A little Netflix help, please.

[Christina]

There's hours and hours of great stuff on there but they suck at helping you find it.  All but getting rid of the "Friends" feature hasn't helped, which is why I no longer bother to rate movies I watch.

Did they get rid of the rank too? I was always trying to drive that up a couple of years ago.

[Paul DePhiladelphia]

Is anyone else having issues with the new roku interface? The videos are playing perfectly but he menu takes forever to load and often shorts out.

[Gilly]

I don't use Netflix to find streaming movies, instantwatcher.com is much better.

[Matthew_S]

I've checked out Netflix's streaming options and am not impressed.  Oh well.

It depends on what you are looking for.  If you want bigtime new releases, look elsewhere.  But there are a lot of high quality offerings.  Though I agree, they can be difficult to find.  For example, I only found out here:

http://forum.maximumfun.org/viewtopic.php?t=4792

that over 200 episodes of Comedy Central Presents are now available.

So, what might be of interest to FOTs?

Well, there are lots of Criterion DVDs available; great foreign films like The Host and 35 Shots of Rum; older classics like All About Eve, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and A Streetcar Named Desire; and  lots of great TV like full seasons of Buffy, Angel, 30 Rock, Dr. Who, Archer, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Arrested Development, X Files.  

For a smaller set of FOTs (and for smaller FOTs), there is also a wide range of great kids stuff.

[Gilly]

Instantwatcher lets you find Netflix streaming movies by rating and rottentomatoes rating and also sorts in order of when they were added to Netflix so you don't miss anything. It also links to your acct. so you don't have to go back and forth. It also tells you what is in HD.

[dave from knoxville]

Instantwatcher lets you find Netflix streaming movies by rating and rottentomatoes rating and also sorts in order of when they were added to Netflix so you don't miss anything. It also links to your acct. so you don't have to go back and forth. It also tells you what is in HD.

Thanks for this pointer, Gilly, fantastic service. I think it's so helpful for me that it's one of those I would actually pay for if it went to that format.

[Gilly]

No problem, I just wish Netflix would get their act together and make the site just as easy instead of using a 3rd party website.

[waltkellysghost]

With Hulu and Netflix (and Bittorrent), the only thing I miss is baseball. ESPN 360 and MLB.tv kind of suck. The Internet is even better than TV for breaking news.

I basically see cable as a scam, and I don't like scams.

Agreed. The internet is my television. Live sports are all i'm missing, but once hockey season and world cup is over I wouldn't care anymore.

[Sarah]

Hulu question:  You don't have to download the player to watch stuff, right?  It's only if you want to subscribe?

In a related question, my mother recently downloaded the player and is convinced it made her brand-new computer sick.  Is there any basis for this fear?

[Paul DePhiladelphia]

For Hulu you don't need a player. However not a single computer I have ever owned has played Hulu without lagging.
The is a lot that is annoying about Hulu, primarily the commercials. Thank God for torrents.
On sites like entensity.net and nothingtoxic, when they link to heavy.com (a site with 30 second commercials sometimes proceeding ten second videos) I'll just x out and not watch the video.
I watch a lot of shows don't get me wrong. But it's really cool to be blissfully oblivious to certain movies, reality shows and products due to not having cable. Like I didn't hear about the Greek movie or Kickass until a few days ago.
Consider torrents, Sarah. No commercials!

[Sarah]

Oh, believe me, I already know about torrents (and will be studying the torrenting thread afresh in days to come).  I'm just trying to find out what all my various options will be.

Am I right, though, in thinking the only reason to download the Hulu player is to subcribe to specific shows?  And to suspect that my mother is being hasty in blaming Hulu for her computer problems (she already hated the player because the first thing it showed her, unbidden, was a chunk of pornography and so was predisposed to find fault).

[dave from knoxville]

Instantwatcher lets you find Netflix streaming movies by rating and rottentomatoes rating and also sorts in order of when they were added to Netflix so you don't miss anything. It also links to your acct. so you don't have to go back and forth. It also tells you what is in HD.

Anybody have a good app to do something like this for the entire Netflix library?