Recently in Entertainment Category

[Edit: Added another screenshot to better explain pre-buffering.]

[Edit: Added details about usage time.]

I've had NetFlix's "Watch Now" function enabled on my account for a few months now, and I think it's safe to say I'm hooked.  It isn't quite the same as, say, having a set-top box for VOD, but in some ways it's better -- mostly because it's an extension of an existing video service that I've come to love, and it works almost entirely without hassle.

For those of you who don't know about this, NetFlix's "Watch Now" feature serves up on-demand video across a broadband connection.  It works in IE only, since you need to install a small (1MB) client-side component that uses Windows Media Player as the delivery mechanism.  But for the most part, it's painless; installing the plugin is the most difficult part.

Watching a movie is like a streamlined version of picking something out of the NetFlix catalog.  Click on the title you want to watch, and after about a 30-second pre-buffer delay you're watching the movie.  The picture quality is virtually indistinguishable from a DVD -- it's marginally softer, but that's about all.  I watched several of my favorite titles in fullscreen mode and saw no discernible difference between them and their DVD counterparts.  The playback window can be resized and also shown in full-screen mode, too.

 
NetFlix Watch Now version of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
The video quality is practically a match for the DVD edition.

The movie also pre-buffers as you watch.  Note the darker segment of the seek bar; that's how much has been pre-buffered for playback.  After a couple of minutes you have a generous (5-6 minute) read-ahead buffer that keeps the picture from cutting out on you even under bad network conditions.

 
The playback pre-buffers as you watch.

Also, TV shows are handled a little differently from movies: note the "Episode | Prev | Next" buttons at the bottom right of the player.  This way you can switch between episodes of the same show without having to exit the player and relaunch it.

The amount of playback time you get per month depends on which subscription you have.  I have the four-at-a-time subscription, and with that I get 24 hours of playback time a month -- enough for a whole season of TV, or 12 feature movies.  That's more than I'll probably ever use in a given month, personally.

Here's what I don't like so far:

• Limited selection of titles.  There's probably not a lot that can be done about that right now, since the service is still young.  But NetFlix is in one of the best possible positions -- aside from Amazon.com -- to offer the broadest selection of material.  And the number of things that have already shown up are impressive enough to get me watching right away: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (as well as the original Ghost in the Shell theatrical film), The Matrix, 3 Women, Being There, Casablanca, Chinatown, The Last Temptation of Christ, Jaws, House of Games, Memories of Murder, Real Genius, Rebel Without A Cause, Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense (and the hugely underrated True Stories), The Year of Living Dangerously, and on and on.
• Seek function in the playback control is very crude.  You can only seek to within a minute or so at best when playing something back.  On the plus side, seeking within the area you've already buffered to your computer is pretty much instantaneous.  There's also no frame-advance or frame-back function, which would be really handy.
• Not available on all accounts yet.  It wasn't active on my own account for some time, and I suspect that's been due to them adding more servers and allowing that many more account-holders to access the service as time goes on.
• Video quality varies.  Some of the less well-mastered titles don't look as good.  Gohatto ("Taboo"), for instance, was originally created from a PAL master and had some field-blending issues.  The A-list stuff typically looked great, though.
• No multiple video / audio streams.  I'm used to having switchable audio or subtitle tracks on DVDs.  Watch Now only has one of each, so foreign films are typically subbed with hard-coded titles that don't look as good as their DVD counterparts.
• You need to close WMP before using it.  Not a big thing, but be warned.  At one point I had WMP open when I launched the player, and a bizarre cross-interaction caused WMP to crash and corrupt my music library.  It wasn't hard to rebuild that (it happened automatically when I next launched WMP), but it's best not to have something like that happen beforehand.

Still, if you have a NetFlix account and have a "Watch Now" tab in your main menu, give it a shot.  I'm going to be very interested in seeing how this develops over time -- especially if they plan to also allow streaming of HD content in the future.  (Can they?  Perhaps they can -- what they can do within the existing constraints of bandwidth is already pretty impressive.)

Now that CES has more or less wrapped, and I've sifted through a good deal of the reporting therein, I thought I'd share some of the things that have jumped out at me.

1. News about the iPhone is impossible not to come by, and after Apple's stock leaped (full disclosure: I own some myself), people started to question the logic of the device: Why Cingular?  Why no third-party software on the phone?  Why such a high pricetag for a device that is essentially being sold into a commodity market?  Even asking for 1% of a market that is saturated with cheap hardware -- and one where, in a way, the hardware isn't even really the issue anymore; it's the quality of the networks and the service offered across it -- seems like they're asking too much.  But I suspect this is simply a loss-leader, foot-in-the-door measure by a company that wants to break into a new space -- the way Microsoft lost money upfront with the first iteration of the XBOX but are now very solid players in a space where they were initially seen as being wholly unwelcome and unwanted.  Now if they can just resolve the nasty lawsuit over the name....
2. The HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc camps are getting all the more entrenched:
   
   a) Warner Brothers' hybrid HD/BR disc.  Apparently many of their HD titles will be in this format only, as a way of consolidating SKUs and saving on manufacturing costs.  I'm still a touch leery of the idea if only because of the way Sony tried similar tactics with HDCD (blech), but the two situations really aren't as analogous as it might seem.
   
