Ugh. Due to dumb DVR programming I missed last week’s season premiere of Beauty and the Geek, a show I really wanted to watch due to the show having its first gay geek. Since The CW has decided Beauty and the Geek is less deserving of decent marketing support than their beauty pageant reality series, Crowed was, they didn’t rerun the episodes.

Now as much as I hate the idea of installing software to watch video online — why should I have to go though that trouble when it’s clearly possible to do it with flash — I really wanted to see that episode and eventually broke down and downloaded the plugin (after setting up a restore point to undo the install).

Well, I still wouldn’t say I’ve seen that episode. That was the worst experience I’ve ever had with online video. For resolution about the size of a YouTube video, I got sputtering video that was unwatchable for the slow speed it came in. Worse, the player apparently doesn’t cache video because if I paused the video hoping it would allow the file to catch up, the video would play with the same horrible quality. Eventually, I gave up trying to follow the jumpy, stuttering video.