HD200 connect to a playon server?

[bialio]

Doesn't Hulu pay for itself by making you watch commercials it embeds in it's streamed shows? If that's the case, I suspect the ability to record Hulu will be fought on legal levels.....

[appelm]

Originally Posted by bialio

Doesn't Hulu pay for itself by making you watch commercials it embeds in it's streamed shows? If that's the case, I suspect the ability to record Hulu will be fought on legal levels.....

Doesn't network tv do the same thing?

[Brent]

Its not exactly the same but, yes very similar.

Problem is Hulu is owned by the networks and thrives only with the networks blessing. The second the commercials are cut from the playback or even the ability to skip those commercials happens, Hulu's future gets much tougher. So I'd be shocked if Hulu didn't work to block any kind of saving or commercial skipping that happened with their content. I think we'll see the same thing from Netflix as well.

[HelenWeathers]

There are only 4 or 5 commercials usually and they only last 15-30 seconds. I don't mind them. The quality of the video isn't to the point where I'd record anything for archiving.

[Para]

Can anyone explain to me how this relates to the full episode streaming available from abc and cbs? They stream the shows with the short commercials like what I read about here.
TIA

[Para]

Well, after browsing the web it appears that getting abc's full episode HD content to work with PlayOn has not been successful. Maybe I have only found the "failure" posts on the web and someone has found a way. Veoh and abc serve up the episodes using abc's media player (and Adobe Flash player?). From what I read, the player only supports operation in an explorer window (IE, etc.)

[mrrrl]

Although I did get this to work, I am finding that getting around the menus in Hulu is painfully slow. Going from Hulu to Channels to Food and Leisure to TV Episodes can sometimes 5 minutes or more and then still fail, causing me to reboot the HD200. Is anyone else having this problem?

[mbowe]

Originally Posted by mrrrl

Although I did get this to work, I am finding that getting around the menus in Hulu is painfully slow. Going from Hulu to Channels to Food and Leisure to TV Episodes can sometimes 5 minutes or more and then still fail, causing me to reboot the HD200. Is anyone else having this problem?

Yep, I'm seeing the same poor performance on my HD200, just browsing around was unbearable. I jumped over to my 360 just to do a sanity check and make sure I had the PlayOn s/w configured correctly and it was vastly more responsive navigating menus, and I had no problems with play back.

So, it looks like there is tuning to be done in Sage still. I hope we see improvements with UPNP, and preferably in both extender and standalone mode.

[dgeezer]

Same here. I can get the Playon interface to show up but browsing is very slow. I also have never had a show go past 3 to 4 minutes before it starts skipping and then freezes up the HD200 causing me to have to restart. Usually I can restart by hitting the power button on the remote,but I have had to do several full reboots.

One thing I noticed on the forums is that Playon is hard coded to buffer to the C: drive. It wouldn't work hardly at all on my XP server since I have it partitioned to only have about 2GB extra once windows is installed. I have Playon installed on my desktop running Vista now but I only have about 8GB of free space on the C: drive of this PC. Perhaps this is causing a bottleneck with the buffering?

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by mbowe

Yep, I'm seeing the same poor performance on my HD200, just browsing around was unbearable. I jumped over to my 360 just to do a sanity check and make sure I had the PlayOn s/w configured correctly and it was vastly more responsive navigating menus, and I had no problems with play back.

So, it looks like there is tuning to be done in Sage still. I hope we see improvements with UPNP, and preferably in both extender and standalone mode.

Me too, compared it on Xbox360 and PS3, and navigation is much faster, plus, thumbnails and descriptions are set up better. Anyways, hopefully they can optimize this stuff.

[bhyman1]

I'm having the same issues you guys are.

Accessing the Playon provided content is incredibly slow, to the point of being unusable.

My Xbox 360 accesses it perfectly however.

[psklenar]

Can the Playon Server s/w be run on a Windows Home Server?

pat----

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by psklenar

Can the Playon Server s/w be run on a Windows Home Server?

pat----

Yep, it's running fine on my WHS.


Dirk

[David G]

Originally Posted by cncb

Any chance UPnP server support will be added to the main Sage software itself (which would potentially bring this to the HD100)? If not, it sounds like it would be necessary to buy the HD200 as well as exit the "extender" Sage interface to the "stand-alone mode" to have this capability?

Any reason that it couldn't be added to the HD100 firmware itself?

[ptaylor]

I'm also seeing issues navigating through the available shows, but once they start playing, it looks (to my eyes) practically as good as watching OTA HD stations. I'm only watching on a 27" HD set at 720P, but I'm shocked at how good it looks. The playback is very smooth, much better than Boxee on my AppleTV. (Though, the latest version of Boxee is smoother, it still doesn't look anywhere near as good as Playon through the HD200).

With Boxee, the Hulu navigation is fast, has thumbnails, and the latest version even supports fast forwarding and rewinding (though, it's not a very good implementation yet, I'm sure it will only get better). If Boxee can do all this, I'm sure Sage can too.

[thatdude90210]

I'm waiting for my HD200 (just pre-ordered), so I thought I give Playon a try on my xbox360. It's surprisingly good. I'm watching hulu right now, and while it's not HD quality on a 46" LCD, it will give DVD quality a good fight.

Having access to hulu is definitely awesome.

[evilpenguin]

FYI, there's a memory leak in the latest PlayOn beta so if your running it, be sure and restart it every once and a while so it doesn't kill your server.

Known Issues

* Netflix video sessions not properly closed in all cases, which may block PC browser as well as PlayOn Netflix access for up to 2 hours after starting a Netflix movie through PlayOn.
* Netflix Instant Queue changes through PC browser may take up to 10 minutes to be reflected through PlayOn. Restarting the server will force an update.
* Hulu Queue entries with expired items will fail to play, and changes to a given Queue may not be immediately reflected through PlayOn.
* Memory usage can increase over time (we recommend restarting the server regularly until this issue is resolved).
* Videos are missing in the total counts for CBS (100).

[inlvnv]

Any particular reason why hd200 can stream hulu but not netflix?

By the way, I'm running PlayOn from WHS and am streaming media files on WHS and internet contents through PlayOn to PS3 and PSP with no problem most of the time. Still working on accessing those contents from Samsung 750 series. Looks like I'm going to have to buy a PlayOn license once the trial period is over.

[thatdude90210]

There's a new release for Playon, version 2.59.3274. CBS was previously broken, but this one fixes that (just watched an episode of "Family Ties" on CBS classic TV). I don't know about Netfix because I don't have an account.

Anyway, I'm not sure if it's due to Playon being updated, or the latest HD200 beta firmware, but menu navigation seems fine. Going through the menu in Hulu is about near the speed on my 360. This is great because my 360 is a bit noisy.

[dgeezer]

I'm glad to hear they are working on support for CBS etc. I jumped the gun and tried this when I first got my HD200 and now my trial is expired.

I would like to test this again but it definitely was not worth $30.00 the way it was 2 weeks ago.