PS3 to stream Netflix! - Page 3

Set your TV to stretch the image it is anamorphic. The PS3 will output SD titles in anamorphic 480p from which you have to stretch the image through your HDTV.

yeah, that's not a fix, that's a crappy workaround. it's going to look bad.

Why is it going to look bad? It's output as an anamorphic image so you're just stretching it to make it look how it should.

Do you even know the difference? I guess you never tried the same movie title on different dvd's, anamorphic vs. non anamorphic. If "stretched" looks the same to you then may i respectfully suggest to visit your optometrist.

I don't think you understand. It outputs widescreen SD content as 480p anamorphic which is meant to be stretched to get the correct image. Play an SD widescreen movie and see how it looks when you have your HDTV set to 4:3, it looks squished. Now set your HDTV to full mode to stretch the image and you'll get what the image is supposed to look like.

You can also see the same movie through your PC on Netflix.com and see that it's supposed to be widescreen. Movies like Corpse Bride and The English Patient which are 1.78 not 1.33.

Got my Netflix disc as promised and have played around with it. I like the GUI--looks a lot like most of the non-Xbox, non-TiVo ones. For the benefit of those who don't subscribe, I'll try to give something of a description of it.

There were no usage instructions included, but it was intuitively easy to figure out. When I first popped it in, I thought it was broken because I was somehow expecting to see the disc in the game column. Of course, it shows up in the video column, with the Netflix icon displayed. When you start it, it will give you a registration code to enter at netflix.com/ps3. Once I entered that, it almost instantly started displaying the title browser in my Instant Queue.

The title browser shows 7 visible full covers, with half covers visible on either side. The selected one in the center is 4 or 5 times as large as the others, with two lines of basic properties displayed below it: the title on the top line, the duration, rating and an indication of whether or not it has an available HD encoding below (for television series seasons, instead of duration, there's a count of episodes). You can get to the title description by pressing either ENTER, X or DOWN, where, at the top, you'll find a little cover graphic with three or four options (maybe five for TV series):

• Resume playing (if you'd played it and stopped before the end)
• play from beginning
• Star rating (in the form of a string of stars)
• remove from Instant queue (or "add to Instant queue", if the title isn't in the Instant Queue)

Below that, there's a short list of the title's starring actors with a description of the title underneath. At the bottom, more properties: duration, release year, HD indicator (if it has HD encodings) and the name of the director, followed by Genre and Subgenre on the bottom line.

If you choose "play from beginning" (or "resume playing", if it's there), playback will begin (or resume from where you left off). Before playback begins, the screen blacks out, it places the word "retrieving" with a "temperature gauge" style progress indicator at the bottom and the name of the film in the center of the screen, all plain white text against a black background, gradually lengthening red line in the progress indicator. When the progress indicator fills up, playback starts (or resumes). Unlike all of the other players (with the exception of the PC) there is no indicator of starting quality level--no bars, no balls, no nothing. However, unlike most of the players, you get some of the PS3's normal video information display when you press SELECT--sound type and current sound bit rate, video type and current video bit rate. For the stuff I watched, sound was always 128Kbps DD2.0 sampled at 48KHz and the video type was always AVC with variable bit rate. While watching both Serenity and Jarhead the bit rate peaked above 5 Mbps, so I assume that I was getting the HD encoding. The information display give no time info--neither progress or time remaining; kinda sucks since it's what I expect. You do get a scrub bar showing the progress and duration when you press PAUSE, FF or REW, so it's not too bad. Pressing STOP or UP will get you back to the description; if you didn't watch through the end of the title "resume playing" will be on the menu.

There are three speeds of FF and REW, using the "frame" selection style GUI. It doesn't speed up or slow down playback, it just presents you with a series of seven frames, with the center one larger--if you press PLAY, the center one is where you'll start playing again. At higher speeds, the time between frames is greater. All the other players have some variation on this (some with fewer frames displayed before and after, but a bigger center frame, etc). Pressing the ">>|" and "|<<" buttons doesn't do anything--they do something in both the Xbox and TiVo players (in Xbox, skip back and forth to tick marks on a scrub bar; on TiVo ">>|" will skip to the end and "|<<" will skip back several seconds).

