Roku Netflix Viewing Tests

I found the material to be impressive for the most part in terms of quality. It really was DVD quality and at "Level 4" I never noticed any artifacting or macroblocking from the encoded material. Here are some screen shots to give you a feel for how the system performs:

LCD-to-camera effects aside, these images from The Fifth Element looked just as good to me as their (non-Superbit) DVD counterparts.

This scene from Ghostbusters was ripe for jaggies, but I found none, even during this motion pan across some very challenging material.

The lines in this shirt and the details in the ghost containment system looked perfect and, for an older film, this looked much better than when I saw it last (years ago on VHS)

Kids are going to love the selection of animation and children's movies and Spiderman looked fine, though it was in a 4:3 aspect ratio

Where the Roku Netflix Player faltered was in two particular areas:

1. The amount of material encoded as 4:3
2. Several movies which were incorrectly encoded with the wrong aspect ratio (resulting in "thin" people.

To get an idea of the distribution of aspect ratios, let's take the 39 videos I initially placed into my Watch Now Queue. The genres were a mix of Drama, Television, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Foreign, Comedy, Classics, Action & Adventure, and Anime & Animation. That covers a lot of ground and, I feel, gave a nice cross-section of the available titles. Here is how those broke out in terms of the encoded aspect ratios:

• 13 were in letterbox format - or some flavor of cinemascope/2.35:1 (33%)
• 14 were in 4:3 format (36%)
• 9 were in full 16:9 (23%)
• 3 were in a distorted, incorrect aspect ratio (7.7%)

Some of the material that was in 4:3 aspect ratio was originally shot in that format (such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which was restored by the Library of Congress), but for the most part it was full-screen versions of either television or film content. That number should definitely go down - as quickly as possible. In fact, a half dozen interns with a couple souped-up Netflix accounts (or heck, a Blockbuster card) should be able to remedy the entire library in about three months if they did nothing else. Most of the 16:9 material looked like it was done on purpose, though a few titles were likely cropped in from original 2.35:1 or similar film ratios (Slaughterhouse 5, for example). Of the incorrect aspect ratios, The Man from Earth was incorrectly squashed, so everyone looked extra-thin. The same was the case for Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society, and Babylon 5: The Lost Tales.

  
Babylon 5 on Netflix (left); Babylon 5 as it should be (right)

Some notes I took while reviewing the content for aspect ratios:

• Bullitt (Steve McQueen) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were exceptionally blurry. This to the point of being almost unwatchable. This was uncommon and thus worthy of mention.
• The Fifth Element looked remarkably close to the DVD, absolutely indistinguishable when sitting a respectable distance from the screen
• The Guns of Navarone was encoded with the FBI Warning still intact (which I found both comical and annoying).