Netflix customers up in arms over the new Netflix Silverlight player | Hacker News Reader

Netflix customers up in arms over the new Netflix Silverlight player

blog.netflix.com

30 pointsnickb35 comments

The title is misleading because none of those problems cited (except lack of support for the .0001% of the population using a PPC Mac) have anything to do with Silverlight. I've seen perfectly good video in that format. The Olympics for example.

If they had the same problems with a Flash player, it wouldn't be news, nor would you have given it that linkbait title. I expect better from you nickb.

It's subjective, I suppose. I haven't done any rigorous testing, but the Silverlight player running through Firefox on my MacBook Pro seems lower quality than Firefox running the old player through a Win XP VMWare instance.

What's wrong with the Silverlight player?

Runs fine on my Mac, except for a strange interaction between it and the NVidia chipsets that causes it to tear video (apparently it doesn't happen on ATI-based Macs.) There's a workaround you can use with Firefox that fixes that, at any rate.

Certainly seems to suck less CPU than Flash, which can peg both cores of my MacBook Pro just playing a YouTube video full-screen.

Read some of the comments.

* Silverlight doesn't run on PPC Macs

* lots of video quality issues: poor picture, blockiness

* lots of audio syncing issues: audio is several seconds behind on many videos

* can't revert back to the old player once you "upgrade" and most customers are saying that they were conned into "upgrading" by Netflix.

Finally, this all started in November of 2008 and comments are still pouring in and it's March of 2009.

I watch it daily on Mac (mini), never had any issue. Love it. I guess I should pour in my comments-- though they get them indirectly when I beam to people about how much I love Netflix streaming.

One of the big frustrations for Linux users is that Netflix supports Linux based appliances, like Roku, but won't support streaming to Linux desktops.

I'm out of luck because I have a couple of Linux machines and a PPC Mac at home...

I tried it the other day on my macbook pro (2.5Ghz), and it skipped several video frames every minute or so. The audio was fine, but the skipping was jarring and unwatchable.

The previous player ran very well on a five year old Dell laptop.

I had the same problem in Safari, but watching in Firefox works fine. I think Safari has issues handling plugins generally.

I also tested it briefly on Safari 4 and it seems to be better.

This seems a bit crazy. To my surprise, Silverlight has worked awesome on my mac. This link is just a trial for a new beta player. Is the "up in arms" part that they still don't support PowerPC?

PowerPC is sorta on its last legs anyways. Even a profitable startup like Netflix has to invest wisely, and pouring development resources into building an entirely new player on the mac (since Microsoft wont support silverlight on PPC) would be a pretty poor business decision.

Sorry guys, you're going to have to upgrade at some point. You just aren't really an install base that has any weight any longer.

I always find it amusing to read the comments for stuff like this. It's just so obvious that you will always get a people complaining about something.

I mean, you have a large number of complaints that Netflix is forcing people to use software made by "evil M$". You have people complaining that PPC isn't supported. You have people complaining that they wasted time supported Mac at all. You have people complaining that their decade old CPUs aren't supported, and others complaining they need to get beefier encoding to allow for better quality.

The post linked is from October 2008. It's now March 2009. Is there any more current information? I dismissed the article as soon as I saw it was outdated.

Does anyone know why they used Silverlight?

There are several reasons but one of the biggest is that Microsoft's DRM solution is/was the most acceptable to the studios.

Some quotes from disguntled Netflix customers:

"You can bet I won't be renewing if they don't fix this garbage"

"lower connection speed and lower quality than before Silverlight"

"uggh, Individualization failed. Unable to playback protected (DRM) content. Error 8152. Still does not work on the Mac."

"horribly pixelated, sporadic and painful to watch at times"

"Never really had a problem with the WMP player. Now, I was forced to "opt" in to the new player. Video is jerky/choppy on all Starz titles and many others. And by jerky, I mean unwatchable. Thanks Netflix!!!!!!!!!!!!! What worked fine yesterday is now worthless. Amazing that they can actually make Blockbuster an option again."

