Monday, March 02, 2009

Best Things Are Free

I am always one to try new things, and certainly enjoy saving money. I have a NetFlix account that I use to rent Blu-Ray movies, and for a few months they have been promoting their streaming movies. A few weeks ago I looked at it, and it turned out that this feature was available in my current plan. I have a 768K DSL modem at home, and didn't expect it to work well. I was pleasantly surprised that it actually wasn't too bad on my Mac laptop. I had been paying 25 dollars a month for HBO/Cinemax; which I found I used mostly to watch older movies. I'm not one to watch movies on a computer, so I checked into the Roku Netflix box. It's a 100 dollar onetime charge and then movie playback is included in your Netflix account. So I turned off HBO/Cinemax and should now have a 4 month payback.

The box arrived and was amazingly easy to install. You plug in the power, and connect it to your TV and are basically done. A screen came up and found my SSID, asked for the password and downloaded the latest firmware. The Roku rebooted and the menu came up in HD/720p over HDMI. You add movies to your Instant Queue from a computer, and within 1-2 seconds they appear on your TV. With 768K the movies certainly are not Blu-Ray or even DVD quality, but they aren't much worse than the digital signals I was getting from the cable company.

All in all for me, it's working very well and just wanted to pass along the information.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the Info! I have been debating whether to switch from blockbuster for netflix streaming video but did not know what the quality would be worth it. I would be using a xbox360 for the steaming so it would be no extra cost. You mentioned 720p, is that just the menu system or are the videos 720p? If so, I am switching to netflix!

This will lower my Movie/TV budget to almost nothing! I currently use Mythtv and get HD OTA.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the Info! I have been debating whether to switch from blockbuster for netflix streaming video but did not know if the quality would be worth it. I would be using a xbox360 for the steaming so it would be no extra cost. You mentioned 720p, is that just the menu system or are the videos 720p? If so, I am switching to netflix!

This will lower my Movie/TV budget to almost nothing! I currently use Mythtv and get HD OTA.

Dave Richards said...

anonymous: The menu system is 720P and just detected it automatically over HDMI. My TV supports 1080P, so 720P must be their current upper limit. I don't have enough bandwidth to test it, but the box supports HD signals and Netflix is adding HD movies to their queue.