So, I have a Netflix membership. They’ve started offering increasing numbers of movies as streaming video. Free with the membership. So, I’m trying to catch up with “Heroes” season 1 which I lost track of in mid-season. Catching up via Netflix streaming. I had to download some kind of IE browser plug-in that allows me to watch. Even though I’m using a MacBook with an ordinary wireless connection (not even hardwired to my Internet connection), it’s like watching a DVD on my laptop. Full screen, glitch free, sharp as it can be. No buffering. Astounding. How is such a thing possible?
Tubes.
LOTS OF THEM.
Praise Al Gore.
It’s a series of tubes, right?
Yeah. I think that’s it.
and parallel tubes too! 
And each tube has 6 holes!
no, no, no holey tubes 
The cool thing with NetFlicks streaming videos is: If you’re tech savvy, you can actually download the file that get streamed and watch it later when you might have more time and be offline, like on an airplane.
As far as I can tell, it’s not illegal, since the file has rights management, and when you connect to watch the file, it connects to netflix to authorize 24 hour access to the file. After 24 hours is up, you can’t watch it until you renew your license…which you can pretty much do any time as long as you’re a NetFlicks member and can get access to the internet.
My guess would be “Honking big local caches”–with a limited menu, they could do something like this.
Second guess would be "a built-in bit-torrent client/server in the browser they made you install. Did you read the AUP, or just click OK without reading, like everyone else?
“Or”? There’s an alternative to clicking without reading?
I’m an idiot. I never read Ts & Cs. I just click-click-click…
It’s like those tubes at the First National Bank where you can just drive up in your truck and there’s a cannister and you send it back and forth to the teller lickitty split, like a vacuum cleaner.
That’s cool technology fer sure, but I still can’t get the appeal of sitting in a desk chair and watching a movie on a small (compared to our 42" plasma) computer monitor. Even harder to comprehend is watching a movie on an iPod screen.
I guess in Dale’s case he’s doing it for the utilitarian purpose of seeing stuff that he missed and might not be able to see otherwise, but all in all I’d rather get the DVD and watch it in comfort.
I used bittorrent to download the entire first season, but now I need to find time to watch them.
Btw, I run GNU/Linux Fedora Core 6 rather than Windows, but I can dual boot Linux and Windows XP Home edition. Boy, Windows is so sluggish compared to Linux. I only boot Windows only if I absolutely have to.
As I am continually downloading stuff, so streaming has lots of breaks. I usually put them on pause until the entire video is downloaded before I watch it.
I can’t put my new whistles down, though. 
Don’t read Ts&Cs or EULAs. Or the Romantic Poets. Or Nicholas Sparks.
Understood. I have an 27-inch non-HDTV, non-widescreen TV. So…
It looks great on my laptop screen, fills up a decent chunk of my visual field and bud headphones make it possible for me to hear the movie without turning up the volume to levels uncomfortable for my wife and pets. Hearing issues continue to be, uh, issues for me. I still have enough hearing in the right ear to create a little stereo effect but I can’t use the telephone on that side. Left ear has pretty decent hearing, but nasty tinnitis. So it goes.
Next weekend, I’m going to attach a little FM transmitter to my TV and that’ll give me the option of using my MP3 player with the built in FM tuner while watching TV.
My laptop has S-Video out so I can connect it to my TV and watch away. I started watching Red Dwarf from the start.
I love the fact that they removed the monthly time limits, I doubt most people would use more than their allotted amount anyway. I do wish the selection was a bit better though.
The networks have also jumped on the streaming video bandwagon (which
helped beget the current writer’s strike). Each network has backed a different
streaming technology. CBS has a pretty crappy plugin, Fox uses a decent
Flash player, etc. NBC is by far the furthest along. Their player is quite good
(though its fullscreen mode doesn’t play nice with my laptop). I use it to watch
shows that my wife won’t watch, but that doesn’t deserve hard-disk space on
my DVR… like Chuck and the Bionic Woman. I watched the entire previous
season of the Office over the summer. They only make the most recent season
available, though. I maintain a deep and abiding love for technology. What an
interesting time to be a content consumer.
I download Doctor Who and Torchwood and watch them
this way before they’re available in America… It’s great!
Up until very recently, I had a 27" television. I got it 15 years ago, or so. Old CRT televisions are measured on the diagonal, so a 27" 4:3 TV is about 22" wide by 16" tall.
I have a 22" widescreen monitor on my computer, which is about 20" wide and 12" tall, with higher resolution.
So my computer monitor is actually about the same size as the television I had up until last year, and the pictures are crisper. I have no problems watching movies on it. It pales in comparison to a 42" plasma though 