I don’t want to make this a whole thing, but I want to get it written down. My Xbox One sucks. It won’t play Blu-Ray movies. It won’t play rented streaming movies. Netflix has been broken on it for months. For types of media that aren’t Hulu or WWE Network, it’s a paperweight. It’ll play games, after a long download and install time, but that’s it.
Two of these problems, the Blu-Ray movies and rentals, can be blamed directly on copy protection. I have a (relatively) old TV and I guess it’s not up to the standards Microsoft wants before it will show me the movies I’ve bought. Mind you, my PS3 and Xbox 360 have no problems on this same TV. I didn’t find out until I tried to watch my Evil Dead Blu-Ray on Halloween, and after I’d rented Iron Man 3 today.
I’m not trying to rip anyone off. I’ve bought my Blu-Rays. I paid for that rental. I’m constantly presented with anti-piracy warnings and now I can’t even watch the things I buy through the Xbox One. My old TV is huge and works great, so I have no reason to replace it so I’m stuck. I can switch to my PS3 to watch movies, but copy protection is keeping me from watching the things I bought. If I had pirated them, I would not have these problems. Even better, I could stream them from my PC through the Plex app that Microsoft has made available on the Xbox One. Microsoft has made it more convenient to be a pirate than a customer.
I can’t even explain what’s going on with Netflix. Netflix works on literally every media streaming device I own (several Rokus, Xbox 360, PS3) except for the Xbox One. Ever since Microsoft pushed a big interface change (which was an improvement!), Netflix has been unusable. I contact Microsoft support and they think my network is too slow (it’s not). I contact Netflix support and they say Microsoft botched the release of their app and they’ll fix it with a new version. I’m certain it’s been updated at least once since then and Netflix is still unusable. It doesn’t affect everyone, so I guess I’m in a minority that just doesn’t get to use Netflix on Xbox One anymore.
This sucks. The copy protection on the Xbox One is beyond ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong with my TV. I’m doing nothing wrong or illegal. If the Xbox One told me on initial setup that my TV was not good enough to watch Blu-Ray movies or stream rentals, I would’ve boxed it up and sent it back immediately. I’ve contacted Amazon to see if they will grant me an exception on their return policy so I can send it back. The Netflix problem is also incomprehensible. I don’t know what they broke, but they broke something, and now the console is worse off than it was with no way of returning it to a prior working state.
I don’t know what to say. I’m pretty flabbergasted. This shit shouldn’t be so hard. This is the easy stuff; take data, output video and sound. The games work fine! I shouldn’t have to fucking struggle against the DRM to watch the things I buy. Microsoft shouldn’t be breaking their console with upgrades, and then doing nothing to fix them. I feel like I’ve been ripped off because I bought a game console and all it does is play games, but it should do more than that. And that periphery stuff should be the bits that work. What a fucking mess.