10:00 – Barbara is heading out late this coming week to a family reunion in Pennsylvania, so it’ll be wild-women-and-parties™ while she’s gone. Either that, or I’ll just have a Heartland marathon. Assuming, of course, that Netflix streaming works.
Last night, we started to watch something on Netflix streaming. Everything appeared normal until I tried to start running the episode, at which point, it bounced back to the episode screen, popped up a “Content unavailable” message, and suggested I try again later. So I tried running episodes from several different series, and got the same message each time. So I backed out of Netflix and tried a couple other services, both of which worked fine. So I called Netflix tech support and spoke to a nice young woman who eventually had me de-register and then re-register my Roku box. She said that was the generic fix for any Roku problem, so from now on I’ll just de/re-register any time we have a problem.
Figuring if anyone would know, a Netflix tech-support rep would, I asked her what she’d buy to stream Netflix. She said she’d just bought her father a box for Netflix streaming, and she’d decided on a Roku. She said, which confirms my experience, that the Roku ordinarily Just Works for months on end, and when it has problems it’s almost always just a matter of de/re-registering to get it up and running again. She also said that using a hard-wired connection eliminated about 90% of the problems people had with Roku, which again confirms my own experience. Roku wireless networking simply sucks. When it works, it works very well, and it stays up for months on end. But when it has problems, you can expect to spend hours getting it to work again. I should have expected that from the start. When I bought the Roku and connected it for the first time, their “5-minute” set-up procedure took me two or three hours. This for a guy who co-authored a book about TCP/IP network administration for O’Reilly. I shudder to think what ordinary civilians have to go through when they have Roku problems with wireless.