Good Grief! More Roku

Back in November, I expressed an interest in the Peanuts Motion Comics, done in Flash animation (like South Park and Spongebob), and available on iTunes. I don’t have iTunes, but today, Roku added Amazon Video on Demand to its streaming digital player, and for $8.99 I bought all ten of the Peanuts Motion Comics. I’ve taken my first step — well, my second — into a larger world of streaming video, on TV, free of the computer.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/MAR/MotionComics.flv 320 212]

BTW, I have my WiFi glitch with the Roku all fixed. It was a DHCP problem with the FiOS/Actiontec router. I tried adjusting the lease period, etc., but ultimately the solution was to use the WiFi access point of a spare router — a D-Link DI-624 — and it’s now working AOK.

Rokusjesdag

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.

[MEDIA=24]

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.

Kudo for Roku

Does Roku mean less blogging? Less running? More time spent motionless, with remote in hand? It sure could, if I let it happen. Roku’s Netflix player is fan-tab-u-lous! It’s limited only by the content that Netflix makes available. (But note: I have 20 Mbps FiOS, so 2-5 Mbps for Netflix Watch Instantly isn’t a big deal, and WiFi reception is excellent, according to the Roku.) I see that none of the various videos on CNet, YouTube, etc., demonstrating the Roku are from a direct video capture. I’ll try to make one.

Stuck between a Roku and a soft place

My buddy Dennis and I agree that “Leave it to be Beaver” is one of the best, if not the best, TV show ever made. Years ago, I told Dennis, in a hopeful tone, that someday the entire library of “Beaver” episodes, all six seasons, would be available online for viewing anytime. Well, that day is here — well, almost. A few episodes, for reasons unknown, are available only on disc. But the funny thing about that is, only the first two seasons have been released on DVD. Anyway, thanks to the amazing Roku Netflix player, I can watch Beav’ and lots of other neat stuff while sitting on the porch couch, looking at the 32-inch Sony, instead of sitting in front of the computer.

The Roku Netflix player is, for $100 (plus shipping), the single best deal in existence — assuming you already have a Netflix subscription. It installed easily, the WiFi reception is excellent, and I could say a lot more, but I’ve got to get back to watching more of the Cleavers. Gosh… there’s Cheryl Holdridge as Wally’s sometimes girlfriend, Julie…

Cheryl Holdridge as Julie, in \

Man does not live by blog alone…

Daniel Lyons, the professional writer and editor who, for a time, was the blogging Fake Steve Jobs, has a column in Newsweek for everybody who ever thought they could make a living by blogging.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/183666

DogRat is a hobby. I’m not selling anything, there’s no advertising, and I have absolutely no expectation of the blog being anything more than an expense and time waster. For that matter, I don’t focus on any one thing, like the popular weblogs devoted to mining every minute bit of detail about a single subject. For me, DogRat is purely a vanity outlet.

Besides the single-subject blogs, I think the single-author blogs that work the best are the ones used to promote whatever it is the author really does for a living — cartoonists Jimmy Johnson and Scott Adams, and writers Mark Evanier and Brian Sibley, for example. Beyond those, the really big blogs, as Lyons says, “aren’t really blogs — they’re media companies that happen to feature, among other things, the work of some bloggers.”