Interesting. We have a Wii and a router. If this becomes available in Canada I might just look into it.
I assume the picture quality isn’t high-def, but is nonetheless good?
It isn’t high-def, but fairly good, just a little fuzzy on the details, but if I want it, i can always buy it after ‘previewing’ it. I use it primarily for things I will never buy.
My only one issue is you can’t do anything with it - no subtitles (unless they are already in the film), no settings or anything. But considering you generally watch TV shows like that anyway, it’s cool. And I just wish they had more instant watch. i would love to watch DS9 but i am not renting every disc, I’d be here forever.
^^ Thanks.
Most of the instant watch is in standard def, however, the newer stuff is in higher quality (720p-ish I believe.)
I’m honestly surprised at how good the quality can be (depending on your bandwidth, anyway). I watched a movie on Instant View last night through my Blu-Ray player, and it was completely indistinguishable from a normal DVD, aside from the lack of actual options like subtitles and chapters.
If there’s a newly released movie that I know I’ll want to see eventually, I add it to my queue before it’s even out on DVD. Even if there’s a long wait when it first comes out, I generally get it within a week or two. The one and only new movie I had a problem with was Inglourious Basterds, which sat at the top of my queue for at least 6 months before it was finally shipped to me.
One thing that does bother me a little about Netflix is that they won’t recommend new movies to you until they’ve been out for years. I understand why they do it. The movie is already in high demand and they don’t want to advertise it and have it waiting on even more queues.
Who the heck turns subtitles on during a movie? Well, if you’re hard of hearing I suppose.
Is there a way to pause the stream?
You’d be surprised how much you can miss without them.
Yes, and fast forward and reverse as well. It’s not quite as smooth as a DVD, but it works well enough.
I do it constantly. In almost every movie. And I have perfectly normal hearing. There’s a ton of things you miss without them, as Bosstone says.
Wow. I wouldn’t even be able to watch the movie. I’d be reading the subtitles the whole time. How can you possibly do both?
The subtitles are sort of…there. On the screen.
It does help if you’re a quick reader, though. I can read a lot faster than the actor can speak.
Well, I can read at a fine speed, but hey, my eyes even get distracted by the TV channel’s watermark in the lower right hand corner of most shows.
To each, his own.
More than 30 million Americans are deaf or hard of hearing. Roughly 1 in 10 people. And we use subtitles and closed captions.
There is some hope that recently passed (as in this past week) legislation mandating captioning for most (though not all, and not necessarily Netflix content) will be the impetus for Netflix to finally make some serious effort to get on with the work of captioning, which they promised would be coming in “about a year” in July of 2009 and haven’t mentioned since.
The multiple-disk membership is also good for multiple queue households. We have 5 at-a-time, so my kids get two at-a-time each and I get one. Everyone has their own queue. During the school year we usually watch them on Sundays (our lazy day), send them back by Wednesday, and get the new ones on Friday. So we usually watch about 20 per month. Obviously we could watch many more movies with this plan (our turn around time is 3 days total) but, the value in Netflix for me is the catalogue and no harassment about keeping movies for a few weeks if we want.
Limewire is P2P program, and the speed of a download is limited by whatever some random smucks on the net have their upload set too. In most cases, this will be well below what your connection is capable of. Even if it does max out your connection, the movie might not be downloaded in order; you might be getting the ending bytes before the beginning ones. Netflix has dedicated servers and big tubes for its streaming service, and can thus take full advantage of your internet connection. And most broadband is quite capable of streaming dvd-ish or better quality video.
Also note, unless your kids are only downloading public domain movies, or stuff that the copyright holder has authorized to be distributed in that manner, they are breaking the law, and you could be sued for quite a bit of money.
You have many answers to this question, so one more won’t hurt.
Netflix has a proprietary program that optimizes the download experience based on the speed revealed in their tests and uses some compression schemes as well. If your speed tests out at max, you get near-DVD quality, otherwise one or two steps below, and they buffer a certain amount of data ahead of your viewing. This algorithm seems to be adjusted so you don’t waste bandwidth downloading the entire show, just enough ahead to avoid stuttering.
And the near-DVD quality suffers when the source is rapidly moving images, like the opening sequence to Airline. So there are compromises, but I think it’s a pretty impressive system. 10 years from now, we’ll laugh at the compromises as we all enjoy 500Mb/sec fiber to the home.
That’s why I only implicated them, and said “download something.” You’re jumping to conclusions, obviously. 
I actually keep a “Long Wait” movie (currently Kick-Ass) at the top of my list for just this reason. They’ve sent me 4 movies with my 3 DVD Plan on a couple of occasions.
I’m not sure if they still do this due to the outcry, but a couple of years ago someone found out that Netflix does sort of throttle your priority. If you have a shit-ton of movies on your queue it used to give you a lower priority for new releases than someone with just a few, hoping that with so many movies in your queue, you wouldn’t mind waiting a little longer (I guess, was the logic).
I’m a loyal Netflix subscriber. Total turn around is 2 days (Send Monday, get replacement Wednesday). I just topped 300 discs on my queue but that was due to my adding UFC 78-115 last night.
It’s possible to shorten the turnaround time if you receive a disc, watch it, then put it back in the same day’s mail. My home mail delivery is around noon, but I can put something in a mailbox by 5PM and it ships out the same day.
Bwuh? You don’t watch any foreign flicks, do you? I do it all the time. You get used to it. I can read way faster than they speak, as is noted, and you don’t have to read every line, but they are there, in case you miss something.
I watch a ton of action movies, for example. A lot of times they say things in the heat of battle you don’t even hear.
And here is my favorite example. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade there is a scene where Marcus Brody is wandering around, white as white can be, lost in a sea of (was it Arabs?). Anyway. He mutters things to the people, but you can’t quite hear them unless you crank the volume, and maybe not even then, because there is a lot of ambient noise. What does he say?
“Water? No, thank you, fish make love in it.”
An awesome joke that I totally missed all these years because it was pitched too low under all the sounds!