[CliffordK]

A friend of mine was trying out Netflix yesterday.
It was fine when we ran it through a little fuzzy 14" CRT TV.
When we connected it to a digital TV, what became obvious was that during slow scenes, the image quality was excellent.  However, during intense action sequences, the lossy format caused unacceptable pixelation.
Of course, it could have also been a hardware issue, so we'll do more testing shortly.

Might be the link that's a bit congested. We run Netflix in HD on Rokus, and it's usually very good, although you can sometimes see it working hard. Mind you, that might also be the TV.

Yeah..
One never wants to be in the middle of a battle between an adult brother and sister living together.
The idea of Netflix was to eliminate Pay-Per-View.

I believe connection speeds were 1.5MBPS, or some fraction thereof, with no upgrade options.

Netflix worked fine on one computer, but had a bad flickering problem with the other computer.  I'm thinking perhaps a bad video card.  I see notes that other people have had the same problem.  And, I can't run it here because they refuse to support Linux clients.

They bought a Roku box, but, it REQUIRED a credit card to configure.  And, nobody was willing to give their credit card number for a service that was supposed to be free (and, the idea was no PayPerView)...  so that one got nixed.

So, they had a blu-ray player with an internet connection that supported Netflix which we were trying.  I would think that a blu-ray player would be optimized for graphics, but perhaps there is a problem there.  It seemed to be slower to load pages than the computer.

Hopefully I'll have a good DVI/HDMI video card that we can test in the computer next week.

Right now the Blue-Ray device is connected with HDMI.  I suppose I never thought to test a composite video connection.

One of the problems with streaming video is that it has to deal with buffer underflow (underrun) conditions.  One option is like You-Tube does, stop and allow the buffer to fill back up, then resume.  But, that is hardly acceptable.   Another option is pre-download and offline viewing (which I prefer),  but it does mean planning ahead, and the media companies don't like loosing control of their data.  I assume that Netflix has chosen pixelation, or decreased quality of the image to keep from stopping the video.

Of course, there is always more bandwidth, but that isn't always possible.