31 March 2009, 22:02 UTC
Netflix has gotten a lot of praise for a polished experience using their website. Well, "Watch Instantly" could benefit from some polish.
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)
28 August 2007, 1:44 UTC
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...
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...
26 July 2007, 16:23 UTC
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".
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:
29 June 2005, 2:41 UTC
Partly due to that little bit of guilt I felt about regularly bittorrenting a few TV shows, I recently became a Netflix subscriber.
So I got a netflix subscription...
Partly due to that little bit of guilt I felt about regularly bittorrenting a few TV shows, I recently became a Netflix subscriber.
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