Back at the title browser, above the display of covers, there are three tabs, the currently selected one in the middle. If you press UP, it will take you to those tabs where you can select a list of titles in a particular genre (and a couple of other things) to look at:

• Instant Queue
• Recently Watched
• New Arrivals: Movies
• New Arrivals: TV
• Comedy
• Action & Adventure
• Drama
• Sci Fi & Fantasy
• Independent
• Romance
• Thrillers
• Television
• Children & Family
• Horror
• Documentary
• Foreign
• Movies You'll Like
• Suspenseful Crime Dramas
• Dark Sci-Fi
• Violent Movies
• Visually Striking Movies
• Mind-Bending Movies
• Like: Serenity
• Like: The Terminator

Everything below "Movies You'll Like" are types of films that I told Netflix that I liked as an account preference. Serenity and Terminator are movies that I recently streamed, though Terminator isn't one of the most recent ones, so I'm not sure why it's showing me movies "like" it. Choose one of those tabs and the browser will fill with covers of movies of that genre, limited to 100, which I presume are the most popular ones. No matter what they do, a browser for the entire 18,000+ titles in an embedded device would be ungainly (as is the Amazon download browser on TiVo). If you select one of titles from that list, you can play it immediately without placing it in your Instant Queue, and playing it doesn't place it in you Instant Queue; there's an option to place it in your Instant Queue on the description display.

That's about it. The mechanics for choosing a TV series episode are a bit different, but I won't get into it.

Dislikes:

• No indication of quality level when you start playing.
• No way to start playing from the top browser level.
• Pressing the PLAY button in the description means "play from beginning"; I think it should be "resume playing".

Likes:

• You can get to the end of a list of titles by scrolling backward from the beginning and vice versa--very cool.
• The overall design of the GUI is nice. I might like it better than the Xbox's, which was my previous favorite.

I stated above that I didn't think that I'd be using this thing, but I just might. We'll see if swapping discs is terribly annoying.

that's not how it works. If it's anamorphic, the TV will automatically adjust. You won't need to do anything else. If there's no anamorphic flag, you'll never get good PQ

It is anamorphic. How can you not notice the image is anamorphic. The Wii's widescreen mode works the same way. It outputs a 480p anamorphic image which you have to manually stretch through your HDTV by setting it on full mode. No automatic anamorphic flag there either.

I don't think that's true. If I look at SD versions of widescreen movies and television, it outputs it to my television as widescreen 480p. I have definitely seen some titles that are presented as pillarboxed, pan-and-scan 4:3; I think that they were all Starz Play titles, though I can't recall which ones.

giedrys, which titles are you talking about? I'll try playing them and see if they come out as 4:3 for me.

Are these movies 4:3 for you? Corpse Bride, The English Patient, and Miracle at St. Anna. Because on my PC they're 16:9 but on the PS3 I have to stretch the image to get 16:9.

I think that's the point. They are incorrect on PS3. However, I can't test this theory until tomorrow.

That's funny because when I leave it at 4:3 the image looks squished. But when I stretch it through the full mode on my HDTV just like I do for PS2/GCN/Wii widescreen games then it looks fine.

There are some video demos of the PS3 Netflix disc up, this one at Engadget and this one at Joystiq.

They're all 16:9 on my screen and I checked my TV's format setting, which is "480p Standard". I cycled through 480p Expand, 480p Zoom, 480p Stretch, 480p Stretch Plus, 480p Narrow and 480p Standard--where I started--and the only one which appeared anamorphic was "480p Narrow", which is a setting for undoing linear stretch that some STBs will stubbornly output.

My PS3 is connected to an HDMI input on an Onkyo receiver (through an HDMI switch) and from there into an HDMI input on a 46" 1080p Mitsubishi Diamond Series LCD panel (three year old LT-46231).

So they outputted widescreen for you which means they do have an anamorphic flag. So looks like my HDTV is the one that is at issue in not automatically stretching the image. I have a Panasonic plasma 42'' PZ85U.

Well, here's my impressions. I will try to remain objective when comparing it to 360 as to avoid "fanboy" comments.

I will also not touch upon the known differences (disc required for PS3, Gold required for XBOX, etc).

I also do not have experience with other devices, so that's why I will compare to the 360.

