My wife fell asleep during Heros tonight as she missed most of Season 2 and had no clue what's going on. Not even a handful of episodes are available on NBC.com and Hulu.com, but all are available via Netflix's watch instantly service, but despite rumors as far back as last year Netflix doesn't offer Mac support.
I remembered reading that the Netflix player worked in VMWare and Parrallels on a Mac, but if I was going to pay $80 for one of these products just to watch a few instant movies, I may as well Roku Netflix Player for $100.
Instead of spending money (leveraging a MSDN subscription for the Windows OS) I downloaded VirtualBox for Mac OS. After a couple hours of installing and patching, I had Windows XP Pro ready to go in VirtualBox. The result: really close. Playing a watch instantly movie on a 2.4 GHz MacBook looks fine. So far so good, but how about going full screen mode? First VirtualBox went full screen, and then I started a new a new Netflix movie and entered full screen mode on teh Netflix player. The video playback was noticably pixilated and choppy.
Well it was worth a shot and now I have a functional Windows XP virtual machine on the MacBook to play with...
