[Macworld]

Post your comments for First Look: Netflix Instant Watching on Mac here

[FLJetFlyer]

Hi Jason,
How did you managed to get the new player added to your account?
I called yesterday and both the representative I talked to and her manager assured me and re-assured me that they could not manually add the service in my account.
They said they were mostly including the new player for new accounts and that existing customer will come later.
As you can imagine I was pretty disappointed in Netflix's business practices since being a member since 1999 I expected some priority from them.
I've been trying to use instant watch since they launched in 2007 and I also had bad experience with it in VMWare. Any tip you can give on how to get the new player turned on in existing customers accounts would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

[6555]

This the third review about Netflix that I've read that doesn't a single direct link to finding out more info on Netflix about instant viewing. If "now, at last, Mac users are welcome to the party," could please provide a link? Or is this just another piece of paid advertising for Netflix?

[6555]

You're not only one feeling this way. There must have been about 8 Apple sites reporting this story, even though it doesn't seem to be a reality for most Mac users. Mac journalists must be hard up for news.

[Jason Snell]

It's because I'm a member of the media and wanted to write this story.
Many consumer-electronic companies do phased roll-outs of products. They do it because they want to test with smaller groups and make sure there aren't terrible bugs. TiVo, SlingBox, DirecTV, Dish Network... they all do it this way.
Netflix says that this feature will be rolled out to Mac users, but it won't be all at once, but rather in a wave. However, it would be nice if they had a form you could fill out to ask for advanced access!

[Jason Snell]

@6555: It's being rolled out slowly -- as the story states right up top. We're writing about it because it's news! This is a feature people have been waiting for. If everyone had been using it for weeks, it wouldn't be news! It's slowly rolling out, but this was a "first look" for a reason.

Update: I've added a link to the Netflix Blog to the story. Hope that helps.

[kennethfcooper]

Jason,
Ignore the advice you receive from amateurs on this blog. Of course, that means you should ignore my advice about ignoring advice... Never mind.
Your team is doing a great job! I enjoy the read.

[derekc]

Regarding watching Netflix via Windows in Parallels:
I've been doing this since about May with mostly excellent results. Not all films are transformed into streams with equal quality. I watched a film a couple nights back that was rather dreadful in full screen mode. It was the first I had seen that looked so badly pixillated. I started it from scratch again with the same results.
The down sides of this method are: (1) You have to deal with Windows, which remains surprisingly painful after all these years. I have been running XP. (I guess I should be thankful as I find Vista to be even more excruciating). (2) You are forced to use Internet Explorer, which happens to be the single least secure web browser available. (3) Parallels remains quirky. For example, I can't compress my Windows disk image, and there is no apparent reason why. According to Parallels there is nothing wrong with my image settings, and yet.... (4) Sometimes the player interface either lies to you are acts retarded. I've had it refuse to play a movie because, it says, I have insufficient bandwidth. Yeah right. So I start the film from scratch and it decides to be sane and everything works perfectly. Soooo Microsoft. Where's my gun?! Patience required. Antacid not included.

[Eight_Quarter_Bit]

The lack of video output on your secondary monitor is probably an intended "feature", not a bug. I have encountered similar things (in Windows) on other online movie rental sites using Microsoft's WMV codec to display the video.

Microsoft does it so you can't hook up an S-video out and use your DVD recorder to duplicate the movie you are watching. Unfortunately, it also means that if all you want to do is use your PC to watch movies on your 56" big-screen TV hooked up as a second monitor you're out of luck. I have tried "clone view" where the second monitor is mealy a copy of the first, and dual-view where each monitor is separate. A split second after the video is visible on the TV it blacks out. Highly annoying.

A possible work-around is using a TV that has a DVI or VGA input as your "primary" monitor. Unfortunately I can't test the hypothesis, since my TV only has S-Video and RCA composite inputs.

As usual Microsoft screws paying customers trying to use their software in a legitimate way while pirates watch direct DVD rips, for free, on their big-screen-56-inch-mega-screen-secondary-monitor-TVs.

[mdntcallr]

Guys, The Netflix Mac program is still in Beta.
It is not yet being rolled out to a wide customer base.
They are testing it, and i believe should offer it if any bugs found are gotten rid of. I have used silverlight 2 and find it great for mac users. actually works better on Macs than my windows pc.
anyway, i am looking forward towards getting netflix on my mac :-).
the neat thing about netflix and silverlight is that netflix uses several different bitrate masters of the films or content. silverlight is able to serve up the movies and keep tabs on the bitrate, if at any time extra bandwidth comes on your internet connection or internet congestion clears up, the picture can get better, or the same if less bandwidth or such is available. so, essentially silverlight and netflix once past the testing is sure to provide great content.

[Jason Snell]

@EightQuarterBit: Sort of makes sense, but the way it works is that it displays on your "primary" display (the one with the menu bar). Which could easily be an external device. In fact, my "primary" for this testing was an external monitor! Oh well.
Compared to many Flash video programs, Silverlight works really well in full-screen mode. I saw smooth video, no dropped frames.

[Eight_Quarter_Bit]

Ah, excellent! Glad to hear it's less restricted than some of my previous experiences. It may actually be usable to me when it comes out then. I look forward to it.

[rlockhart]

I couldn't get the Roku Netflix Player to work on my wireless (or wired) network. In fact, of the several devices I own, including a Roku Soundbridge, this was the only device that couldn't join my network. Roku tech support, which is outsourced to India or Pakistan, was unable to help. One technician offered to call back with a solution, but two days later, not having heard from him or anyone else, I called back to get an RMA and returned the unit.
What I find ironic is that no one offered to replace the player. I know that the Roku wireless adapter was working since I could see and connect it to my access point and even receive an IP, but was never able to join the network. For the record, I tried wired as well as wireless and experienced the same problem.
Oh well, I guess it was destined not to be. If you, however, are thinking of buying the Roku Netflix Player, be aware that it apparently doesn't work on all networks and that tech support isn't so hot.

[greggT]

what is the difference between "dropping frames" and a "still image for a few seconds"? is it that in the first case you never get to see the frame whereas in the second case you see it, but delayed?
i installed the WINDOWS player on my intel imac's parallels 3.0 machine and it worked well (with the aforementioned freezes) after about a 10 minute installation process which involved a reboot. not bad. i watched a 2-hour movie and 2 30-minute tv episodes and experienced 5 freezes. parallels can be frustrating in that it fails to do commonplace actions like a non-virtual PC, but with all other app's closed, it played movies fairly smoothly.
although the player zooms to full screen, the image quality degrades. you can just sit farther from the screen... :) perhaps, for the silverlight player, they should have take the display area into account as well as the net speed to choose the resolution.
like others, i also found video corruption on my second (external) monitor. i get horizontal lines across the entire window. but IE6 doesn't know how to display on that monitor either and i would 'betcha that these are related somehow. does VMware have this fault? i think it's fairly silly to inhibit the external display -- pirates have LOTS of other ways to capture the video stream and all this does is make legitimate users angry and confused.