Feature suggestions

[sansnil]

I'd like to be able to use CC subtitles with the Roku Netflix player.
A member of my household is deaf and the movies are obviously not that great without it.

It's been said here many times, but the short form is that the Roku box could display them if Netflix would send the data. You need to make this suggestion to Netflix.

http://www.netflix.com/Suggest?type=2&lnkctr=cu_suggest

Done and done -- thanks.

Hopefully another suggestion to Netflix to do this will help make it happen.

[midiwall]

I'd like to be able to use CC subtitles with the Roku Netflix player.
A member of my household is deaf and the movies are obviously not that great without it.

It's been said here many times, but the short form is that the Roku box could display them if Netflix would send the data. You need to make this suggestion to Netflix.

http://www.netflix.com/Suggest?type=2&lnkctr=cu_suggest

Done and done -- thanks.

Hopefully another suggestion to Netflix to do this will help make it happen.

MANY folks have their finger's crossed!

[arikmoon]

One good way to think of the Roku (I don't have one yet, but I can only make educated guesses from the Netflix IE plugin side) is that it is analagous to the Netflix plugin that you use in IE for the Watch Instantly features.

If it can't be done in IE with the Netflix plugin, it's not a feasible "feature" for the Roku. (i.e. closed captions, bonus features, different languages, subtitles, faster playback, slower playback, chapter selections...)

Think of Netflix as having web server that has a file folder with 10,000 .wmv files in it. When you click play, it starts downloading/playing that file. There isn't anything more you can do to that file like make it closed captioned, add chapter data, have different audio tracks, etc.

When they say that the Roku will be able to deliver HD content, that will be when Netflix adds a "less compressed" .wmv file to that big folder. It'll be at least double the size of the normal movie and thus you'll either need a pretty fast internet connection, or you'll buffer for a little while longer.

[ben12]

A really cool feature would be the ability to play video games from the Roku box. You should check out t5 labs. No idea if its vaporware or not but I read an article about them and if true, what they can do is really neat. Using their product you could play standard PC games from any dumb device capable of decoding an MPEG video stream.

Have a look at www.t5labs.com.

[Sn3ak]

A nice feature would be a warning when Netflix is down for maintenace.

I just spent 30+ mins or so tinkering with the roku, thinking something was wrong with it, even testing the urls posted here for testing netflix streaming on a pc. I hit netflix's home page and voila 'Netflix is down for maintenance'.

The symptom was the Roku sat at 'retrieving your insta watch queue' or whatever the message is.

[midiwall]

A nice feature would be a warning when Netflix is down for maintenace.

I just spent 30+ mins or so tinkering with the roku, thinking something was wrong with it, even testing the urls posted here for testing netflix streaming on a pc. I hit netflix's home page and voila 'Netflix is down for maintenance'.

The symptom was the Roku sat at 'retrieving your insta watch queue' or whatever the message is.

Oh... is THAT what 'caused my box to hang up last night at midnight?

[cchkb]

I would love to have one box that could do what my soundbridge does and what the Netflix box does.

[boykster]

A nice feature would be a warning when Netflix is down for maintenace.

I just spent 30+ mins or so tinkering with the roku, thinking something was wrong with it, even testing the urls posted here for testing netflix streaming on a pc. I hit netflix's home page and voila 'Netflix is down for maintenance'.

The symptom was the Roku sat at 'retrieving your insta watch queue' or whatever the message is.

Oh... is THAT what 'caused my box to hang up last night at midnight?

Yep, me too. Was settling in at 1120pm PST to watch my nightly episode of BSG and was denied I even went downstairs and unplugged/replugged the box to see if it was just a lockup, no go. It did come back about 20 mins later though.

a "netflix down" notification would be nice

[kinorob]

This may already be a feature, since I don't have my box yet to check, but I think you should have the ability to remove movies from your Instant Watch Queue from the Netflix box.

I have 65 movies in my queue already and I haven't even gotten my box yet. I can see this quickly becoming a problem (like when I have 400 movies in the queue).

By the way, after some digging around, I actually have found a lot of really interesting films available for the box. Sure, there's not a lot of current releases, but there is good content if you dig around a bit.

[boykster]

This may already be a feature, since I don't have my box yet to check, but I think you should have the ability to remove movies from your Instant Watch Queue from the Netflix box.

Already a feature, and a useful one too. You can see it here in this pic

[the_ether]

A really cool feature would be the ability to play video games from the Roku box. You should check out t5 labs. No idea if its vaporware or not but I read an article about them and if true, what they can do is really neat. Using their product you could play standard PC games from any dumb device capable of decoding an MPEG video stream.

Have a look at www.t5labs.com.

Now that would be cool.

[MCWHAMMER]

Already a feature, and a useful one too. You can see it here in this pic

Only problem I've found with that feature is that sometimes you'll hit "Remove from Instant Queue", and find out later that the movie is still sitting in your regular queue. You kind of have to check both queues to get rid of these things. Wish that could be fixed.

[midiwall]

A really cool feature would be the ability to play video games from the Roku box. You should check out t5 labs. No idea if its vaporware or not but I read an article about them and if true, what they can do is really neat. Using their product you could play standard PC games from any dumb device capable of decoding an MPEG video stream.

Have a look at www.t5labs.com.

I got to thinking about this, and couldn't find any real info on their site (i HATE heavy flash sites like that).

Anyway... how are they set to deal with the ~100ms response time from a user input to the player seeing the results?

[ben12]

I got to thinking about this, and couldn't find any real info on their site (i HATE heavy flash sites like that).

Anyway... how are they set to deal with the ~100ms response time from a user input to the player seeing the results?

Well I guess you need to ask them. I imagine latency would be no worse than with current online gaming which varies according to the location of the servers and the number of hops. It may even be lower. They would probably have several sites so the distance / hop count would be less than online gaming. In online gaming the players are normally all connected to just one set of servers since all the players need to know where each other is. In the t5 labs case - at least when playing single player - you could have multiple sites and therefore less routers in between you and the server.

They claim to have some kind of turbo charger for handling video compression which is described on their site (more flash) and I suppose they could organise some kind of quality of service deal with their interconnect provider. High network latency like what you get isn't endemic, it's all down to the number of hops and whether any prioritisation is available.

There's a few articles from the games press on their site with no major latency issues mentioned. Call up t5 labs and challange them to a deathmatch.

[bbabul01]

Feature suggestion:

Power off.

I have a box that autoswitches between inputs, and it doesn't recognize the roku box because it is always on.