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Friday, September 12, 2008

REVIEW:  Roku Netflix Player

Who isn’t a Netflix subscriber?

It’s a pretty rare mailbox that never sees those iconic red Netflix envelopes.  The little mail-order that could reshaped the face of video rentals seemingly overnight.  But slick as it is, you still have to do something that is anathema to many people these days - you have to wait.  Now there seems to be a bit of an answer to that, and one that could offer an alternative delivery vehicle for small productions.

The Roku Netflix player is a flyweight black plastic box measuring about 5” x 5” x 2”.  There is nothing to see on the front panel other than the Roku logo and a pale blue LED that glows constantly.  You won’t find a power switch, either on the box or the incredibly simple 9-button remote control.  It’s just...on.

The back panel reveals remarkable connectivity for a box this small.  There’s a power jack, an Ethernet jack, and video outputs in composite, component, S-video and - surprisingly - a HDMI jack.  Since I don’t (yet) have a TV with an HDMI input, I have to admit I’m not sure how good this output looks, but the other three work great.  Audio comes out either as RCA line jacks or an optical pipe.  I have never installed a piece of A/V componentry that was this easy to set up - and that’s even more amazing when you figure this is really a tiny computer that has to negotiate with your home network.  After a few minutes of thinking, the Roku shows you an activation code.  Take this code to your computer, input it in the right page on the Netflix site, and bam!  You are online.  It really is that simple.

The next step is to use your Netflix account to feed content to the Roku box.  Sadly, not all of the Netflix library is online-capable, but they claim that over 12,000 titles are.  And the variety in that group is surprising, and maybe even a little confusing.  Contemporary movies available online include “La Vie En Rose” and “The Good German.” Older films I noticed included the Coen Brothers’ “The Hudsucker Proxy,” Woody Allen’s “Manhattan Murder Mystery” and Terry Gilliam’s loopy classic “The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen.” Of course, those last three films make me hungry to see “Fargo,” “Annie Hall” and “Brazil” (or maybe “Time Bandits") but none of those titles are offered in the Watch Instantly list.  It makes you wonder what the parameters are for inclusion.  Classics are represented by titles like “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington,” “Of Mice And Men,” and my personal favorite “Casablanca.”

There are more than films in the Watch Instantly list.  Television available instantly includes both the English and American versions of “The Office,” my personal favorite “NewsRadio,” the Showtime police creepout “Dexter,” “Penn & Teller’s Bu!!$#it,” and much more. 

But what could make the documentarians among us interested is the immense number of docs online.  A quick search reveals “The Atomic Cafe’,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room,” Errol Morris’ “Fast, Cheap and Out Of Control,” “What Would Jesus Buy?”, “Wisconsin Death Trip,” and the Oscar-winning “Born Into Brothels.” And rest assured, there’s a lot of crap too.  I watched a documentary on the band Van Halen that managed to omit either interviews with the band or more than eight notes of their music.  A rockumentary on ‘80’s Boston band The Cars was, while authorized by the band, still essentially unwatchable.  But I have hope that the list will get longer and of higher quality.

Even though I have what is claimed to be a 3 Mbit DSL connection (read: 2 Mbit on a good day) I have been totally impressed by the video quality from the Roku box.  Of course, this is still streaming video, so if you decide to fast-forward or rewind your video, there will be a delay while the buffer is refilled (faster connections = shorter recues, of course.) For $99, this is a really compelling way to get access to a large part of your Netflix queue without the wait by the mailbox.  And the Watch Instantly service is included in your Netflix subscription, even the lowest-priced tiers.  I call this a big winner, and it’s bound to get better as Netflix expands the number of movies, documentaries and TV shows available to Watch Instantly.

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Starting some time this month, the Xbox 360 many people already have will do this as well.

Posted by  on  09/13  at  01:10 PM

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Great review, thanks Bruce!

Matt Jeppsen
FreshDV

Posted by Matt Jeppsen  on  09/14  at  09:49 AM

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