Topic: Logitech Revue (Google TV)

[charlie]

Anybody using Google TV, or the Logitech Revue specifically?

I got one for Christmas and was curious if anybody had any tips or tricks. If not, I'll review the revue after I've set it up and played with it a bit.

[KnuckleBuckett]

This should be good.

[charlie]

This should be good.

Thought you might like that idea...

So far so good. Typing from it right now. My daughter just did a double-take at ethic's avatar . We signed up for the free trial of Netflix's stream only service. Not impressed with that at all, since there were very few movies available that I wanted to watch, and searching through googleTV (or through the iPhone app) was extremely limited in functionality. It was basically just a bunch of random movies thrown together that could only be sorted by genre. But we did find Pixar's Up and watched it. Quality was passable but not great, possibly due to our slow DSL service.

Got Pandora playing through the speakers while I surf the net. That's neat, too.

Set up was easy but took a while to download and install all the updates. They have a cool integration with my Dish DVR, but that would cost me $4 a month from Dish so I skipped it.

Keyboard feels good and isn't as cumbersome as I expected when using as a remote, but typing this is not as easy as I would like (lots of typos). Still, it's fairly intuitive and my wife felt comfortable using it right away, too.

So those are my first impressions, I'll come back with more details in the future.

[charlie]

It's all relative, ethic. I have enough time for 10-15 movies a year, not a week. I'd like to save that time for movies that I actually want to watch. Five years ago, or five years from now, I'd probably be cool with it since I'd just stream a random movie that I didn't know much about. Right now I only have use for a service with the best stuff available.

[charlie]

I'm just going to add a few more notes so I don't forget them. Some things are still buggy. The pandora app stopped playing music a couple times for no reason, and also it gave something a thumbs up when I clicked the "stations" button to switch stations. Now it thinks I love "Like a G6".

Would prefer more control over how the keyboard maps to a remote. When watching TV I have to put it down and switch to the regular remote when watching because some keys I use a lot aren't there. I might be able to customize it, but I haven't found that yet.

Web surfing is more cumbersome than from a PC. Switching tabs, typing in web pages, and stuff like that isn't quite the same, so either I need to get used to a different interface or it just isn't as good.

[ober]

We just got back into netflix.  We used to have it several years ago and then gave it up due to cost.  We recently decided to do it again because we realized that for about the same price as 2 on-demand movies from the cable company per month (which is roughly what we've been doing), we can stream tons of shit and get 1 dvd-out-at-a-time.

Granted, you are right that their streaming selection isn't all that great but it is growing and I'm guessing it will skyrocket over time.  I'm not sure why it wouldn't since I'm guessing that's probably more of a money maker than the DVD route.  That's why we have the plan that is one step up because their DVD collection is probably the best out there.

I actually really like their interfaces too.  We stream through our Wii which has a dedicated Netflix app.  I think the iPhone app is pretty good too.  And I'm not sure how you could do much better as far as organizing and suggesting and rating as far as their website goes.

I know that has nothing to do with the Google TV, but I think Netflix is the shit so I had to say something.

[charlie]

For the iPhone app (and the GoogleTV app) I couldn't find any way to sort or search based on anything other than genre. For example, I wanted to see what the latest releases they had available were, but the closest they had was the latest movies they had made available for streaming, which included a ton of old stuff. Plus, a lot of times the lists included things I didn't want to look at, like comedy included all the Saturday Night Live DVDs that I had to wade through to find movies.

I actually like Netflix a lot (we're in the same boat of having canceled a couple years ago while starting to think about paying for it again), but at the moment I'm not sure the streaming is worth paying for. Maybe we'll upgrade to the one DVD a month, but I'm not sure we'll have time to make it worth it since we barely do one redbox DVD a month now.

I'm going to search through the web interface to add movies to our queue so we can find them, and we've been rating movies we've already seen which has helped a bit since I first posted, so hopefully that helps.

[ober]

Yeah, rating movies is huge.  And yeah, the iPhone app isn't perfect which is why I prefer to do it through their website.  But I still use the iPhone app randomly to look at recent suggestions.

[charlie]

I just went through and rated about 100 movies through the website. I guess I remember more how it works now, and it's always been like this, which really isn't that bad. The problem is when you have the streaming only plan and all you see are the streamable movies. There just aren't enough good ones.

[KnuckleBuckett]

I just went through and rated about 100 movies through the website. I guess I remember more how it works now, and it's always been like this, which really isn't that bad. The problem is when you have the streaming only plan and all you see are the streamable movies. There just aren't enough good ones.

I hear this all the time.  Seems to be their Achilles heel for now.

[charlie]

Well, despite the low quality of the available movies on Netflix, we've been using it a lot. It helps that we've been on vacation and have had time to watch stuff, so I don't know that we'll actually pay for Netflix when the trial expires, but it's been fine so far. We have watched several mediocre chick flicks (The Proposal, Something about the Morgans, Victoria something or other), as well as the first 5 episodes of She-Ra.

I also still use the Revue for the web somewhat often, although it's as much for the novelty as anything else. Otherwise, besides Pandora there's not much there we've been doing with it. My initial recommendation is that it's not yet worth the price unless: you get it on sale, you use Netflix, you have a little money to burn, and you like cool gadgets like this.

The nice thing is that there is no subscription fee or any other cost for GoogleTV, so even if we don't use it much for a while I don't care since I won't be wasting money and can wait for more apps and features.

[ober]

Hey Charlie... do you guys have an HDTV?  I'm just curious because the quality (audio/video) has always been excellent on my TV (not HD) but it's not as great on my computer.  So I'm just curious if they send out a lower resolution signal and if so, does it look shitty on a nicer tv?

[charlie]

Yeah, we have HD (the Revue actually requires it). I wasn't referring to the quality of the picture, though. I was referring to the quality of the film.

Picture quality is good with netflix. It's a little pixelated initially but after a minute or two it looks like a normal HD program. I think that's probably normal. I'm guessing if my internet is faster (I have slow DSL) we might get even nicer picture, as there is still some room for improvement.

[charlie]

By the way, I'm running into bugs that are somewhat frustrating. Also, whether it's my slow connection or something else, I have been unable to get NBA highlights to run without constant buffering. The same is true for a random video podcast I found. Both seem to be very high quality HD (look nicer than netflix), so that might be why, but I haven't been able to turn down the resolution so I basically can't use those features at all. Lame.

The bugs I found last night were with Pandora running in the background when I didn't want it to. I was fucking with the NBA highlights and when I pressed pause it would unpause Pandora and some brazilian music would come on in the middle of the highlight. I even got Pandora to crash. They still have a ways to go to get this thing usable for the general public.

[KnuckleBuckett]

Obes.  PC can look crappier because they don't up-convert.  Many TVs and media players (DVD, Blu-Ray, etc.) up-convert SD to HD for our TV viewing pleasure.  Up-converters vary dramatically in quality, but always look better than no up-conversion at all.

Up-converters use algorithms to guess at missing data and fake it in.