Finally got to watch something via Netflix's "Watch Now" on the web.  We watched Congo as our first movie. Neither of us had seen it in quite a while and so we didn't remember the store in full detail.

One annoyance is that the streaming client will only run in Microsoft Internet Explorer.  I have IE7 installed, so I used that.  This isn't completely annoying, though, because that leaves my Firefox window available on the laptop monitor for browsing and such.

I plugged my laptop (the Dell XPS M1210) into Ethernet so that the connection would be as stable as possible.  Netflix detected it for the "High" quality, which is their best quality of three levels automatically detected by the actual bandwidth available to the server.  This category requires over 2.4Mbps of bandwidth, IIRC, which is nearly half of our available 6Mbps.

I also hooked up the 40" TV to my laptop using 1920x1080 resolution for a nice, native wide screen display.  I did a "F11" maximize within IE7 so the top bar would float away.  After clicking play on the movie, the Netflix plugin (or whatever it was) had to be installed.  This installed in seconds and seamlessly.  The movie started playing in a tiny little window right away (although, on checking for the above screen shot, it was 720px wide).  That was impressive, so I hit the "full screen" button and got a dialog saying that Windows Media Player had to install something for a requested action to work.  Clicking yes had it install something and success dialog popup mere seconds later.  After this, the full screen button worked fine. A small control bar was at the bottom of the screen and also hid itself after a few seconds. 

The viewing experience was great.  The screen had no borders on it, unlike some of the playing experiences with the networks.  It fit almost perfectly within the full 40" display, too, and played without any annoying tearing that many of the players experience.  Throughout the entire movie, we never experiences any skipping of frames or other sort of troubles that might be caused by slow bandwidth to the server.  A couple of times we paused it; this also had no negative impact on the playback.  It paused and resumed like playing any movie might.

Picture quality was not too bad, given that they are sourced from a DVD.  There were no noticeable deinterlacing issues.  Most things were smoothly blurred for the 1920x1080 resolution we were playing at compared to native DVD at 720x480.  Now, the non-full screen player window looked much smaller than 720x480, so I don't know if it's actually being streamed at DVD resolution anyway. (Update: It was 720 wide, but not 480 high.  Instead, it was 390 high which made it a 1.85 aspect ratio screen.  This means it's probably movie dependent.  Click on the first screen shot to see the actual size.)

The biggest issue with the quality, though, was the color depth.  Faces and skies ended up being made of only a few color bands or so.  Many other things that had slowly changing colors had also being downsampled to only a few color bands.  This made these things, which included many faces, look like rough topographic maps.  When we were within only a few feet of the screen this was actually a very distracting issue.  Jungle scenes and scenes where everything was moving were movie or just busy were actually much better looking.  Sure, they weren't sharp, but they didn't have the coloring issue.  When back farther from the screen, only the worst of this would show.

I hope they can figure out a way to make this better.  I also don't know if it was just that movie, though.  As we watch more, we'll have no choice but to keep an eye on it because it really is bad enough to notice and, like I mentioned, actually be distracted by it.

Overall, though, this does make a great personal library supplement and filler for when we don't have any Netflix DVDs or HD-DVDs on hand.  They seem to be adding new movies fairly quickly, too.  Maybe the day will come when we'll only be renting HD-DVDs and playing anything else back online.  We'll see. ;)

Posted by Shane on February 14, 2007 7:37 AM | Permalink