I have put my Blockbuster Online account on a 3-month hold, but after last night I think I will go ahead and cancel.  I signed back up for Netflix so that I could try out their 4-at-a-time plan with the unlimited Watch Now service and I have to admit, I’m more than impressed at the quality of their online videos.  I expected something a little grainy/pixelated and got movies that are as good in video quality as the DVDs I convert at home using h.264.  I was amazed.  To sweeten the deal for me, I did all of this using the VMCNetflix Vista Media Center plugin.  Although a little slow to initialize the interface (it’s probably not the plugin’s fault) and get a movie streaming, the plugin works absolutely perfect.  It looks good too.  I have a feeling I’m going to be making good use of the Watch Now service.  It has an excellent selection and my wife and I have recently been on a TV show kick and there are close to 200 TV titles available.

On the system upgrade front, I ran into some issues yesterday.  It appears that the new 160GB WD Caviar SE that I bought is toast.  Every time I tried to write to it, it failed and disappeared.  On at least one occasion, I heard a loud shriek when attempting to access it.  It’s going back during lunch today.  I’m a little torn on whether I want to get another, however.  I sort of would like to get a better PSU, but they’re all pretty expensive and I don’t know if I can swing the cash for anything much better than what I already have.  I may just get a refund on the drive which will take a little strain off my current PSU and wait a while until I can get a quality 600W+  My Fortron is still kickin’, but I know it’s got to be feeling some of its nearly 3 years of constant operation.  I don’t know what to do, really.  I probably should just wait until the tax-free weekend which is next week.  There will be some sales and no tax is a big plus.  I did decide to go with 4GB of memory over 2GB though.  I figure I might as well.

Recent Entries

• Colds suck.
• Happy Holidays!…and other stuff.
• Media Browser beta released!
• Media Browser (pre) beta release screenshots.
• Quick look at the Video Library plugin.
• Quick unRAID beta release.
• Open Media Library (OML).
• unRAID 4.4 Final Released
• Wordpress 2.7 “Coltrane” Released.
• Sorry, No HDPC-20 for DirecTV Hopefuls.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 8:05 am and is filed under HTPC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.