Startup to queue:

• About the same for both systems

Look/Feel:

• The PS3 has bigger thumbnails (which is nice). Not that the 360's was ever a problem, but they're probably about 1/2 the size of the PS3's
• I do like the PS3 a little better with my remote, as after I select a movie, I can press "up" to go back to the queue, whereas on the 360 I have to press B, which is mapped to another button on my remote. I kindof like the PS3 being able to control everything with the "circle rocker" on my remote.
• I also like that the "active" movie in the queue is the center one. On the 360, it's the leftmost one (making it impossible to see the previous movie in the queue)
• Other than that, it's about a wash. Same info just displayed differently

Navigation of queue:

• The 360 wins hands down here. I can FLY through the titles on the 360 to the end of my queue in about 3 seconds. The PS3 is just painfully slow going from one title to the next. I couldn't even imagine wanting to watch #50 in my queue on the PS3. Is there a faster way to scroll left/right that I don't know of? I can't even hold down "right" or "left" on my remote and have it scroll through them...I have to repeatedly press the button over and over. Annoying as hell EDIT: I tried the controller, and L2 and R2 appear to jump 7 titles (what a strange choice...why not 5 or 10?). It's a little better. But I'd have to map those to my remote, and it still would be more annoying than just pressing right/left and having it fly through the titles.
• The PS3 does allow you to scroll "left" though to wrap to the end of your queue, which the 360 does not: You have to scroll right to the end and then left back to the beginning. However, as I said, it's very fast....just wish it wrapped like the PS3. But the 360 still wins for me due to speed....like if I had a 100 movies in my queue and want to watch #50. It would take a long time on the PS3 and a couple seconds on the 360.

Starting a movie:

• Again, the 360 wins (for me). You cannot press the "play" button on your remote to play a movie on the PS3. You must first select the title, then select "Play"...I prefer just being able to press one button.

Playing a movie:

• No noticeable differences in buffer-time before title starts to play, or PQ/AQ.
• The 360 gives you a "quality" bar as the movie is buffering (1-4 bars or HD). It also gives you the bars when you press "info." As far as I can tell, the PS3 doesn't give you this info, which I do not like at all. However, the PS3 does give you bitrate info, but that doesn't tell you what quality the NF feed is.
• The 360 is noticeably faster at rebuffering after you fast forward or rewind. It takes about 1/4-1/2 a second on the 360 (nearly instant), and roughly 5 seconds or so on the PS3.
• Most annoyingly, when I stop playing a movie on the PS3, it kicks me all the way back out, just like if I was playing a Blu-Ray. On the 360, it kicks me back to that title on my queue, where I am able to rate the movie and remove it from my queue. EDIT: Ok, if I press "Menu" on the remote, it takes me back out to my queue, but not to the movie I was watching...just reloads my queue again to the first title in it. Combine that with how painful it is to scroll left and right though, and I can't picture stopping the movie, scrolling over to the movie again, and selecting it to rate and remove it. Just too slow and too many steps.

The long and short of it is, PS3 owners should be very happy with it. As far as the overall experience, it's pretty much the same.

However, personally, I will be sticking with the 360, due to no disc, and the features I mention above (faster buffering after rewind/FF, faster navigation of queue, and being able to stop the movie and have it return to the title I was watching). It's generally just a faster and more streamlined experience. I will note that I do not have noise issues with my 360 and I also already pay for Live for gaming, so the fact that it's "free" on the PS3 is not a concern to me.

Overall, I am pretty happy with it, and you should be too. I am sure they will address the issues when they roll it out as a native app next year, and I'll revisit it then.

Thanks for the L2/R2 info--it is mapped to the screen buttons on my Harmony, and of course, people using a PS3 pad or the PS3 Bluetooth remote will have the buttons. It vastly improves navigation for me.

Seven is the total number of titles/covers displayed in the browser at once, so L2 and R2 basically go to the next or previous page full. Using L2/R2, I can scroll through one hundred titles in 13 button clicks, more than twice as fast as I can scroll through the same list on the Xbox 360 with a direction button held down, using either a 360 controller or my Harmony.

For me, using either the controller or my Harmony, it takes 10 seconds to flip through the covers from the first to #50 and about half the time to use R2 to get to the same point in the PS3--7 button clicks.

I really love that scroll to the end going left from the beginning. If I added something to my Instant Queue and forgot to move it to the top, I can get to it nearly instantly.

Pressing STOP or UP will get you back to the description of the movie that you were just watching.

I agree with your points about the speed of updating the title browser. It's lickety split fast on the Xbox, but then the Xbox is a native app whereas this is running in Java (no excuse, just a reason). I should think that "late next year" when a native version of this app is scheduled to appear (probably when MS' console exclusivity agreement expires) it'll be much faster. We'll see.

