Justin Wyatt

Netflix on XBox 360 Review

Posted by Justin under motorcycles, Personal, review, xbox360

Living in the dorms on a military base, I chose to just stick with the internet rather than getting hosed by the ONE cable provider we’re provided with on base, which has a monopoly so as you’d guess their service is absolutely horrible.

Simply because they know you have no other choice.

Now I do have an hdtv and it happens to have a VGA port so I can hook my laptop up to it. With all the video sites around now and NetFlix and it’s competitors offering viewing of entire movies on their web-sites I said no thanks to cable….

Then a while back while I was waiting god knows how long for my xbox 360 to get back from their repair depot. (Click Here to read that horror story) I had read about Netflix offering the ability to stream movies through xbox live. This sounded fantastic to me as that is what I primarily use netflix for since I’m not a big fan of waiting a day or two to get the dvd.

All you have to do to add your netflix account to your xbox is go to netflix on your xbox dashboard.  It will tell you a URL to go to and the url will give you an activation code to enter into your xbox.

So, it works like this you pick out your videos to stream and add them to your instant-queue. For those of you not familiar with netflix queues you have to setup a list of movies you’re going to watch and/or want delivered to your house. You pick them out or you can have netflix suggest them for you with their “movies you’ll ♥” feature.  That feature works basing on your ratings for the movies you have seen, I know when I first got netflix I spent a couple days just doing that, it actually works pretty well at first.

Anyway, once you have the videos added to your instant queue you can see them on the xbox.  It brings you a menu that looks like this:

From there you select the movie and begin playing.  It’s pretty simple and the quality is near dvd or better depending on your internet connection.  I know when mine slows down pretty bad the picture will get youtube-ish.  But I am rather the exception seeing as the only connection I have is my roommate’s wireless.

My overall experience:

Overall, I’d say the whole thing is pretty slick and works rather well.  The only shortcomings I’ve noticed is that sometimes the navigation of the movies can get rather tiresome since it is streaming.  Like if you hit the button on the controller on accident it will stop the movie and start fast forwarding and then you’ll have to wait and see the “buffering” screen for a while…  it looks like this, get used to it cause if you’re one of those people who like to skip around movies a lot you will be seeing it plenty.

Other than that the picture quality is top notch and it really is a time-saver compared to getting out the vga cable and plugging it into my laptop and then having to plug speakers into my laptops little headphone jack and dealing with crappy sound.

If you already have an xbox 360 I would suggest getting this seeing as it’s free already.  If you don’t have a netflix account they have plans from $4.99/mo.  I personally use the $9/mo one because it allows you to get unlimited movies one-at-a-time and stream unlimited movies.  They have a trial offer of something like 2 weeks free with no charge.  So there’s really no reason for you not to try it.  I know I’m glad I did and it definitely saves me money on a cable bill paying $9/mo rather than $60-100+.

Click Here if you would like to try Netflix for 2 weeks Free.

Sorry for the shameless promotion but it is really a great deal they have going and I know I personally use this service everyday, if you already have a computer (obviously you do) and a xbox 360 there’s really no reason not to try it.