Amazon on Roku?

[drewg]

Pretty off-topic, but does anybody here use Amazon Instant Video on Roku? How is the user experience (UX)?

I've got 2 TVs. The main TV has an LG BD player where the Amazon Instant video experience is miserable. During playback, there are lots of buffering pauses (network connectivity is fine, the LG just sucks), and ffwd/rew is so abysmal as to be beyond belief (it takes ~10-seconds to rebuffer the stream after any ffwd/rw skip). And just getting into AIV is painful (waiting for slow LG menus to load, waiting for Amazon App to load, no access to watchlist, so everything is accessed via a "search"). The game room TV has an Xbox360 where it is much better. FFWD/Rew is still pretty miserable (no fast motion, and no index pictures), but it rebuffers much faster than the BD player so it is almost tolerable, and it has watchlist access.

In the last 2 days, there have been 2 big Roku sales, and I'm thinking that if the Amazon experience is any better on the Roku, then I should probably pickup a Roku for $50 to replace the LG BD player for on-line stuff. But I just wanted to make sure its UX doesn't suck just as bad.

Thanks,

Drew

[panteragstk]

I would imagine that the Roku experience is much better. I've been looking for a device for Amazon instant, and am about to grab one just to see.

If you get one, let me know how it is. Media streamers always seem too wimpy to me.

[darcilicious]

I haven't used Amazon extensively on the Roku but it does have a fairly decent "top level" navigation including Watchlist. Rewind and fast-forward work the same on Amazon as they do with most other video services on the Roku: three "speeds" with thumbnail/index pictures.

Not bad but still pretty typical Roku interface.

Plus Roku has now added a "global" search feature so you can search by title and get a list of apps/services that have that title. Not sure which all services are included but I expect it's the usual suspects: Netflix, Vudu, Hulu, and Amazon at least.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by darcilicious

Including Watchlist. Rewind and fast-forward work the same on Amazon as they do with most other video services on the Roku: three "speeds" with thumbnail/index pictures.

Sweet. That is much better than any device I've used Amazon on (LG TV, LG BD, Xbox360). Now my wife finally has a gadget to give me for Christmas.

Thanks!!

Drew

[panteragstk]

Now, if only they would add CEC or HTTP control of the roku I'd get one in a heartbeat. Stupid technology.

[waynedunham]

I got a Roku XS during one of those sales. One of the main reasons I went with it was because of Amazon Prime support. I went with the XS because I wanted the wired ethernet to avoid any of the wireless pitfalls.

There really isn't a FF/RW like you're used to. It is basically 10 second "skips". On my network I usually see load times of a 2-4 seconds.
One thing I do like is that if you are searching for a certain point in a video you can call up a "timeline" with thumbnails and scroll through them and then hit play when you find the spot you want.

The global search is very nice also. If you search from the Roku menu as opposed to the search within 'x' service the Roku will show you all the options you have to see your search. I did a search for a TV series and the Roku showed me that it was available on both Amazon and Vudu.

[Serra]

I have an older Roku and there are no pauses on Amazon, except the FF/RW pause, which may be up to 10 seconds, depending on a number of factors.

Normally, with both Amazon and Netflix, if I'm not skipping more than 30 seconds, its not worth skipping.

On the Roku, the Amazon experience is better than Netflix. Netflix is good, Amazon is better.

I doubt that is is possible to FF/RW without a rebuffer pause of some sort and those often are network related, not box related, since the content is remote.

Overall, I'm very happy with the Roku, and this is the prior gen.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by Serra

Normally, with both Amazon and Netflix, if I'm not skipping more than 30 seconds, its not worth skipping.
<....>
I doubt that is is possible to FF/RW without a rebuffer pause of some sort and those often are network related, not box related, since the content is remote.

A lot of my skipping is stuff like 30 seconds past opening credits, or 10 minutes past something like a British "star" I've never heard of in the Top Gear "star in a reasonably priced car" segments. With the LG, I've got no thumbnails, and the re-buffering pauses after skipping makes it incredibly frustrating to do anything but just watch the show.

If they'd just download & buffer the entire file, then as long as it is buffered, it should be easily to quickly skip around.

Anyway, thanks. The Roku is probably going to be my Christmas gift..

Drew

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by drewg

A lot of my skipping is stuff like 30 seconds past opening credits, or 10 minutes past something like a British "star" I've never heard of in the Top Gear "star in a reasonably priced car" segments. With the LG, I've got no thumbnails, and the re-buffering pauses after skipping makes it incredibly frustrating to do anything but just watch the show.

If they'd just download & buffer the entire file, then as long as it is buffered, it should be easily to quickly skip around.

Anyway, thanks. The Roku is probably going to be my Christmas gift..

Drew

I should have noted that single 10 seconds skips in the Amazon UI are almost instantaneous. The several second pause for buffering is when you use the timeline to do something like that several minute skip in the example you gave above. Having the thumbnails is very nice for doing something like that though. I find that part of it nicer than hunting around randomly using the FF/RW jumps in SageTv.

[IVB]

Wife & I use AIV/Roku extensively. It's great. We use watch list, browse free prime movies, add to watch list, etc. I'm not super bummed if sagetv crashes as roku with Netflix , hulu, AIV means I'm not reliant on it.

[drewg]

So, I just setup my new Roku XS. I took it out of the box 90 minutes ago. 5 minutes was spent threading wires. 75 minutes was spent on hold to get an account without giving up personal details & CC info to them (there is no longer a "skip" button). The need to establish an account with a credit card is absurd & obnoxious, and irritates me to no end. I have no intent to ever buy any "channels" from them. The only reason I got it was because of their Amazon support.

