Amazon Prime Instant Video - Page 26

None of Farscape is in HD on Netflix--the fourth and final season is widescreen.

I never watched it on Netflix. I just noticed that it was available to stream. That is one show I wish I would ahve watched when it aired. I've only seen a few episodes. It's also one of the few DVD sets I still own. But I haven't watched a DVD in many years(well I guess I have watched a couple of anime titles on DVD over the last couple of years but I can handle Anime on DVD, well barely) I'll probably never get around to watching Farscape, but if I do, my first choice will probably be streaming.

Meh--I never much cared for it, though it had its fanatical following. I did, paradoxically, watch quite a bit of it though; I think that it ran during a kind of television sci-fi drought.

What I bought was a Blu-ray set of the entire farscape series. It looks very good, with excellent sound.

Apparently the original films were lost, so they worked from the Australian PAL videotapes - which look good.

Yes, it is standard definition, but it looks very good on my screen, which is 5' 4" tall - it may not use the whole 9' 6" width, but neither do lots of older shows - and films.

The follow-on series Peacekeeper Wars, is only on DVD - and I'm not going to look at it until I've worked my way through the original show - I haven't even finished the first season.

By that point the other might be on Blu-ray as well. That won't be a problem - the whole later series cost me less than $10 on DVD.

I have the first season of "Star Trek: TNG" on Blu Ray. (which looks amazing!)

Just for fun, I synched the BD in a pc window to the 480p amazon prime service in a separate window. I know amazon was just SD, but it was great to see the vibrant colors of the uniforms. It was also great to see the updated effects shots of the rendering of the ships, planets etc...

Noticed more Prime titles in my watch list are no longer Prime

I assumed they were Prime because the bought the rights and thus would be Prime forever.

Guess they have a time limit, would be nice if they had an end date so we know how much time we have to watch.

Excellent idea. Anyone know who at Amazon to say this to?

Netflix makes expiration dates available through their web API to application developers though they don't chose to expose the information on their website. Forum member RangerOne's TVandMoviesNow.com can search both Netflix and Amazon and can sort results by expiration date, but only Netflix titles, which would indicate to me that Amazon's API doesn't have that information.

I'm not sure whether rights holders ever license contents for VOD on a in perpetuity basis but I know that some Netflix expiration dates are years and years in the future. Some Netflix titles expire to be added back again the next day or soon thereafter; Netflix will automatically put it back in your queue (they used to list expired stuff that was in your queue in a separate section at the bottom of the queue listing on their site, but they claimed it confused customers so they stop .

Well so far I have only noticed movies 'expire', not TV.

BTW

Amazon Announces Expanded Prime Instant Video Agreement with NBC Universal Cable & New Media Distribution:

Amazon.com, Inc. today announced an expanded content licensing agreement with NBCUniversal Cable & New Media Distribution, adding hundreds of popular and award-winning TV episodes to Prime Instant Video, including prior seasons of Parks and Recreation, Parenthood, Friday Night Lights, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica and more.


Complete story: LINK

Now if there was only a way to play this on my Apple TV, it would be awesome. Mine is jailbroken, and I still can't find a way to do it, even trying PLEX.

Anyone else have any luck?

Just get a Roku and be done with it, it's so easy.

Agreed. Apple is never going to license an app for Amazon VOD - which would smuggle in unlimited Amazon Prime - because they want to sell you content through iTunes. Apple, like AOL before it, maintains a "walled garden."

The Roku is the among the best - if not the best - player for Amazon Prime, because it can handle the Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks on a fair proportion of their movies and tv shows.

If your sound is handled through HDMI, a current box is fine.

If your AVR is pre-HDMI like mine and only has SPDIF jacks for surround, look for the XDS, which was their last 1080 box with an optical SPDIF output.

And once you have a Roku you'll see how many dozens (maybe even hundreds) of free channels there are, since it maintains an open interface that functions as a programming language. My Roku "screen blanker" is a localized weather station readout based on the area code I fed it, written and posted by a guy as a "private channel" that anyone can use for free!

