Category: Tech

Roku expands offerings

Anybody in the U.S. who uses Netflix but doesn’t have a Netflix player for connection to a TV is really missing out. There are now a lot of Netflix-compatible devices. The one that I use, and love, is the Roku player.

Netflix seems to be on top of the movie game, and I think the industry has no choice but to deal with Reed Hastings and his vision of the future, the way Steve Jobs forced the music industry out of digital indecision. But I’m not on iTunes, in part because there are so many other options for music, especially for casual listening.

Roku offers services besides Netflix, and last night I took an update that enabled a bunch of additional channels. The one that caught my eye — actually, my ear — is the Pandora music service. A year ago I started using TheRadio.com, and it’s good, but I have to give the nod to Pandora, now that it’s on the Roku player. I want to hear everything that Elvis Costello has done that I don’t own, and Pandora makes that possible. I assume Costello gets money in the process, so everybody wins.

Another new Roku option is Revision3, with videos about tech topics. Looks promising. One of Revision3’s channels is Film Riot, where a guy named Ryan, who has some of Leonard Maltin’s mannerisms, teaches videography. Ryan’s latest entry features Popeye, which I liked, and I was impressed that he got into some history by talking about a technical innovation invented by Max Fleischer nearly a century ago.

Mediafly, sort of a news aggregator, is the only other Roku channel I wanted to try. Mediafly is rather rough around the edges, and not only is it slow to come up, there seems to be a bug that causes occasional lockups. Sometimes these are local to Mediafly, but sometimes they affect everything else on the player, and a restart is needed.

Who blinked

Whether it’s called Video on Demand, IPTV, streaming video, or whatever, once you’ve seen it you know it’s eventually going to take over television. At our house we take Netflix Watch Instantly for granted, on Eric’s Xbox 360 that’s hooked up to the video projector via component video, and on the Roku HD player that’s in regular composite SD video on my beloved Sony 32XBR100.

Last summer I wrote about a Doctor Who episode called “Love and Monsters” (the YouTube video I’d embedded was pulled). Another memorable installment, one of the most enjoyable hours of TV I have ever watched, is called “Blink”.

Recently, the whole family watched “Blink” on the Xbox 360. It wasn’t in HD, but it wasn’t supposed to be. The quality of the highly compressed widescreen picture was, to borrow a line from The Doctor, a bit “wibbly wobbly,” but it was serviceable.

Funny thing, though, because last night, on a lark I put the Roku player on the projector with an HDMI cable. “Blink” was in HD! There was no doubt about it.

This left me wondering if there’s a setting that needs changing on the Xbox 360’s Netflix software, or if Netflix upgraded the Doctor Who files without adding an HD logo. I’ll see tonight, when I have Eric play a bit of “Blink” on the Xbox again.

This video clip has a few minutes of “Blink” in HD on the Roku player and taken with the Canon digital camera sitting on top of the projector. I add to the suspense of the scene by sticking my fingers into the left of the picture at 1:45, so you can get an idea of the image size.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/OCT/WhoBlink.flv 512 384]

‘A Hard Day’s Night’ on CD-ROM

Way back in January 1994, I ordered my first “serious” desktop computer. It was MS-DOS 5 with Windows 3.1, on a 40 MHz AMD processor with 4 MB of memory, a 160 MB drive, generic Tseng ET4000 video card, and a 14″ SVGA CRT. I installed a Soundblaster 16 card with a proprietary SCSI interface for a Panasonic CD-ROM drive that used caddies.

One of the first CD-ROM’s I had (which, come to think of it, might have been a gift from Denro), was “The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, the complete uncut movie”. It was put out by the Voyager Company, known for its high quality Criterion label of LaserDisc videos. My LD copies of “A Hard Day’s Night” and “HELP!” are both from Criterion.

I was thrilled with this new technology! I could actually watch the movie on my computer, albeit in extremely compromised quality, with the script automatically following along. Here are some sample screens.

A Hard Day\'s Night CD-ROMA Hard Day\'s Night CD-ROM

A Hard Day\'s Night CD-ROMA Hard Day\'s Night CD-ROM

A Hard Day\'s Night CD-ROMA Hard Day\'s Night CD-ROM

Enlarged, the screen caps show the actual video image size. I’ve scaled up one of the MOV files from the CD to 320×240. It runs at a measly 16 fps, but this was hot stuff in 1993, with online streaming video still a long way off. Note that even here, in this limited presentation, “I Should Have Known Better” sounds better than on the Miramax DVD!

[MEDIA=67]

1965 comic book predicted the iPhone

Denro visited today, which is always fun, bringing with him the new mono Beatles CD set. We listened to “Sgt. Pepper’s” and realized that mono is indeed the best way to hear the Lonely Heart’s Club Band. The experience really was as if we were hearing it almost for the first time.

I always expect Dennis to bring a stack of old comic books, and he didn’t disappoint. One story in particular caught my eye. Take a look at this drawing.

Gil Kane drew this picture of a smartphone in 1965! He really nailed it in every way. Very impressive.