In the 10 minutes or so I've been playing with it, I will say that its Amazon gui blows the doors off anything I've seen in my LG or Xbox clients. It is very nice to have surround sound. The season / episode interface for TV is awesome. The thumbnails are nice & re-buffering is quick.

Basically, it works just well enough for me to forgive the credit card annoyance...

Drew

[panteragstk]

Nice, looks like I'll have to grab one.

[Serra]

Originally Posted by drewg

If they'd just download & buffer the entire file, then as long as it is buffered, it should be easily to quickly skip around.

The simple fact is that both Amazon and Netflix know that people don't always watch movies/shows they start. Downloading content in advance would greatly increase bandwidth usage.

It might be user friendly, but I bet is very cost prohibitive.

I just noticed that the player for BBC (iPlayer) does the same thing. It only caches a few minutes ahead. If I pause, it downloads for about a minute, then stops and waits for me to catch up. I guess this is the way that streaming works best.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by Serra

The simple fact is that both Amazon and Netflix know that people don't always watch movies/shows they start. Downloading content in advance would greatly increase bandwidth usage.

It might be user friendly, but I bet is very cost prohibitive

They are being penny-wise & pound foolish. When they have a zillion connections streaming "just in time" at a few Mb/s, they end up defeating the most valuable TCP optimization in the last 15 years: TCP Large Segment Offload (TSO aka LSO). This is because there is never enough data buffered to aggregate transmits into large segments. So their co-lo hardware ends up being more expensive to buy & maintain, since it is using a few times as much CPU power as would be required if they just sent the data as fast as they could and had fewer connections.

What they should probably do is buffer ~1 minute at the beginning, and after a minute, buffer the next 2, and keep doubling until they max out at whatever the device can hold.

Drew

[Serra]

Originally Posted by drewg

They are being penny-wise & pound foolish.

I'm not sure that is the case. PlayOn caches (or did) the whole show. When a show starts, then pauses, it downloads the whole show. Once restarted it resumes from the disk.

I found that method to be hugely painful. For example, I start watching a show, then stop it and switch to Roku, the stupid PlayOn is still downloading my whole show, just in case. I always found that method to cause more problems than Roku, since the bandwidth usage stops shortly after pressing pause.

Given the choice, I'd prefer the buffer to be larger on Roku, but I wouldn't want them to have to include 50-100GB of ram to buffer my whole show!

[darcilicious]

Originally Posted by Serra

I wouldn't want them to have to include 50-100GB of ram to buffer my whole show!

Just to clarify a little bit: it's unlikely that an entire (one-hour) TV show is anywhere near 5GB (they don't do TV shows higher than 720p) and even a 1080p movie isn't going to approach 50GB...

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by drewg

They are being penny-wise & pound foolish. When they have a zillion connections streaming "just in time" at a few Mb/s, they end up defeating the most valuable TCP optimization in the last 15 years: TCP Large Segment Offload (TSO aka LSO). This is because there is never enough data buffered to aggregate transmits into large segments.

Is this true? Netflix already breaks videos into 10-15 second chunks, and they stream each of those chunks as fast as they can. That's more than enough data to take advantage of TSO.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by Serra

I'm not sure that is the case. PlayOn caches (or did) the whole show. When a show starts, then pauses, it downloads the whole show. Once restarted it resumes from the disk.

I found that method to be hugely painful. ...

You can disable this by going to the General Settings and unchecking the box under "Resuming Playback". Once that is disabled PlayOn will only cache a few minutes ahead of where you are in the show.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Is this true? Netflix already breaks videos into 10-15 second chunks, and they stream each of those chunks as fast as they can. That's more than enough data to take advantage of TSO.

Based on the watercooler talk at the office from a group who is optimizing the TCP/IP stack for a large CDN, they have zillions of connections & TSO never triggers in a meaningful way. Between the number of connections & the slow speed of each one, 10Gb/s NICs max out around 5-6 Gb/s with several CPU cores maxed out. On the same hardware, one (or a handful) of connections running at 10Gb/s uses about 25% of a single CPU core. I'm not sure who this CDN is, and what they are serving.

Drew

[drewg]

Originally Posted by Serra

PlayOn caches (or did) the whole show. When a show starts, then pauses, it downloads the whole show. Once restarted it resumes from the disk.

I found that method to be hugely painful. For example, I start watching a show, then stop it and switch to Roku, the stupid PlayOn is still downloading

What Playon does is to create a virtual framebuffer and a fake copy of IE running in that framebuffer. They then play the video from hulu via a flashplayer running in this fake copy of IE, and transcode the video/audio as it is rendered by the fake video / audio drivers. That is why you see the hulu logo over your video, and why you see the ads & overlays asking if you like the ad.

Some say that if you are a pirate & just download the actual audio/video stream using something like rtmpdump or stream recorder, it is about 1Mb/s, so ~300MB for a 40 minute show (also, no ads, and no logos) and it downloads in a few minutes. The difference between a normal hulu flash client & these pirate methods is that rtmpdump grabs the file as fast as it can while a real flash client grabs small chunks.. I expect that is how Hulu will eventually detect & block these pirates, once they give up on trying to hide the decryption key to the video in ever increasing layers of obfuscation. Then the pirates will start throttling back, and it will take an hour to download the video.. Cat & Mouse, Spy vs Spy...

My understanding is that Playon initially used these pirate methods, but then went the virtual IE route since there is really no way for Hulu to stop that.

Drew