Category: Sci-Fi

My little Roku streaming video-on-demand player is so nifty I could kiss it. Nobody else has, that I’ve seen, done a direct video capture off of a Roku, so I’ll do one here. I don’t want to present an idealized view, so I used WiFi rather than ethernet, and I made the recording during the peak evening period, when there always seems to be congestion and the buffering can slow down before the video starts playing. Netflix is very good, however, about picking up where you’ve left off. This is a glitch-free run-through. Everything is the result of a button click on the remote, although now I realize that I neglected to demonstrate a simple pause and continue.

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The quality rating is for the end-to-end connection, with four dots being the best. There’s a separate WiFi signal strength rating. Scanning can be done in three speeds, or you can manually click between individual preview pictures.

Picking up on a theme from earlier this month with June Marlowe in “School’s Out”, that’s the late Sue Randall playing Beaver’s too-good-to-be-true teacher, Miss Landers. Kids have always had innocent and safe crushes on teachers, of course, but over the past 20 years something seems to have changed. The number of women teachers who have developed what is delicately described as inappropriate relationships with students is shocking. Priests abusing kids in private was covered up for decades, if not centuries, but a teacher running off with a student isn’t something that happens unnoticed, and fifty years ago it would have been even bigger news than it is today.

Vera Miles, who I consider to have been a second only to Grace Kelly in the looks department, is seen with Francis (Mayberry) Bavier, in the first installment of the anthology series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”. In 1940, fifteen years before he appeared on TV, Hitchcock introduced the long-running radio series “Suspense”, as heard here, in an entry I made back in the fall of ’07.

Another follow-up to a previous post is a bit of remastered Star Trek that you can compare to a transfer from VHS I made, by clicking here.

Netflix has a real winner with its Watch Instantly service, now that it uses the Xbox 360 as a set top box. With my FiOS Internet bandwidth of 20 Mbps — better than any other home Internet service — it wouldn’t be wise for Netflix to send HD content at its 19 Mbps maximum, as is seen with FiOS TV, so compression artifacts are apparent. SD material also has more noise than DVD, but it looks good enough, it plays smoothly, and being able to watch old Star Trek episodes on demand is something I’ve long wished for. Right now season 1 is online. I recorded a bit of “Shore Leave” off of the projection screen with my digital camera. Keep in mind the picture is about 70 inches diagonal.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/FEB/ShoreLeave.flv 480 360]

And just for fun, here’s the same AVI source file converted to MP4 format instead of FLV. The contrast and color in MP4 more accurately reflect what the Panasonic PT-AX200U put on the movie screen, and it handles fast changes between frames much better than FLV, but you’ll need Adobe Flash 9 or higher to watch it.

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The Senate has delayed the end of analog TV transmission, which I think is a mistake, but in our house we’re using the absolute latest in TV technology. Because we’re finally set up to play Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature on Eric’s Xbox 360.

Whether SD, or Netflix’s limited selection of HD material, the video quality isn’t up to FiOS TV, but it’s certainly watchable, there are no glitches, and the operation of the user interface is fast and smooth. Here’s an example — one minute of the series “Heroes” in a somewhat grainy HD rendering, as seen on the Panasonic 720p front projector.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/JAN/NetflixHD.flv 480 360]