YouTube Leanback

Today when trying to watch a Youtube video as soon as I clicked search it popped up Leanback. Yay. I have been complaining for a while that it would open the regular page and making me. click the small buttons to get it full sized, but today it magically worked like I thought it should since the beginning.

Complaining

I have had my Sony Internet TV powered by googleTV around 4 months now. Let me tell you all my current complaints.

Most annoying issue: Remote delay

Semi often the remote will delay when I press the buttons. This includes everything but Crtl + Alt + Del. If you you want to restart it, that will always instantly work, but I cannot search, type letters or change the channel or volume. That is really annoying. It will always do what I want it to, but each click will be 10 to 30 or more seconds delayed making it look like it isn't working. I don't understand why the force restart would work instantly when everything else doesn't.

Tips to improve it:

Pandora: Add a clock, if you have a music player that just sits there, at least let me know what time it is.

Timers: Give me a countdown timer so I can use it when I am baking cookies.

Kill page: The kill page warning doesn't pop up till the page in responding again, I can always click wait and it will work right after, so either pop the warning up faster, or wait that second after you would pop it up to do it.

Tabs: These don't really work, they just disappear with the back button with no hope of coming back. Make them work, or don't include them.

End notes:

I am waiting for the store to come, because I want to see what the tv can actually do, but I am worried because of how often it freezes. I hope that doesn't continue and get worse with new apps.

Update 1.2

The update for my Sony Internet TV with Google TV came out this week. I was a bit sad because it took 3 days after I saw on twitter that it was released until my TV was able to update. I wanted it, and I knew others had it, it just didn't upgrade so I had to wait it out. I guess that is a bit much complaining, but I like my updates. Here is what I think of the updates:

Netflix: The interface is way better. You can search which is nice (even though they put a weird letter clicking thing, for if I didn't have a keyboard). My only problem is they made the font and pictures for everything a lot smaller, so I need to put my glasses on to search now, a bit annoying, but whatever.

Dual View: The update is nice, bigger is better. I like being able to move it, but I don't really use this feature. I don't have a cable line plugged into my TV, I use it exclusively for online content and my Blu-ray player. When apps like Netflix can be put in Dual View this will become much more useful to me.

Remote: I have an iPhone and the remote app isn't out for it yet. I am waiting. My roommate has a droid so I downloaded it on his phone, the voice search was kind of fun, but I am not going to take his phone whenever I want to use my TV. My biggest problem here is the Logitech keyboard supposedly being supported. My roommate has a Logitech Revue, so we have the keyboard, and he likes it much better than my Sony controller, so I am trying to set it up for him to use, but I don't know how to do it, and there seems to be nothing online to help, when I find out I will update here.

Movie: This feature is cool, but needs some updates. I love how if a movie is on Netflix it can go straight to the movie in the Netflix app. The fail I see here is that not movie services are found here. Crackle the Sony service which they are trying to push on the Google TV doesn't show up in the search. I think it should.

The updates are nice, but not all that impressive. I will probably be more happy when I find out about that Logitech keyboard, I might call Sony tech support tomorrow.

Wired Internet

I originally set my Sony Internet TV up on wireless internet because I didn't have a cable at the time, and I wanted to play with it as quick as possible, but being the person I am I wanted to try all the features so I tired wired internet. It didn't work.

After setting up with wireless on a Sony Internet TV then trying to go over to wired it will just say "not connected". The trick to get it to work is simply disable the wireless and it works. To bad I couldn't figure that out myself and had to ask tech support.

fancast.com

Today I wanted to watch Castle on my Google TV, and since both Hulu and ABC.com, the two sites I would usually use are blocked, I decided to just do a search and found Fancast. Looking at it, it looks a lot like Hulu, and seems to be owned by Comcast. Good news Castle works just fine. It looks like Chuck works there too, and I haven't looked around much more, but yay I can watch the shows I want again. Note: Yesterday I learned you can use NBC by changing the User Agent to Generic, but that trick doesn't work for Hulu anymore so I don't think it will last on NBC. Yay for using my Sony Internet TV as it should be used.

I haven't found a way on Fancast to queue like Hulu, but it does have RSS feeds when you go to each of the shows so you can add it to your Google Queue and it will tell you when you have a new show to watch. I couldn't get it to work right just using the favorite button then clicking add to queue, but I went to my computer and added the RSS feed to my Google Queue subscriptions in Google Reader and it works now.

Update: November 5th:

It seems that I was just a little excited and didn't review Fancast very well. In order to watch shows on it you must have the User Agent switched to Generic. If you don't it will just stay and the loading screen and never actually play. There is one down side to using this site. Ocassionally after commercials the sounds will come back, but the video will not. You have to actually refresh the page(Crtl + R), then go back to where you were. It is a bit of a hassel, but still it mostly works, which is better that what I can say for other sites.

Update: November 12th:

I haven't actually checked this, but according to everything on the internet this is now blocked too. The user agent switch will not work because the companies are blocking the version of flash, not the browser. Wow this is getting annoying, I need to get a new laptop with HDMI out, and just watch what I want no problem. I already have the HDMI cord to plug in across the room thanks to Monoprice.com, but my laptop is just two years to old. I have tired this with my roommate's computer it works great.