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Roku Netflix Player
Installation
The little black box can connect to your TV in the popular ways, and can connect to the Netflix by way of Ethernet or wireless (oh teh noes, you need the Internets too? Hidden costs everywhere!) and the included guide should have you streamin' in fifteen minutes or less. This isn't a competition, but I had it going in four, and I was using wireless Internet. Included are analog RCA cables, which are adequate, considering that the movies Netflix streams are 480i and in stereo. However, as Netflix adapts their streaming, so can Roku; the player is capable of outputting up to 1080i and it supports 5.1 audio. Along with the instructions is a device code. It's a key that you plug into your Netflix account page. After you do that, Netflix knows which Roku Netflix Player to send your movies to. Since you're at Netflix anyway, you should add some movies to your watch instantly queue. In fact, you have to, as that's the only way to select content for viewing. It's a shortcoming, but it's also a lot easier to navigate using a keyboard and mouse than with a remote; I would love to see future updates that enable Roku-based browsing, even in a limited capacity.    In-Use The quality of the video and amount of pre-caching depend on the blazingality of your Internet connection. At home, with my poorly DSL, I was limited to the lowest encryption rate (500Kbps) giving better-than-bad-reception TV-quality, but at my office, I got the max (2200Kbps) which looks as good as any SD TV broadcast. Eat your heart out, regular DVDs!. No, but truthfully, DVDs look way better. One thing that the Roku does that the Internet Explorer-based player doesn't, is a kind of chapter-selection emulation. You can see a slide show of the movie or TV show in question, with frame-grabs of the video at ten-second intervals. There's no kind of skipping ahead available using web browsers. Also, if you stop a video and come back to it later, Netflix will begin streaming where you left off. It's an automatic dumb bookmark, but it would be a huge suck if there was nothing. The player doesn't offer more features than what you might guess by looking at the remote. It has four directions of navigation, a select button, a home button, and play/ pause, fast-forward, and rewind buttons. There aren't subtitle options, audio options, or even scaling options. Of course, those don't exist no matter how you chose to watch instantly, so they're not exactly missing on Roku's end of things. It's clear that the shortcomings are all Netflix-based, the greatest of all being selection. They don't have a lot of recent content, and they have a lot of content rated three stars and worse. Often with TV shows, they will have some but not all episodes of a season. But they're adding things constantly, and generally expanding as fast as they can afford to. By the time I thought I'd watched everything I thought was worth my time, I checked again and found an equal quantity of media gems. (Like Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter. How can that possibly go wrong!) Of course, even that's not entirely up to Netflix, they have to prove to the developers and owners of the content that streaming is the way to go; there's a real "we're all pulling together" sense about this stuff. There's potential.
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