

 Netflix customers up in arms over the new Netflix Silverlight player - nickb
http://blog.netflix.com/2008/10/opt-in-for-new-netflix-movie-player.html?commentPage=3

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mattmaroon
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.

~~~
eli
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.

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rufo
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.

~~~
nickb
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.

~~~
thorax
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.

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jpcx01
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.

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Goronmon
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.

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KWD
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.

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pg
Does anyone know why they used Silverlight?

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

~~~
cabalamat
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.

~~~
jrockway
_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?

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grandalf
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...

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DarkShikari
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.

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jfarmer
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.

~~~
KC8ZKF
I have this problem when I use Safari, even the new version of Safari, but it
all works fine when I use Firefox.

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donniefitz2
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.

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zain
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.

~~~
elq
> back to flash?

Flash never was an option.

~~~
zain
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.

~~~
jpcx01
Nah, the "Opt In" is just for the new version of the Silverlight player.

Netflix on demand has always been silverlight based.

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

Netflix on Tivo works well.

~~~
eli
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.

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_bn
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.

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

