killmak: Do they have it where you can download it before you watch it so you dont have to worry about connection problems affecting the frame rate of what you are watching?
Do they have it where you can download it before you watch it so you dont have to worry about connection problems affecting the frame rate of what you are watching?
It doesn't seem so. When you fastforward or rewind on the PC, it's pretty quick. On PS3 there's a decent length resync whenever you fast forward or rewind, and then my bitrate always starts out really low before it start to really get going again. I can see where people are getting clunky from. Still, it's a nice little addition to the PS3's lineup.
Doesn't seem like a lot of movies have HD yet. Just tossed on something else in SD, Karate Kid. This actually looks better than I expected after seeing Barney and the bitrates seem to go all the way up to 3.0 instead of 2.0 on this. I'm going to do some comparison to things that I have the DVD's of, both SD and HD.
Still haven't gotten around to doing my comparisons against some of my DVD's, but we've been using the service a decent amount. Trial expires this week, I've been happy enough with it that I'll give it another month.
HD content is definitely decent enough. No surround sound is a significant drawback, but picture quality isn't bad. Unfortunately there aren't many movies in HD at this point, I have 200 things in my queue and I think there may be about 4-5 movies that are in HD. The vast majority of HD content is TV shows like LOST, The Office, Heroes, etc.
SD is pretty hit or miss. Some things look decent enough, others not so much. Cartoons work well for the kids, because those always compress pretty nicely by nature, but you get a good amount of artifacts whenever there is motion in just about all of these. For some other things I really don't believe it's even as good as an upscaled DVD. They sent me a survey asking about picture quality on one of the things I watched, so they're at least trying to give the impression they're looking to improve this. We'll see how rapid that is though.
Movie selection isn't barren, but it's definitely light. Especially when you consider a good amount of what's there just doesn't look all that great.
Overall, I'm enjoying it and like I said I'll continue for another month. I'm not blown away by any means though and lack of content, especially HD content, is a serious limitation to this thing at this point. There's a lot of potential, but still a LOOOONG way to go here. It's worth a few bucks a month though.
As for the interface, it's a little annoying to keep track of and put in the streaming disc. Kids are very into Up right now, so it's just sitting in the 2nd PS3 for whenever they want to watch some of it. To stream I have to take that thing out, etc, etc. I actually have 2 streaming discs now, it seems they'll send you gobs of these things if you want them which may be worth it in case you misplace one.
Interface itself is very workable. A little slower to get things kicked off and stuff, but as far as ease of use and navigation I think this is very similar to the Xbox version I got to play with a little bit. It's just different so someone accustomed to the Xbox interface is going to have to spend a little time to get used to this menu which is cosmetically very different.
Nice addition to the PS3's stable. The Xbox version does have some slight advantages when you aren't considering cost of Live in the mix. Confident the PS3 version will get there next year though when it's in dash.
This isn't neccessarily related to the thread really, but I found this old Jim Henson miniseries called "The Storyteller" on Netflix streaming.... it looks like 9 ~25 minute fairy tales from various parts of the world... if you liked the Dark Crystal or stuff like that, it is pretty awesome so far... only about 4 episodes deep, but they all played flawlessly with the disc
Wildo88: This isn't neccessarily related to the thread really, but I found this old Jim Henson miniseries called "The Storyteller" on Netflix streaming.... it looks like 9 ~25 minute fairy tales from various parts of the world... if you liked the Dark Crystal or stuff like that, it is pretty awesome so far... only about 4 episodes deep, but they all played flawlessly with the disc
Oh I didn't know The Storyteller was on Netflix. I need to finish watching that series!
Goozex Forum Moderator
Just wanted to point out that there is a legitimate reason why Netflix requires a disc to stream movies...
As most of you know, Microsoft was able to claim exclusivity of Netflix service, but Sony and Netflix were able to circumvent this exclusivity by providing the software via Blu-Ray (which Microsoft obviously has no control over). Netflix is in business to make money, and reaching a larger customer base (including PS3 support obviously does this) is a great way to increase revenue. So Sony/Netflix was able to create a back-door using the Blu-Ray proprietary media in order to bypass the exclusivity agreement.
It's designed to be a short-term solution to allow Netflix to be provided to PS3 owners. Once the Microsoft/Netflix streaming exclusivity agreement is up (presumably next year, as company officials have stated), Netflix will be legally free to provide disc-free streaming to PS3 owners.
Regardless of the reasoning, I'm happy to take any additional benefit from being both a Netflix subscriber and PS3 owner sooner than later.
StilesCrisis: So, anyone with a Blu-ray player try the disc in there yet? Does it work?
So, anyone with a Blu-ray player try the disc in there yet? Does it work?
I got my hands on a disc and tried popping it into a BDP-S360. It did boot right up but then it complained because the player lacked external storage. (For the Sony players, you need to attach a thumb drive to a USB connector on the back in order to have storage for BD-Live functionality.) At that point I didn't bother testing further because I also didn't have Internet hooked up to the player :) But at the very least, it looks like the disc may well work in other Blu-ray players. I'm surprised this hasn't gotten attention anywhere yet.