It is very slick... too bad the quality coming through silverlight vs the old plug-in is terrible. So bad, I literally cancelled my netflix subscription. After testing the new VMC/Netflix plug-in today using a coworker's account, it seems as if nothing has improved.

I think you'll find that media center extenders are not supported...

:(

For those of you having issues with stream quality, Netflix uses adaptive streaming, sometimes it will send you the 500kbps stream for a short time until it verifies you have enough bandwidth to handle the higher bit rate streams, which look significantly better.

What Jack is talking about has nothing to do with the data rate of the stream, but rather that Silverlight is not as capable a video player as the old plug-in was.

Many are experiencing frame-dropping (I was averaging 5-12 on a 2ghz Athlon 64), and constant vsync tearing. Netflix nor Microsoft seems aware or willing to address this issue, as I contacted technical support only to be told to 'lower my resolution to 800x600' or 'put in a faster processor'.

Ironically just yesterday I was streaming fine, with excellent quality, and after "upgrading" this morning, it is basically unwatchable on any of my PCs.

Silverlight player sucks ass. Tearing, jerkiness. Luckily, I've never opted-in to silverlight and can continue to use WMP, which on the same computer is smooth as silk. Too bad MS continues to push this crap when WMP is superior. Feel badly for all you that are forced to use silverlight. WMP rocks.

Yeah, Quality on this is an issue! a big issue!

i'm looking for who to officially write about this. the quality is atrocious. i mean abhorrent. not only is the quality bad, but it drops frames and stutters. considering that i can play full 1080p videos (with the appropriate codec) with my current machine, i don't see a good reason that this is so bad.

I have seen the same tearing issues on three different PCs and both nVidia an ATI graphics cards. This stinks.

Its beyond laughable and pathetic they put all that effort into a slick vmc plugin (albeit 2 years later than they should have) and its still unwatchable. I have a core 2 dual 3.4ghz, nvidia 9300, and I get unwatchable tearing and stuttering and interlace issues even when i lower my res to 720p. And thats just with silverlight normally. With the vmc plugin its twice as bad. The plugin also gives me the lowest quality stream even though im 10mbps. When i use the xbox netflix its smooth and beautiful. And when i use flash on my pc like hulu that looks great too. But Netflix on silverlight for windows is absolute utter garbage and its been many months and they dont even acknoledge it.

I'VE CANCELLED MY MEMBERSHIP ON 5-31-09; PLEASE DON'T SEND ME ANYMORE DVD'S.

I love the Silverlight player in Netflix. Four movies so far, no problems.

That being said, I vastly prefer vnc-player on Linux or Windows to WMP or silverlight. I can have lots of background apps open while watching movies. On a dual monitor set-up, i can be chatting on msn w/ friends while watching Battlestar Gallactica. W/ WMP or Silverlight, it's not possible.

However, what Silverlight does is shield users from d/ling compatible codex for what they want to watch -- always a PITA! So long-term Silverlight is more "commercial-grade" than vnc-player.

I finally feel that I'm not going crazy. I am having the same problems as everyone else here. I utterly despise the new Netflix player. I honestly can't watch any videos because their choppy and poor quality and constant readjusting connection leaves me so frustrated. I desperately looked for an alternative to the website method. Finally there's a WMC add on....but this too doesn't work. It'll work all the way up until I click "Play" then it crashes Windows Media Center, every time. I'm just about to the point of canceling my account as well. There has to be a solution soon or Netflix will probably loose many valuable customers.

I was recently forced into the Silverlight plugin and Netflix Instant is now unwatchable. The tearing is maddening. Using the old player, playback was silky smooth and rivaled DVD quality. I'm glad I'm not the only one who has seen this. I've doubled my DVD return rate now that I can't watch instantly.

So... I did all the installing and now I can't actually access Netflix either from the website or from inside the fancy new (full of things I didn't ask for) Media Center. Where has Netflix gone?

I found running Silverlight (2 or 3 beta) inside VMC had extreme tearing. However, running it outside of VMC (opening Netflix from IE) worked very good. Seems this is an issue that should be able to be resolved by Microsoft. Anyhow... I run VMC from a Sony Vaio HTPC with RGB output to CE Labs HD component distribution amps to split and distribute for multiple zones in my home. With that, I deceided to stretch the boundries of the HTPC video past what's viewable on my flat panels. Then not run VMC in full screen, but restore the window and strech the borders just past what's viewable then on my flat panels. Now, all VMC functionality works via remote and Netvista streamed watch now movies are acceptable watching quality. It looks great in fact for the price I'm paying. Between Netflix, HD Tuner, and multiple firewire changers on-line, this will allow me to cancel my $150/mo bill with Uverse. Hope this helps, and I hope Microsoft fixes this issue. Good luck all.

Very nice plugin but the silverlight player is complete crap. Tearing, jerkiness, dropped frames. