Amazon Prime Welcomes Me (but proves almost impossible to use - help?)

[dreamshark]

Netflix was down on Friday evening, so I decided to try that one-month free trial offer to Amazon Prime that has been dangling in front of my nose. I found it extremely difficult to figure out what was available for free. In fact, not paying close enough attention, the first movie I downloaded turned out to cost $5. I had strayed out of the "Prime" browsing section without realizing it. And I was actually trying to watch the trailer, but having trouble with the controller, and ended up starting the movie. So what the hey, I watched "Oz the Great and Powerful." The movie was pretty good, although more of a kids' movie than I had been expecting for some reason. But technically I was not impressed with the Amazon streaming experience. Although supposedly in HD, the visuals were kind of fuzzy (possibly the effect of watching a 3D movie in 2D?). And the sound was majorly misbalanced - at the max volume level for my sound system the sub-woofer shook the floor whenever something exploded, but the dialogue was barely audible. I'm not sure if it was just that movie, or if Amazon Streaming just doesn't work right with my PS3.

But I've got a free month, so I need to find something I can actually watch for free and see how that works. What's the easiest way to browse through the Prime offerings? (without getting them mixed up with the ones I have to pay for). The Playstation interface is incredibly awkward, so I thought I'd look through the catalog online. But I can't figure out how to do that either. Help?

Comments

[guppiecat]

I watch it natively through my TV or on my Kindle Fire. Neither interface is particularly good. On my TV, I have to search every time I want to watch something, but there's a "prime" area that's hard to get out of, so I don't have to worry about being charged.

The HD is 720p max. Sometimes, it's lower than that. Also, if the Internet gets interrupted, you can lose sync between video and audio.

I've experienced sound issues as well. It sounds to me like sometimes the stream switches between stereo and 5.1.

So I can't help much, but I can commiserate with you.

[carbonel]

The other annoying thing about Amazon Prime is that I bookmarked a bunch of free movies, and when I came back to them later, some of them were no longer free.

[mle292.livejournal.com]

I don't have Amazon Prime, but I would recommend a ROKU box for when Netflix is down. There are several alternative "channels" to watch, including second tier movies, TED Talks, public domain movies, anime, and music. The cost is an up front fee for the box rather than the monthly subscription fee (Netflix still costs a monthly fee, and there are others, but plenty of free channels).

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I suppose I could have run out to buy a ROKU box last Friday, but by the time I got home with it, Netflix would probably have been back.

By "upfront fee" do you mean a one-time cost for buying the device? Where does the content come from?

[mle292.livejournal.com]

I agree that it's probably not practical to run out and buy a new thing, but it's probably easier in the long run than dealing with the trial period for Amazon.

I do mean a one time fee for buying the device. The content is probably not expensive enough to warrant monthly fees beyond whatever bundle fee ROKU pays.

http://www.roku.com/meet-roku

[carbonel]

If you do decide to buy a Roku, Ben's Outlet has been listing them for $60, which is 40% off the usual $100 price.

Roku is a device for getting Internet content from a bunch of different places (free and for-pay) to your television. I like mine, but would love it more if the USB port played .avi files instead of just .mp4 ones.

[laurel]

There are all sorts of different models of Roku these days, new ones starting at $50 (often discounted to $40), high end model is usually around $100. Comparison chart. The two we're using right now are Roku 2 XD which was the high end offering before they launched the Roku 3 not long ago. My folks have one has well. My folks were using my oldest Roku (their first ever box) before they got the one they use now. I suspect I've had three different generations by now. D'oh!

Beth-- I was disappointed when I saw the USB player on the Roku doesn't handle AVIs. Crazy! It's rather clunky. I put some TV shows on a USB drive for my parents and was surprised by that, had to make sure I gave them mp4s. Though honestly it seems more and more people are moving away from AVI to mp4 and mkv. We run Plex server software on one of our computers and the Plex client on the Roku box (and on other gadgets) and it has no problems with AVIs.

[carbonel]

I probably should have been clearer. The one being sold at Ben's Outlet is the 2XD one. Unless you're a gamer, I don't see the new Roku 3 model as adding a lot of functionality.

I tried using the Plex server/client combination, but never goit it quite right. I was able to watch a few episodes of Haven in .avi format that way, but the video quality was decidedly pixelated, and I couldn't figure out how to persuade it there were new videos in the folder -- I kept adding new folders. Eventually, when I made the final switch over to the new computer, I didn't bother to install the Plex server on it. It's probably my fault for not figuring out how to work things properly, but all the documentation I found seemed to assume you already knew what you were doing, and I didn't.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I'm looking at the Prime offerings on the computer, and finding it a lot more feature-ful than the PS3 interface, but still hard to use. I had gotten the impression on the PS3 that "Big Bang Theory" was available on Streaming Prime, but it looks like I was wrong. On the other hand, I haven't found a way to display more than 25 available shows for Amazon Prime, and most of them seem to be SpongeBob Squarepants or Dora the Explorer. Surely there are more than that?

I did find the control in My Account to disable my free Prime account from auto-upgrading to a paid account. I had been thinking I might want to keep it, but unless this experience gets a lot better very quickly, I've changed my mind.

[carbonel]

Last time I looked, there were something like 300 free movies. It's been a while, though.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I'm disinclined to try anything that makes it that easy to spend money by accident.