My first experience with Video on Demand...

or: How I wasted 3 dollars.

Greencine, this Netflix alternative I used to use is offering Night of the Living Dead VOD-style, so I figured, what the hey, it'll be a nice way to get prepared for Land. They had a test VOD file up to, y'know, test whether their VOD shit works with your system, which is real nice-like. I streamed it, it worked, no problems, so I buy my 106 minutes of Night. Night runs 96 minutes in its longest form, Greencine includes 10 minutes for "connection problems" and stuff. Again, real nice-like of them.

So, they link me up to my stream. WMP promptly tells me I'm running low on memory, quit some programs and try again, to which I reply, "umm." Okay, so I ran Counterstrike and UT earlier, did some patching of the latter, maybe I really am running low on teh rams. I reboot and try again. Same problem. Oh, maybe I don't have the latest WMP. Update. Try again. No dice. Trying on my laptop produces a different, but equally infuriating error: it can't find the right codec. Of course, the test VOD file runs perfectly on the laptop.

It's only 3 bucks, but man alive. This incarnation of VOD has a pretty small market right now anyway: people who watch movies on their computer or stream in some way to their TV. The fact it don't work on two different relatively new machines with updated software doesn't help.