It's like Android and the Windows Compact Editon ("WinCE") platform, known at various points in time as Pocket PC and Windows Mobile - but not Windows Phone, which is Microsoft's version of Apple's "walled garden" approach.

There is a good selection of free movies using the Crackle app on iPad and Airplay.

True. If you've never seen the 2006 Stranger than Fiction, starring Will Ferrel, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Queen Latifa, watch it on Crackle. It's so not a "Will Ferrel film" that it wasn't even mentioned during the show honoring him in DC last year.

It's a "Klein bottle" of a story, with the central character, an OCD IRS auditor named Harold Crick, played by Ferrell, hearing his life being narrated by the author, Emma Thompson - who's a piece of work, a chain-smoking perfectionist author of perfect tragedies who hasn't been able to figure out how to bring about the death of her latest protagonist, Harold Crick.

When she finally does, and he hears her say that his having reset his watch "would lead inevitably to his impending death" he seeks out the advice of a Professor of Literature played by Dustin Hoffman - who nearly steals the film, working out ways to test what kind of story Crick is in: a comedy - in which you get hitched - or a tragedy, in which you die. When they figure out who the author is, Harold shows up on her doorstep to plead with her not to kill him, giving her a moral crisis - who knew that these stories she was writing would become real? How many good people has she murdered?

This is a film that wears the masks both of comedy and tragedy and bears repeated watching - it's a great romantic comedy (I didn't even talk about Maggie Gyllenhaal, the tax protesting proprietor of the Uprising Bakery Harold falls in love with while auditing her).

Not to be missed, particularly since you can watch it for free - hell, I bought the Blu-ray after seeing it in the theater, because it's made like a swiss watch - even the soundfield is light-years ahead of most films. (At one point you can faintly hear his heartbeat when he fantasizes about her.) And check out the titles of the books on the Professor's bookshelf, including Soft Focus, lying near his TV and not quite in focus!
Edited by Philnick - 8/25/12 at 3:01pm

Anyone know if there is there a way to force amazon instant video to play in hd on the ps3? I'm watching Fringe in HD, but only 3 of my 4 bars on the quality meter are lit up. Amazon states if HD is being viewed, I'd see 4 bars and the HD lit up in blue. Amazon also says the min requirement for HD is 3.5 Mbits/sec. I tested my internet connection on the PS3 and my download is right at 14 mbits/sec. I restarted modem and router and turned off all other devices. Everything seems to be working find except for Amazon Instant Video!

Thanks for any help.

I know some of the free material is 480p, and you have to pay for the HD stream. Could Fringe be an example?

I've never heard that. Can you name any title for which that's true?

I just placed the four seasons of Fringe in HD on my Watchlist and started watching an episode on my PS3 which I got in HD in 5.1 sound. Just because you get a certain result in a short bandwidth test to an arbitrary site, doesn't mean that you can get or sustain any particular bit rate on the path to a streaming service's servers.

You make a strong case for the Roku. I used to use a HTPC in the family room, which offered the ultimate freedom. But I found that it was frustrating to control using only a remote control. Although I have a harmony remote and several macros set up, invariably something would go wrong, and I would need reset or to make a remote connection to the HTPC to fix it.

What I like about the Apple TV (jailbroken running Firecore ATV Black) is that it does 99% of what I did with the HTPC and it just works. In addition to that 99%, I get to do a few things I never did with the HTPC. My music collection is managed via iTunes on my desktop PC, and it is shared to the Apple TV. There I can play music and choose to send it to any Apple TV I choose. Additionally, I can use the Apple Remote app on my iPhone to queue songs and choose which connected device speakers will play the songs.

Is this something the Roku will do? My guess is it cannot, and at this point it would be hard to give that up.

