MediaMall’s PlayOn is Off
Here was this excellent internet article about MediaMall’s PlayOn steaming server which now had been tested with Network Media Tank / Popcorn Hour (NMT and PCH respectively). I thought, "Wow – I could watch some TV shows from Hulu and if that worked, then Netflix On Demand video would be a real option for me".
I already have a Hulu account and there is a 14 day trial of PlayOn so I thought "why not?". I downloaded and installed it.
My first lament was that PlayOn is MS Windows only so I’d have to keep a PC running. But, if it did everything in the video testimonial, it’d be worth it.
My second lament was it reported in it "system requirements" to be very internet heavy. I could not imagine why it needed 1.5 – 2.0 mbps to function. Hulu makes this recommendation and it seems to work pretty well with my DSL service. Since, PlayOn is just receiving a Hulu stream and it is the local PC that needs horsepower to transcode and stream to the PCH, I would expect PlayOn to be as good a native Hulu.
PlayOn has a convenient setup interface that confirms account settings and even checks your network connectivity. Now, why it checks my internet performance EVERYTIME I OPEN THE SETTINGS is beyond me. But it always reported "low" in brilliant red. Just to compare, I ran a few DSL speed tests and downloaded some files. Those tests were all in the 1.2 – 1.7 mbps range and yet, PlayOn called foul.
True to its report, PlayOn performed horrifically. So, while my internet and local net were fine, PlayOn said they were bad and performed as such.
I’ve concluded that the only reliable solution is one which lets me queue up my interested content and download as internet bandwidth allows. I’m fine with this approach but the services don’t seem to get the fact that they are catering to the elite. For the record, the United States FCC defines broadband as anything above 768 kbit/s.
Commentary: I guess I can see why Netflix tries to limit its bandwidth usage and/or attempts to match your internet connection capabilities. For TV programs, that’s probably fine (most of the time). Still, what I’d like is the option to buffer the entire program/movie – I’d be happy to tell Netflix in the morning that I want to watch a movie that night and get it downloaded and stored in advance. If I’m just looking to “vegg-out” then I’d be wiling take the best quality stream I could get given my bandwidth. But that’s not how they work – it’s streamed or nothing.
Amazon Video on Demand might do what you want. I know on Tivo the Amazon hook in downloads the movie so you can watch it later etc. for up to 24 hours.
Interesting. I’ve been playing with Tivo Desktop Plus to make my media library to my three Tivos (2 HD, 1 Series2) with mixed results. My HDs share my wireless g network and the S2 is wired. The Tivos report 6-7Mps transfer rates but the math doesn’t work out with actual transfer times being more like a quarter to half that. So watching anything ön demand” just doesn’t work – even for most standard definition much less HD. I’m going to do some experiments with some long CAT-5 to see actual performance on a wired backbone. I suspect that the TIVO boxes don’t have the throughput to handle streamed HD. The Desktop Plus server (Windoze of course) runs on my media server and can publish folders to the community and pretransfer folders you would like. But it works very inconsistently and apparently does some transcoding along the way. The Tivo boxes themselves are very finicky about the video they – they ain’t no popcorns for sure! Their performance with Netflix on demand has actually been pretty good with a minimal of start/stop and maintaining ok video quality most of the time. Working better than the stream/transfer between machines so far.