Netflix Prize Contest Ends, Down To the Wire 100
suraj.sun updates us on the Netflix Prize now that the competition has officially closed. We discussed the new leader with one day to go in the contest: The Ensemble, taking the lead from long-time leader BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, the first contestant to submit an entry that broke the 10% barrier. In the contest's final day, BellKor re-took the lead with 20 minutes to go, then The Ensemble apparently pulled a Michael Phelps with 4 minutes to go, squeaking ahead by 0.01%. At least so the leaderboard claims — but those numbers are posted by the competing teams. The NY Times reports that an official winner will not be named until September — Netflix needs that much time to pore through the complex entries and read the code. Netflix contacted BellKor on Sunday to tell them the team remained in first place; The Ensemble has had no such notification.
these guys are all improving each other's code (Score:3, Interesting)
team a makes algorithm improvement b
team c takes algorithm improvement b and makes algorithm improvement b(+d)
team e takes algorithm improvement b(+d) and makes algorithm improvement b(+d)->f
the guy who squeaked out the extra 0.01% did that on top of someone else's code that eked out 0.05%, etc., ad nauseum
so how do you ascertain who won? all the teams won
they should take the final prize money and try to fractionate each incremental improvement in the algorithm and proportionally dole out the money that aways. anything else is unfair
Re:I am still waiting... (Score:1, Interesting)
No joke.
I was watching a show last night (Leverage, which Netflix suggested for me at a 4.6 stars and they were right, I love it.). 3-4 times per hour episode it would reset and tell me that it was adjusting things. Often, it never came back until I hit Refresh. I noticed that it would only buffer a small amount ahead (30 seconds) and then try to keep it there, calling an incredibly laggy site called something like controls.netflix.com or something like that. Once that happened, it had about a 25% chance of locking up completely.
They seem to be trying to save bandwidth by only allowing your movie to get 30 seconds ahead, which is way too short.
I'm just an aerospace engineer but.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I am still waiting... (Score:4, Interesting)
I, for one, think the Silverlight player is phenomenal.
I have limited Internet options-- even though I'm living urban I am not close enough to a CO to get decent DSL speeds (the max Qwest offers is 1.5Mbps). Cable is not an option because my complex has a contract with the television provider who wired the buildings at construction, which is good for those who watch any TV since you get 50+ channels of cable television for free, but bad for Internet options.
Long story short, my Internet connection has a very high bit error rate percentage because I am getting my DSL over Qwest's line but from an ISP (AT&T via Covad) willing to boost the artificial limit of 1.5Mbps Qwest imposes to 3Mbps, at the expense of a quality signal. This results in being able to truly realize the faster speeds, but also in having a very burst-y connection.
I find the new Silverlight player to be far superior with its buffering saving the day, allowing me to watch Netflix streaming at maximum quality. The fact that the Silverlight player adjusts quality on the fly is outstanding as well-- when I first start streaming content it may look like shit at first but after a short time it is crystal clear, it realizing my connection can support the data load with a little buffering.
By contrast, with the old player, even before I had this error-ridden Internet connection, I would find myself initiating an instant streaming session only to find the stupid player would decide my connection was slow and give me piss poor video quality. I would have to click the "Back to Browsing" button and reinitiate the streaming several times sometimes in order for it to give it to me in high quality.
The new player also provides a great new feature when seeking through the content, where it will scroll past freezeframes of the content as you scroll forward or backward, which is perfect for skipping the intros for TV shows, for example.
I only wish it would "back buffer" a little because currently when I rewind a little bit, rather than replaying it from memory it rebuffers altogether, as if I hadn't just watched those few seconds prior.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:these guys are all improving each other's code (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I am still waiting... (Score:4, Interesting)
I, for one, think that the Silverlight player is crap.
I have a dual-head machine with a very nice 1600x1200 IPS-panel NEC LCD as my primary monitor, and a nice (but far lesser) 24" 1920x1080 TN-panel Asus LCD as the secondary.
I want to pop up a Netflix show on the secondary monitor, full-screen, and continue to do stuff like read Slashdot on the other display. Silverlight has no problem putting good-quality video up, full-screen, on the second display -- but as soon as I click outside that window (ie, to browse Slashdot), it shrinks back down to windowed mode. My dual-head computer is therefore retarded into being effectively a single-head machine for the duration of the film, unless I either want to watch it in a little window or soak up a couple of cores worth of CPU power zooming in with Ctrl-+.
Allegedly, if I had Media Center on my computer, this could be worked around. But with Netflix + Silverlight, it cannot be accomplished. Of course, this situation works fine if I'm playing a DVD on my own computer -- it just doesn't work with Netflix's streaming service.
It is therefore retarded (in a very literal sense of the word).
I'd like also to note that Flash seems to have the same difficulty, and that its behavior is similarly inexcusable and retarded.
The best I can do, if I want to watch a film in my office and occasionally fuck around on the Web, is fire up my 4-year-old laptop and use that to browse with instead of my badass dualhead desktop rig. Which, also (and obviously) is retarded.
I've complained to Microsoft Silverlight developers directly about this, and the best they ever say is something like "You're right. It is retarded. Maybe we'll fix it some day. *harumph*" while months/years pass by and it's still an issue.