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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.