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Inside the Tech of the Roku Netflix Player
MojoKid writes "A little over a week ago Netflix unveiled the Netflix Player, developed by the team at Roku, a set-top box for watching on-demand movies and TV. This interview with Tim Twerdahl, the VP of Consumer Products for Roku, goes into some detail about the guts of the box and the future of the set-top box. Of course the system runs an embedded Linux OS, but interestingly also runs on a Nexperia (Philips) media processor."
Wow, that was one of the most in-depth interviews I've ever read. They go really into the details of what makes it run and how the system works. Well worth the read!
The only part missing is the part about the service is at the mercy of the delivery ISP. If you think bandwidth shaping is bad for torrents, see what the Cable TV providers do when this competes with the cable company's own offering. I have enough Buffering..... playing. buffering...........playing...buffering....... to know this service will be at the mercy of the bandwidth providers. When it takes 6 hours to deliver a 2 hour movie, it won't be popular for many. Some will be lucky and actualy get enough bandwidth, but the number 1 complaint will be related to low resolution as a solution to interuptions to buffer content.
Too much of the contry has better bandwidth provided by Fedex, UPS, and Blockbuster. This will only get worse with high def content.
The truth shall set you free!
jdb2
That's a great point / warning and it's one more reason why we (pretty much everywhere) need net neutrality legislation.
My ISP has a maximum transfer / month and I don't see anything wrong with that. They tell me what it is, give me a way to check my usage and I can purchase more if I want / need it. With that kind of setup there's no reason for ISPs to shape traffic (unless 3rd parties pay them to, which is something the legislation needs to make illegal) so I don't think the ISPs have much to lose following a similar model. If bandwidth is their concern there's ways to cover that without harming / deceiving their consumers.
Netflix's current streaming video service (on the watch instantly tab) is basically useless to a lot of people because it only works under IE, thereby meaning windows only.
The advent of this technology holds out hope that someday Netflix might also actually support the rest of us customers who would like to watch streaming stuff but aren't using IE and/or Windows.
I beg to differ. I am a *very* happy Netflix subscriber and the catalog of films for instant viewing is *huge*. You probably don't get to see all offerings until you subscribe and have access to the browsing interface. Not only is it ready for prime time, it is raising the bar. (The flaw is that Windows is required to view the instant titles.)
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
I completely agree.
... we're talking electricity, water etc.) then you solve the problem of giving the government vs. giving the market control. Then every voting citizen is awarded an equal share in the corporation and it's run like a business but the voting public gets a say. The government doesn't have control, a corporation does but it's a corporation that's owned entirely by the public.
I've always been torn with this issue because on the one hand I believe that any kind of infrastructure that "the people" require needs to be public and open for anyone. On the other hand I believe in small government and don't like to give too much power to the governing body. So which is the lesser of the two evils ? (I know some people have strong opinions on that but I'm pretty much torn for reasons that would take me off topic).
So as a Canadian I had an idea with regards to how Canada (or anywhere) can handle that. In Canada (and other British Commonwealth nations) we have something called a "Crown Corporation". The only crown corporation in Canada currently being The Bank of Canada (which serves a similar purpose to The Federal Reserve in the US). If all necessary infrastrucure (which doesn't have to only be telecom / internet
I'd love to hear replies pointing out the flaw with my idea because I'm sure there are some.
At this very moment there is exactly one cable provider servicing Sandusky, Ohio: Buckeye Cablevision. Buckeye Cablevision has a franchise agreement with the city to use the city's rights-of-way. This agreement is not exclusive; any other cable company is more than welcome to negotiate a similar agreement without supplanting Buckeye.
Why doesn't this happen? Everybody agrees that the ROI is insanely low. A new company would have to roll out new infrastructure and then go through the process of trying to convince current Buckeye customers to switch to their services (pretty much everyone who wants cable already has it, so new customers would be negligible). Undoubtedly, some will, but not enough to justify the investment in infrastructure.
This situation is called a natural monopoly.
The only way to foster competition in a natural monopoly is, oddly enough, via government intervention. One solution is to have the government buy the infrastructure via eminent domain and open access to anyone on non-discriminatory terms. This would immediately foster competition.
I'd prefer this solution to net neutrality legislation myself, but I'd prefer net neutrality legislation to simply deregulating the cable/telephone companies. The only thing that keeps them from going all out with anti-customer policies is the current (weak) regulation.
Well, call it a hunch, but we're talking about Linux on a "new" CPU and on custom hardware, including no hard drive, flash memory, and special data in and video out circuitry. I suspect there may be a few changes to "standard" Linux. And just as Linksys had to do when they built routers that used GPL code, this project should be required to release the sources. And users shouldn't have to speculate if anything was changed or what was, it should be available as source. They may not want to do that, but it's the price that they agreed to when they chose to build on GPL code rather than go the much more complex route of completely building their own from scratch.
This little Linux box with it's special video hardware could be a very slick platform to build upon. I certainly hope that, if they don't release the sources on their own (and I rather expect that they just might not play nice), they should be made to do so.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I don't usually buy something when it first appears but in this case I made an exception. I ordered my ROKU on the day it became available and I received it yesterday (Saturday).
My first impression was positive. The unit is much smaller than I was expecting it to be and it can connect to just about anything. The one shortcoming I found is that the unit ships with only minimal cabling. There was no ethernet cable, s-video cable, or hdmi cable included. The only cable provided (besides the power supply) is a 3-pair RCA composite video/analog stereo sound cable. The unit can use WiFi or hard-wired ethernet and I prefer to use hard-wired when possible. Fortunately I had a cable handy and it took me less than 5 minutes to get the hardware set up.
The unit defaults to DHCP so it had no trouble configuring itself to work on my network. The first thing the unit did was to download a software update and restart. I've got a 15 megabit symetrical fiber connection for my Internet service so this went pretty fast. The picture quality is surpurb and the sound is excellent. The unit takes about 3 seconds to buffer content before it will play and it displays a progress meter while buffering. The user interface is simple and easy to navigate. My only complaint at this point is that you cannot browse all the available content from the TV. With one exception, you must log into your Netflix account via the web and add "watch now" selections to your queue. I'm going to complain about this and I fully expect a future software update to address this shortcoming. The exception mentioned above relates to content with multiple episodes. The unit will allow you to browse and view additional episodes (if any) of the shows in your queue.
All in all this is a cool gadget and definately worth the one hundred dollar price.
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