The Roku has a free channel called Plex, which is a client for the Plex Media server (also free) that runs on PCs and Macs. You install that, and from within it you fire up its browser-based media manager to include folders (including subfolders) of media on your desktop machine - music, photos, home videos. You give the server a name on your network and then can access your collection from any Plex client on your network - and there are versions for PC, Mac, Android, etc. [A little digging on their web site reveals how to set up a client on an iPhone - to avoid antagonizing Apple, they don't advertise that the iPhone can use it - but I came across that while spelunking there months ago and don't remember exactly where.]

In addition, if you take the extra step, when configuring the server, of establishing a login and password at myPlex.com, your Plex clients can log onto your server from other locations over the internet.

You can establish a queue in a client to play things in sequence, but you can't "send" things - you have to ask for them from the individual client.

Plex was originally developed on the Mac and is visually-stunning, with a background photo of a closeup of the fingerboard and strings of what could be anything from a violin to a double bass - if nothing more specific to the musician you're listening to has been grabbed from Last.fm by your client (it grabs images and bios automatically, and if you use its search function it also finds related YouTube videos). It has video channels and can grab videos out of browser windows to turn into feeds.

It looks and feels exactly the same on the PC and Roku as it does on the Mac. They're a little short on online help - it took me weeks to find out that the + and - keys on a computer client's keyboard work as a volume control - but it's amazingly professional-looking for a piece of freeware.
Edited by Philnick - 8/26/12 at 2:39pm

I wanted to watch a film on Amazon and noticed they had changed the interface on the player app again. They seem to be pushing Prime and I perused but wasn't that impressed. The problem was I had seen an interesting b-movie at a good rental price but it was hard to find as though new it wasn't on the rather limited "new releases" list.

Use the browser's history section to look back at the sites you visited on the day/week you were looking at the Amazon Prime site. You may be able to find the page with that movie that way.

On what device?

Did you try the search function within the Amazon app? It works well, and even maintains its own history of past searches.
Edited by Philnick - 8/26/12 at 2:36pm

BTW

The addition of Battlestar Galactica content includes RAZOR.

It's the back-story of the Pegasus and explains why Cain is so fracking twisted. Plus it's fun to see the original raiders with 3 toasters saying 'by your command'.

Has anyone seen the new Amazon Watchlist show up on their play device menu? I have a Panasonic DMP-BDT200 with the latest firmware and the Watchlist does not show on the Amazon app. The Amazon app says it’s a March 2012 vintage, may be it will be updated soon.

I've had it on my Roku for a few months now (along with DD 5.1 sound if the film or episode has it). It's a matter of Amazon getting a new app customized for each hardware platform - and usually standalone Blu-ray players are at the end of the waiting line, with priority being given to the PlayStation and the Roku, each of which have much larger installed bases than most disk players.

The head-to head competition with Netflix also argues in favor of the the PlayStation and the Roku, which are among the top Netflix platforms.

My Oppo disk player, for example, is still 720p stereo for Netflix, with no Amazon app on the horizon!

No different than any other streaming services, like Netflix. They only get the rights to stream for certain periods of time. And many titles will also be removed when they show up on a Premium channel and then return to streaming when they finish their premium channel run.

It showed up in a recent update for the Amazon player in the 2012 Sony BD players (I have a BDP-S390). That player was and is kind of unattractive and annoying to use, though it was improved significantly in that update (though it continues to feature tiny little unreadable cover thumbs).

I hope that when they add the Wishlist to the BDT220/320/500 that they'll add support for 5.1 sound from the small subset of Amazon titles which feature it, which the Sony player has had from the beginning.
5.1 sound support has been in the Roku player (at least on my Roku 2 XS) for quite a long time.

That's why I got a Roku - a year ago it was almost the only way to get 5.1, short of buying a PS3. All I meant was that the Watchlist had shown up a few months ago.

The only reason I mentioned 5.1 was because I know that Panasonic players didn't have it back then and if he wanted primo Prime he should consider getting an outboard box like the Roku.