I'm envious that your Xbox seems to scroll through the Netflix title browser several times faster than mine .

I am confused. When I press STOP while playing a movie, I get the "Are you sure you want to stop playback?" message. Choosing NO makes the movie continue and pressing YES kicks me back out to the XMB.

But pressing UP does take me back to the title I was watching. Thanks for the tip, as some of these are not intuitive.

And I see your point about the L2/R2 scrolling, as it's nice to jump around quickly through 100 titles. Still don't like it because it's slow (like if I jump to a page and need to scroll 3 to the right or left to get where I want....so slowwwwwwwww).

Not a big deal on either system though....just prefer the 360.

EDIT. I was curious so I figured I'd time the scrolling thing on both. I used the Comedy genre, full speed scrolling on the 360, and the L2 pressed 13 times as fast I could method on the PS3. Seems the PS3 buffers the button presses, so it took about 5 seconds to press it 13 times, but then the PS3 had to catch up. Results to get through all 100 titles:
360: 15 seconds
PS3: 22 seconds

I call shenanigans on your "1/2 the time of the 360" comments! SHENANIGANS! The PS3 was just too slow at refreshing the pages and catching up to my button presses. However, if you know where the movie is at, I guess you could plan ahead and scroll right for the first 50, and left for the last 50, so it could be a faster, depending on where the movie is at in the list and if you scroll the right direction to get to it. This would be most worthwhile in your queue, if you take the time to order them alphabetically (as I do). The other genres not-so-much since they just appear in some random order so there's no way of knowing where the movie is going to be at in that list of 100.

It's only a few seconds either way, but I was curious so tested it out.

What sort of remote are you using and what do you have the STOP button mapped to? I use the Logitech Harmony PS3 Adapter with a Harmony "For Xbox 360" model remote. When I'm using the PS3 the STOP button on my remote sends the code STOP to the PS3, same as the one on the PS3 Bluetooth remote. (Looking at the little menu that you get when you press TRIANGLE, apparently there is no button corresponding to STOP on the DualShock 3 controller).

Sounds as though your remote is sending CIRCLE, which is analogous to the B button on the Xbox controller (my Harmony has Y, X, A and B buttons, which are mapped to SQUARE, X, TRIANGLE and CIRCLE when I use the PS3, nearly matching the colors, except that SQUARE is more orange than yellow ). Pressing CIRCLE from anywhere in the PS3 Netflix GUI will get you the "Are you sure you want to stop playback?" message. I believe that that's also true of playing a BD or DVD. CIRCLE goes up one level in native PS3 apps and in things like games and the PS Store, when you go up one from the top you get an "Are you sure...?" or "Quit Game?" message. This isn't a native PS3 app--it's a very fancy menu on a Blu-ray disc which has no actual video. Up one level from it, no matter where you are in it, is the XMB.

Okay--perhaps "half the time" was an exxageration. I scrolled through the Comedy list on the Xbox and it took me 17 seconds, as measured by a stopwatch, but the first time that I did it, there was a huge section through the middle where there were no box covers, just gray rectangles with little slightly lighter gray circles in them and even when the box covers came back, there were missing ones here and there. On subsequent trials, that didn't happen--apparently it'd buffered the graphics.

In any case, my scrolling through using R2 without letting the graphics update is no less valid than scrolling through the Xbox queue that way, because there's nothing useful that you can do with either, except maybe in your Instant Queue. You cannot review the things in one of the genres by flipping through as fast as you can--you'd be slowly flipping through one by one.

At this point, I doubt that I'll use the PS3 player. There are some things about it that I like a lot, but on balance, the TiVo player is the fastest and best of the three, though arguably the ugliest, so I'll probably stick to using it. Also, since I've been doing a lot of gaming on the PS3 lately, I would have to keep changing discs.

I did find a video that when played on my PS3 shows up anamorphically squished. Dexter Season 1, at least the first two episodes; Dexter Season 2 doesn't. Both display widescreen when played on TiVo and the Xbox.

I'd really hoped that someone would try this disc in a network connected BD Live 2.0 compliant Blu-ray player (other than the PS3) and report the results online, but I can't anything. I suggested to bdraw that they do that in their Engadget review, but that's not up as yet. Oh well.

