The Criterion Channel -- Technical Issues and Questions

[Lowry_Sam]

Got it back by manually entering everything. Watchlist only contains about 1/3 of what I had & is in random order. They've changed interface somewhat (top themes slide by every few seconds rather than having to click on them), but it doesn't seem to do anything to make finding stuff easier. It would be nice if we could at least sort our watch list by year, director, title, date added.

Update: you can sort & filter under "All Films" just not your watchlist. Also, going out of app & opening back up again changed the order of my watchlist (but still no defineable order). It's also a little odd that there's now 4 (instead of 5) films in a row & films load 10 at a time, so when you scroll down there's only 2 titles in third row & you have to scroll further down for remaining 2 to load.

[fdm]

A bit hard to find, but Leaving Soon is at the bottom of the "New" page.

Thanks!!

[Lowry_Sam]

A bit hard to find, but Leaving Soon is at the bottom of the "New" page.

Thanks!!

Actually you don't have to scroll down far at all. There's also a "Leaving Soon" box under "Browse".

It also looks like the duplicates that were in my watchlistare gone (that may account for some of the number change). All the tiles look the same, ie. the ones with picture on left & info on right, no more artist renditions in the watch list.

After a bit of use, it does seem like it is easier to search for titles in "All Films" and using a remote to scroll through titles seems more responsive (Roku). The only downside I notice is that older themes are harder to find or seemed to have disappeared entirely. "Collections" only has a limited number of themes & I'm not finding the older ones anywhere. "Series" is gone as a category too & you have to do an individual search for "Blossoms Shanghai" & "Penance" to find them.

[Matt]

Unless I can't find the option, it looks like their new platform does away with the ability to change the playback speed. No more listening to interviews and commentaries at 1.5 speed.

Except for the jumbling of the order of film in the watchlist, it looks like a solid upgrade.

[zontar]

Well, this did not go well for me. My ROKU 3 will not play anything. It appears to attempt playback and then kicks back to the film's title screen. I have tried a dozen films and they all do the same thing. At one point there was a cryptic 'no applicable bitrate found' or something like that. I opened a support ticket.

Frankly, this rollout seems rushed. A few days notice that they are merging accounts and now this, IMHO, garish new interface. It all seems very un-Criterion.

[DimitriL]

I'm hoping that this wholesale platform change from Vimeo to JWX - they handle the BBC's video backend, among others - means that they have more flexibility and we'll see faster updates with more features. Presumably JWX actually has engineers to work with them, unlike Vimeo, who canned all theirs when they were bought by Bending Spoons.

A small thing, but I'm happy to finally have a film info button on the 24/7 page when watching through my Roku TV's app.

[fdm]

Ok so per the previous discussion a few weeks ago about Flow not playing in DD 5.1 in the old app, on AppleTV the new app now seems to play it (most likely) in actual DD 5.1. Sounds like it is all there (within the constraints of streaming quality anyway), but with my receiver and the AppleTV selected that audio type is shown as "Multi Ch In" so not 100% conclusive but all the usual symptoms of when DD 5.1 is actually playing are there. (Beyond that if atmos or 4K are now also enabled that is beyond what my system can handle.) Finally... (how many years was that in the making?)

I thought maybe the Roku app would clearly show it as Dolby Digital 5.1 (or maybe even 5.1+) on my receiver's display, but after I figured out how to login in there, there were only two audio options for Flow, one was the commentary and one was just Stereo audio. So probably just AppleTV for DD 5.1... and just baby steps for now otherwise...

Just one more quick data point, Amadeus also does the "Multi Ch In" thing …

[jarno_vaan]

First time here, but since it’s a hot topic, had to take part :) The updated app on Apple TV4K is pushing 60p framerate instead of 24p ignoring the device’s ”match framerate” setting. Not that serious in the end I guess, but a bit of a pity yes. The previous vimeo-based app did the correct 24p. I wonder if the new app is 60p on other external streamers as well?

Great if the new app has other technical upgrades with sound or in future with some 4K possibilities.