Hands On the Netflix Download Video Service: Thumbs Up

I downloaded Real Genius. The 1 hour, 40 minute flick took about 16 minutes to finish on my 6mbit connection, which was being tapped at about 2mbits. And the stream started playing almost immediately. Netflix claims it can scale quality based on your bandwidth, and how hard their servers are being slammed, so quality will vary.

Quality was outstanding, with very few compression artifacts visible in either solids or motion. I'd guess the resolution for the standard def movies was at to be roughly 800 wide, by 480 tall. So, native DVD resolution. It looked good fullscreen on a 1280 by 768 11-inch Vaio, but probably would hold up on a larger screen.

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