Ordering a Roku Ultra

My media player of choice for years has been the Apple TV. I have a Gen 2, Gen 3, and a Gen 4 throughout the house. The combination of the Gen 2 & 3 along with iTunes has been a pretty solid combination for my household. I was pretty psyched for the Gen 4, because all it was missing was apps. I bought the 32GB Apple TV 4 right when it was released and I’ve just never been happy with it. The interface is crap, the remote is crap, and I constantly have to restart it to get it working properly again. I was really hoping that the tvOS update that came last month would have brought tremendous improvements, but it brought nothing that improved my user experience with it.

At this point, I’m ready to try a different media player. One thing that has kept me tied to the Apple stuff was that all my media has been kept in iTunes. I’ve since setup a Plex server and moved all my media over to it and it’s been a pretty impressive experience. Being on a new media server allows me to look at other media players. So I’ve pre-ordered one of the new Roku Ultra‘s.

rokuultra

The new Roku’s officially release October 7th, so I won’t have it until early next week. I will report back once it’s setup with my first impressions.

IMAX Nascar 3D on DVD

If you’re a Nascar fan and didn’t get a chance to see Nascar 3D at an Imax theater, save yourself the cost and effort of renting or, gasp, buying this on DVD. I found it to be really boring and mostly a documentary of Nascar and it’s history. The only way it could possibly be entertaining is on an 8 story screen for the staged racing scenes. That being said, it may be interesting to someone new to Nascar.

Netflix: So far so good

Well, I’m approaching the end of my first month using Netflix and I must admit, I’m fairly happy.

I’ve seen a couple movies that I would never of rented at a traditional video store, such as The Terminal, and Pirates of the Carribean as those movies don’t nomrally peak my interest. Plus it allows my wife to add moives to the queue that she wants to see. Normally I always did the video store stops and never knew what she might want to see, so she was always forced to watch movies I wanted to see. The only problem with her is that she keeps moving the movies she wants to see to the top of the queue so I have to shuffle them up once in awhile.

Stats thus far. In one month we’ve seen 11 movies. That, I’m sure is some sort of record for us. And we have 22 movies in our queue.

Our first netflix movies showed up today

I went ahead and signed up for a netflix account earlier this week. After him-hawing it around for a little while about the $18 per month, I decided it was a good idea, at least for a couple of months. There’s a lot of movies I wouldn’t mind seeing, but normally wouldn’t rent. The concept of the queue makes this a lot more feasible. I quickly loaded up my queue with about 20 movies.

Our first 3 movies showed up today after shipping yesterday. It appears that there may be a netflix warehouse in Milwaukee.

So what was at the top of my queue?
This is Spinal Tap
The Bourne Supremacy
The Terminal

See you later Hollywood Video…

I stopped by the local Hollywood Video today to pick up a few movies for the weekend, but ended up walking out empty handed. Why? Well, because they raised their prices. What’s the percentage of this markup? $0.99 to $3.79. Yikes! Now I know this is more of the norm for video stores, but I’ve been spoiled by 99 cent rentals for a few years at this place. Also, this place was always busy. They had to be making good money.

We own a lot of movies, but we have a rule, we have to rent the movie before we buy it. We’ve been burned too many times buying a movie because we think we’re going to like to find out it royaly stinks. To me, 99 cents made it worth it to find out.

So, now I’ll have to figure how we’re going to accomplish this, because I will not pay almost 4 dollars to rent a movie. Maybe it’s time to finally investigate Netflix.

Oh well, bottom line is Hollywood Video will not get another dime from me.

Movie Thoughts – Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle

This movie was the sleeper of this bunch of reviews(which is a good thing). I couldn’t remember what the movie was about, just that I remember the name from when it was out at theaters. That being said, I really had no expectations what-so-ever of this movie. While this movie was no ground breaking comedy, it had a nice consistent amount of humor. It made me feel bad for the main character in the beginning when he kept getting the raw deal, then I felt good for him when he stood up for himself. My wife says that this was her favorite of the 3 we rented. I liked it, but it’s doubtful that it will get added to our DVD library.

Movie Thoughts – Garden State

Heard a lot of this movie and none of it was bad. And being Scrubs fan, I figured I had to see it since it was written and directed by Zach Braff. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same. The reason is because ‘deeper’ movies such as this one don’t really interest me. But overall the movie kept my interest fairly well and if you like movies that you have to follow closely to understand, this movie may interest you. This movie will not be added to our collection.

Movie Thoughts – Napoleon Dynamite

Unfortunately this movie wasn’t as good as a lot of people hyped it to be, but with that said the movie was pretty funny. There’s a lot of crazy lines that just don’t seem to fit the scene and those had me rolling. The problem with the movie is the story. Was there one? It just seemed like an 1 1/2 free form that really never went anywhere. I still highly recommend seeing it. I will be adding it to our collection.