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[personal profile] varjohaltia
1) Signed up for Netflix!
2) Discovered that playback on my home theater PC (XP, Nvidia 8800GS on a 50" 720p plasma) has tearing so horrible it's unwatchable.
3) Searched the internets, found tons of threads on this, upgraded video drivers, forced vertical sync on.
4) Tried to find help at Netflix, but there doesn't appear to be any way to report trouble that isn't one of their check boxes.
5) Discovered that there is no vertical sync in Silverlight for XP, so no way to avoid tearing. Netflix won't let you play content on a computer any other way, though.
6) Upgraded to Windows 7, with the hopes that the improved APIs would fix that.
7) Discovered there are no drivers for my sound card, bluetooth adapter, remote, or NIC that will work with Windows 7.
8) Went to see how much a supported NIC and soundcard are, and bought a Sony streaming media box instead, since it was about the same price.

Date: 2011-06-19 03:23 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] elusivetiger.livejournal.com
Oy, sorry - been there done that a couple of years ago, I could have warned you. :(

Silverlight is indeed the problem. The old proprietary Netflix player worked beautifully, but when they decided to unify their code base it went out the window.

My solution was similar - a tiny $80 Roku. Lovely Netflix playback, zero tearing. I'm also running Plex on it with the HTPC serving files for torrents/etc; it's free and works great.

Date: 2011-06-19 03:28 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] elusivetiger.livejournal.com
I forgot to mention, if you happen to have a Wii - before the Roku but after the Silverlight Netflix/PC debacle we used one for Netflix for some time, and it was serviceable. The drawbacks were a component connection (kind of clunky these days) and of course 480p limit, but it suffered none of the tearing and jumpy ugliness of trying to do Silverlight on a PC.

Date: 2011-06-19 01:20 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] phyrra.livejournal.com
OMG that's awful :(

Date: 2011-06-22 01:53 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] silvertales.livejournal.com
Isn't technology wonderful?

Roku has really nice Netflix playback.... along with Hulu Plus, Amazon, and a veritable host of other channels you can pick and choose at will.

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