A second look at In2TV

So while I was on my online TV watching bender yesterday afternoon, I decided to try watching a show at In2TV just to see what it was like. I picked an episode of the Jetsons. Unfortunately, I had some disappointments along the way. For one thing, I happened to pick an episode I'd already seen 15 million times, the one where Rosey comes to live with the family, but that's nobody's fault but my own. More germane to this review is the fact that I had a lot of problems while watching it. First of all, In2TV allows you to watch in full screen, but I think it may be more trouble that it's worth. When you hit the button, instead of just making the screen bigger in the window you're already in, it pops up another window with the program in full screen. And then it starts the video over at the beginning again. Once in that window, there are no controls of any kind. The only way to make it stop playing or change any settings is to close the new window entirely. And guess what? Once you do that, the video in the small window starts playing again at the point where you were when you hit the button in the first place. Can we talk about buggy and cumbersome?

Also, the quality in full screen isn't very good. Most sites give you a higher resolution and faster bitrate when you go to fullscreen, but it looks to me like In2TV just makes the picture bigger. It was watchable if I backed my chair up all the way across the room, but if I got any closer to the TV, the pixels were clearly noticeable. At least there didn't seem to be any compression fuzziness like you often get with YouTube. The pixels were nice and sharp and where they should be; they were just big!

I also experienced a bug that I've read about from other reviewers but never had run into before. Periodically the show pauses for an ad (dumping you back into the default screen size in the process), and it seems to go to some centralized ad pool to find an ad to show you. (It gives you some kind of message like "Searching for an advertisement" to let you know what's going on.) This always takes a few annoying seconds to get through, but at one ad break it couldn't find an ad, and it got caught into a loop of searching and searching and searching. I've heard that some people get stuck there forever and never get to see the end of the show, but fortunately, after about 3 tries it decided it couldn't find an ad and dumped me back into the show again.

I'm really kind of upset by all these problems, because as I mentioned before, In2TV has every episode of Lois and Clark, and I was seriously considering watching it at some point. Now I'm wondering if I could hold out for a whole episode, let alone the whole series.