tl;dr No malice here, calm down and relax.
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I tried the Netflix PS3 streaming disc on my Samsung BD player -- no love. I don't think it'll work on every BD player.
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Wrong.
From a previous post of mine: "Microsoft has an exclusivity deal with Netflix for the time being [microsoft.com]. Either due to technical or legal reasons, requiring the disc is a way to get around this. Considering Sony has already said the required disc is temporary [destructoid.com], this implies the exclusivity deal is nearing its end. This also implies any disc required for the Wii would be temporary as well."
To add to this, it's also possible that since Silverlight is currently used for streaming except to the PS3 [wikipedia.org], there is a t
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You may not get Netflix up there, but you DO get Showcase, which means you get to watch the new Pure Pwnage series without having to sulk around the Internet to find a mirror :/
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As stated above, most Netflix streaming content is in standard def still. They are adding more HD content on a regular basis, but the amount of HD content is still miniscule compared to the amount of SD content they offer for streaming.
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The highest output on the Wii is 480p. It looks great for Wii games but i would imagine most Netflix streaming customers want their stuff in HD.
Well, sure, that's what they want... But I think most of Netflix's streaming encodes are still 480p...
(I don't think 480p looks "great" for Wii games, personally... For video it would probably be alright 'cause you don't get all the aliasing problems you get with polygon graphics...)
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