If the studios want to push people into downloading over BitTorrent, they're going the right way about it.

Having said all that, kudos to Netflix for not pulling all the adverse comments from their website.

If the studios want to push people into downloading over BitTorrent, they're going the right way about it.

Yeah, I only use Netflix out of utter desperation. If I really want to watch something, and just can't find it on Usenet or TPB, then I grudgingly accept the fact that I will have to use Netflix. The UI and video quality are both terrible. Why is it that I can stream full-HD video for free, but I am only able to pay for low-quality DRM'd crap?

My understanding is that is was the only viable DRM solution that was cross-platform.

Apple won't license FairPlay and Flash-based DRM ain't quite there yet.

Widevine (http://www.widevine.com/cypher.html) offers a flash based DRM that many of the studios like, but it's shockingly expensive.

1. time based animation (vs frame based)

2. content delivery network

3. scalable video formats from HD to mobile

4. media server licensing is cheap

1. Player frame rate has zero impact on flash video playback

2. Established CDNs for flash delivery has been in existence for years(Akami,Influxis..)

3. Flash's video capabilities include playback of H.264,mp4,mov,3gp...(from HD to mobile!)

4. Red 5 is free as beer.

I dont think its a feature based choice. Looks more like a marketing deal with MS for wider adoption of the format.

You're missing the key feature: DRM. The studios won't sign off unless they trust the DRM.

Flash does have DRM support. My understanding is that Amazon's Video on Demand implements it.

They have a deal with Microsoft to stream to the XBox. I always assumed Microsoft "evangelized" Silverlight to them.

Not sure what everyone is talking about. I use netflix on osx and it's by far the best online streaming experience I've had.... equivalent to iTunes in quality, but with better error handling for flaky connections.

The DRM also works seamlessly.... so the end user wouldn't even know the content was protected.

I just wish it worked on linux... I don't know if moonlight plans to support DRM...

The quality on their player is worse than your average Scene DVD rip--and given how bad such rips usually look, this is embarrassing.

How long is it going to take, how many hundreds of millions of wasted dollars, how many failed companies, before people realize that if you're going to charge people to watch video, you should show it in reasonable quality, not godawful low-bitrate VC-1? And it isn't as if good encoders are expensive or something like that.

I don't like it because the video skips about every 5-10 seconds. The audio is fine. It's really annoying, especially if you're watching an action movie.

Hrmph.

I have this problem when I use Safari, even the new version of Safari, but it all works fine when I use Firefox.

I've been using the Silverlight version on Boxee for a few months and I have had few issues. I do think an opt-in opt-out program would have been a better move.

Does anyone know why they decided to make it so people couldn't switch back to Flash? It seems to me that if they lifted this ridiculous restriction, all these people pissed at Netflix would be happy.

> back to flash?

Flash never was an option.

Isn't that how streaming to PCs works if you don't opt in to Silverlight?

If not, substitute "flash" with whatever the current option is.

Nah, the "Opt In" is just for the new version of the Silverlight player.

Netflix on demand has always been silverlight based.

Has anyone hacked the streaming format? It seems like it should be possible.

Netflix on Tivo works well.

The whole point is that its got baked in DRM.

Anyway, what's the point? Everything's already on bittorrent, and everything on streaming is also available on easily rippable DVD.

I don't know, but this is the type of shit that really makes me mad. If you decide to do business with a large corporation that has enough internal resources to deploy a half-assed product that is based solely on the decision to add competition to an existing market, then this is what you get.

What kind of crap is netflix(and microsoft) trying pull here? -There is no reverting back to the old-player (a subtle TOS) -No Mac support -Silverlight has to be installed on all PC's that use the netflix service ...this list goes on

Microsoft's primary focus has always been to use tacky business strategies that will increase shareholder profits rather than building great, dependable products....and it really needs to stop.

>No Mac support There is Mac support, but only for Intel based systems. PowerPC systems are out of luck.

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