General
The Netflix Player by Roku is a set-to-box to bring the Watch Instantly service to the living room. Any user of Netflix over the last should have some familiarity of this complementary service they have provided. As nice as it is, how much fun is it to watch a movie stuck in that office chair?
Watch Now service
To understand the use and important of the Netflix Player box, one has to familiar with the Watch Instantly service. The Netflix service is a subscription base movie rental service. The plans are based on how many movies one wants to have out at any one time—anywhere from one or up to eight movies. A little over a year ago Netflix implemented a movie download streaming service. When it first started, one could watch one hour per one full dollar paid in subscription service, ie. Paid $17.95 a month, get 17 hours of viewing. About four months ago, they amended the service to unlimited viewing if one had a plan with unlimited DVDs rentals per month; there are plans that limited the number of total movies one can rent.
The Box
The box itself is nothing that, from the surface, is going to impress one’s AppleTV tauten friends. Roku and Netflix choose function over form. The box is quite small; about the six of Xbox 360 controller. It has multiple outputs. For video, it has composite, s-video, component and HDMI, and audio has composite and toslink. The box also has an Ethernet port, and built wireless to connect a LAN either by A and G.
Installation
The Netflix Player comes with everything you need to install it. The player, a remote, composite video/audio cable, power cord, basic user guide, and warranty card.
Installation was designed to be very simple, quick, and easy so that those who may be technology challenged, will be able to get the box working. The box is designed to use the same ports that one needs open to surf the web on Internet Explorer. This makes sense considering if you want to watch movie you have to use Internet Explorer 7 or better. Installation basically consists of connection the box to a TV, and plugging it in. Once plugged in, the box will walk people through the installation, which is telling the box how to connect to one’s home network—wired or wireless—and entering any SSID and passcode information. The box will test how it connects, if it connects to the LAN and Netflix. Once it connects, it will do any updates needed, and then give you an activation code. Then one will go their PC, log into Netflix, go under account, Netflix Ready Device Activation, and enter the code. After that, one is all set.
The one thing to note on setting up the basic, the box is designed to get it's IP and DNS information dynamically. There is ability to setup a static IP and manually enter a device name or DNS information. This could a problem if one has already used up maximum IP leases his/her router allows, or if there DHCP option available.
Personally, I had a small issue installing because my firewall had ICMP ping blocking turned on which prevent the box from connecting to my LAN. Once I turned it off, it connected, and did the setup. I was able to turn the ping blocking back on with no further problems.
Also, once the box is up and running and connected to Netlix, to access settings, one needs to push up on the remote. From there you can change video option for standard to widescreen, factory resest (there is a push-pin option on the box for this too), audio, box info, and so forth
Use
The use of the box is simple. The home screen is selection of movie in one Instant Watch que. It show movie covers. Click on a movie, gives a brief description of the movie, it’s MPAA rating, time length. One can also give a user rating, remove the movie from que. There is also a resume movie play back. Nice feature because you can resume the movie no matter where you started to watch a movie, such as in the office on a PC.
To select movies for the Instant Watch que, one must go on the PC and select from there. Some people may not like this because they would like to search from their coach. Overall, it’s more an overrated complaint since you have be on the PC to select what DVD or blue ray movies one would like sent to their home, so it’s just an extension of that activity.
During movie play back, one can pause and stop the movie. Fast forwarding and rewinding is a bit different. Because the movies are streamed, they don’t keep enough movie in memory to do what is accustomed to from a DVD or other services such as AppleTV or Vudu. Instead, the box brings up little video vignettes, which are about ten seconds long. Select a vignette and the movie will play from that point.
Possible Negatives
The box is not perfect by any means. Depending on how uses their movie rental service, the box could not be right for them. The biggest one is the movie selection is limited in size and scope. Netflix has about ten thousand titles, which they include individual television episodes. There are no new release major studio movies, but there quite a few independent films. Most of the movies are older such as Fifth Element, Blade Runner, Logan’s Run, Vertigo, and so forth. There is a growing television shows, such as Heroes, The office, Dead Like, Dexter, Leave it to Beaver, Quantum Leap and so on. Unfortunately, not televisions have all the episodes, such as Dead Like Me. Heroes had all but the one unaired episode.
Another issue would be videophiles and HD snobs. The video output at this time is limited to 480p. The quality of the video is very dependent on the speed connection to Netflix. There is a four dot indicator when a movie loads showing the quality. Four dots is near DVD quality. 1mb is minimum speed for one dot, but ideally you want to 2.2mb for the highest quality.
Netflix player
Denon 2910 DVD player, and Fifth Element Superbit DVD
The last one issue is there is HD available as of this date. Netflix has indicated they want to bring to higher quality video to the service users. The box is designed to be about to putout a HD video. Roku/Netflix will do a firmware update.
Also, the movies can take up to a minute to load and start playing. I use Comcast ISP upper tier service (8m down, which I can 16mb with speedboost), I generally wait about ten to fifteen seconds. If resuming a movie, it takes about a minute; this is important if one is rewinding or fast forwarding through a movie.
Future/Rumors
Rumors have it that Roku wants to bring more content to the box and are talking with other content providers, possibly Hulu.com. If can they can do this, the $100 price will be a bargain; Hulu.com has some, albeit limited, HD content.
Conclusion
For $100 the box is a bargain for what it is. I recommend this box to current Netflix subscribers who use the Instant Watch service. For new subscribers, considering the box, because of the limited amount of content, it may not meet their expectations.
The good thing the box can updated by firmware updates, so the when better content comes, it will have the ability to do HD, or 5.1, maybe 7.1 audio via the toslink.
I think Netflix can have a big hit here if they can figure out how to get the big movie studios to allow new movie releases to fit within their subscription business model.
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