   b) Triple-layer HD-DVD and beyond.  Toshiba claims they can push the capacity of an existing HD-DVD to 50GB+, which would kind of negate any immediate advantages afforded by Blu-ray.  What's not clear is how feasible this is with the players that have already been put onto the market -- would they be able to accomodate such discs with nothing more than a firmware upgrade?
   
   c) The porn factor.  In my opinion the idea that the porn industry could decide which format is the victor is so myopic it isn't even funny; it's just wishful thinking based on a loose analogy about Beta vs. VHS.  One joke I heard before sums this aspect up nicely: In what format do people want their porn? Any dang way they can get it.
3. Microsoft's "home server", which sounds a bit like Windows Media Center Plus.  One of the things I have always been annoyed about is Microsoft's lack of a server product that was intended for home or even home office environments, and that didn't cost a ton of money.  Among the ideas being tossed around for what this thing is for: network-wide automated incremental backup, central data repository, media streaming, and most likely firewall/network filtering too.  It's also clear that it won't be a standalone software product (unless you're a system builder), but a bunch of hardware boxes offered by different manufacturers loaded with a custom version of Windows Server 2003.  RTM for the software is scheduled for June 22, so I'm guessing we'll see the hardware itself in the fall.  Hewlett-Packard is going to be one of the first manufacturers to offer such a device.  But, again, at what price?  (The fact that the system is supposed to ship without and run without a display or a keyboard -- it's a "headless / lights-out" configuration, in other words -- will cut some dollars off by default.  My guess is that it won't appear for less than $500, which is a lot more than what you could pay for a simple desktop machine with no display ... but then you'd have to configure it all yourself.  And that's presumably what people are shelling out for -- the luxury of not having to do that.)

If nothing else, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2007 has proven that there's no end in sight to the Clash of the HD-DVD / Blu-ray Disc Titans.  Here's just a few of the goodies that were unveiled at the show:

• Toshiba's 51GB triple-layer HD-DVD disc.  It's yet to be approved by the DVD Forum, but they're confident it'll be a standard-issue item.  I suspect existing players will need a firmware upgrade before they can recognize this thing, though.
• But the Blu-ray Disc people aren't about to be one-upped: they unveiled a quad-layer, 100GB Blu-ray disc as well, and claim that they can cram as much as 200 GB on a single disc (possibly by double-siding two 100GB discs).
• There's Toshiba's TWIN Format Disc, with HD-DVD on one side and regular DVD on the other -- although these "combi" format discs have never really sold all that well no matter what the format.
• And then there's LG's combination HD-DVD / Blu-ray Disc player, which will eventually also be released as a PC standalone drive.  If nothing else, I might as well start saving my pennies for that baby -- it sounds like the only logical way out of this mess.

(Oh yeah, and there was this company called Banana or something like that, they released this phone...)

Word around town was that the new content-scrambling system used by both Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD, AACS, had been cracked.  Turns out the news was premature: only the decryption keys to a few specific AACS-encoded titles on HD-DVD had been cracked, no thanks to an insecurity in Cyberlink's PowerDVD product.

VideoBusiness has a nice discussion of the whole thing in some detail, and the ever-informative folks at The Digital Bits put it this way:

Here's the bad news... those select titles (which so far include Warner's Full Metal Jacket, The Last Samurai and The Fugative, Paramount's Tomb Raider, and Universal's Apollo 13 and Van Helsing) could now be considered open and unprotected. The studios involved COULD decide to revoke the title keys on those specific unprotected HD-DVD discs, rendering them unplayable on all HD-DVD players, both software and hardware. Doing so would mean that those of you who already own the discs would have to work with the studios somehow to obtain replacement discs with new (and still valid and protected) title keys. The market is certainly small enough that the studios could do this without TOO much problem, though I don't imagine anyone involved would relish the hassle. We're making inquiries now to see what happens next and hopefully, we'll know more next week.

So basically, what we're likely about to witness is the AACS system demonstrating its own deliberately built-in ability to take a bullet and self-heal for the very first time in a real world situation. Fascinating.

"Fascinating" isn't the word I had in mind.  If one of the major "attractions" of using HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc is being constantly pestered about having to trade in my "cracked" discs for "re-protected" ones, I think I'll skip a generation.  The whole problem is not that the studios want to protect their content, but that they have to treat the consumer like a criminal to do it.  That said, if the costs of HD content are comparable to standard-def content (and so far they have been, amazingly), there may be that much less of an incentive to crack-and-rip.

Remember a while back I reported that HD playback would only be possible on PCI Express systems due to AGP video cards not supporting HDCP?  Looks like I was partly wrong: HDCP-capable cards do exist in the AGP form factor; they're just not all that common.  They're also upwards of $150 or so -- which, along with the $650 for a Blu-ray Disc drive, is still pretty heavy sugar to shell out.

Once again, signs point to "wait".  Especially since my favorite video company, the Criterion Collection, isn't going to produce HD in either format anytime soon.

On a mildly related note, some folks over at the Blu-ray Forum posted a thread with screenshots from both the regular DVD and the BR edition of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (one of the first BR titles).  The images seem to have gone missing as of this writing, but they were seriously impressive -- not just for the resolution of the pictures, but the colors were more discrete and not as washed-out (although I suspect that may be more a product of the post-production and mastering than the format per se).