Silent-Q

Within 5 minutes of having downloaded the PlayOn software I had it installed and working. It was possibly the most painless setup of any of the media servers with which I’ve worked. As I mentioned yesterday, PlayOn can pull from CBS, CNN, Hulu, Youtube, and soon, Netflix. This means that the content it provides is limited to what is available for download from these websites. I had no luck finding The Middleman, however the latest episodes of Eureka and Psych were up as well as several hundred other shows, including classics such as Family Ties, Alf, Weird Science, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I’m sure that Mediamall is working to add more sites and as they do, more TV shows will become available.

The complaints that I have are minor, and I’m sure they will be taken care of as technology improves:

Quality – Since these are videos downloaded from the internet, they’ve been compressed quite a bit. I have a standard TV and I could see occasional compression artifacts causing a grainy look.

Rewinding/Fastforwarding borked up the playback – We wanted to watch a scene over again as I had missed it while I was working on my computer. After that the image stuttered and skipped, and at one point the sound became out of sync from the video.

If High-Def is your thing or you already have TiVO or a DVR, don’t plan on replacing it with this, but at a one time fee of $30, this is a great deal that no one should really pass up. MediaMall is definitely getting my money.

In an effort to save a bit of money, my wife and I decided to cancel our cable TV. We did this even though we knew we’d miss out on some of our favorite shows. Namely Middleman and Eureka. Then Greg was kind enough to show me PlayOnPlayOn. I signed up for it yesterday, and plan on giving it a whirl. With as little TV as we actually watch, this could be a nice, cheap solution! I’ll let you know how it works out tomorrow.