I believe the issue many folks are reporting about SD Netflix content coming out "squished" at 4x3 is due to the fact that the PS3 does NOT upconvert SD content from a BluRay disc. It never has. And the Netflix streaming disc is BluRay, and the PS3 treats the non-HD streaming movies as SD content coming from a BluRay disc.

Therefore, if your receiver or HDTV won't upconvert it for you, you get 4x3 480p "squished" output.

I have an older Westinghouse HDTV, and, to get the Netflix streaming disk to play so the 480p video looks correct, I have to use the "fill" option on my TV.

Unfortunately, the "fill" option on my TV sucks, as it is only an on/off option AND for HD content, it adds way too much overscan - so much so that playing PS3 games in "fill" mode is almost impossible.

Lossless codecs and LPCM require anywhere from 5Mbs to 15Mbs (source), and currently Netflix encodes the video+audio stream at a max 3.4Mbs (source). So this is not happening anytime soon due to the current residential broadband limitations and high cost for companies to support this much bandwidth today. DD5.1 at 384 or 640Kbs is much more likely and Amazon VOD offers many streams either online or through a Roku. However, Netflix still only offers 2ch audio today.

Internet TV streams are the future of video distribution. I haven't been this impressed with home AV since going from VHS/Dolby Pro Logic to DVD/DD5.1. Although not quite ready for the masses, the Internet TV streams will be the next standard. In the future expect video distribution to become like MP3 distribution, and every device being DLNA and Internet TV streaming ready. But for that to happen residential broadband speeds and availability have to improve even more than they are today. Home Wifi speeds are improving with 802.11n as well.

For the early adopters it's still amazing that today we can get DVD+ quality VOD content. Netflix is a bit behind on the DD front compared to Amazon, but it's right around the corner. It's true that most Internet TV streams are 2ch since the companies are taking their current streams meant for PC browsers and allowing them to be displayed on TVs. So expect DD5.1 soon, but to stream HD video and HD audio it's going to be a while. Hell we just got Blu-Ray a couple of years ago!

I've been looking for the answer to this question as well. It seems like it should work but who knows. If I have a chance to tommorow, I'll take my disc over to a friends and see what happens.

If this table is accurate, there are BDs with TrueHD surround tracks averaging as low as 1.13 Mbps and a ton of them lower than 2 Mbps (DTS MA surround doesn't seem to get much lower than 2 Mbps--there are only a few lower than that and the lowest in that table is 1.68 Mbps). For example, the BD of Collateral Damage (great flick) has a VC-1 video encoding averaging 21.56 Mbps and a TrueHD soundtrack averaging 1.72 Mbps.

So streaming lossless audio is not out of the realm of possibility, even given today's residential broadband speeds: if we take Netflix's 3.4 Mbps (actually, that's an average of video and audio combined , but they're using 128Kbps stereo audio, which is in the noise) and add 2 Mbps for lossless audio, you'd only need a 7 Mbps connection to support it (5.4 + 20%). Netflix wants to keep the connection speed requirement for their highest quality video lower than that, but they also want to add 5.1 surround. Of course, given 3.4 Mbps video, lossless audio is "putting lipstick on a pig", to use a recently popularized colloquialism .

You wouldn't stream lossless audio. You would do like VUDU and stream DD+. With their HDX titles they stream at up to 9.5mbs which include 640kbs DD+ audio and 1080P24 video.

The quality is miles better than any other streaming or VOD available.

OK, so to reiterate, if we currently subscribe to Netflix w/the video streaming & BD movie rental options and own a PS3, once we receive the "free" Netflix instant streaming disc for PS3 can we stream DVD quality video to our PS3 and watch it on TV for no additional charge?

If so I think this is and provides a good pre-cursor to streaming HD content (for a fee of course) someday.

My PS3 & Netflix membership just keeps getting better all the time.

They already stream HD content for free......... ??

I'm curious if anyone has compared HDX to the 1080p smooth streaming from the XBOX.

Does anyone have both a VUDU and XBOX to compare? There are some free eps of The Guild on the XBOX if you don't want to pay for something.

I have never seen an HDX movie, but the 1080p smooth streaming looks and sounds amazing, and is the best thing I've seen. But of course it's also the VUDU model of $5-$6 to rent something. I have a feeling it might be one step below HDX since I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) HDX is more of a download thing than a streaming thing, at least on the back end.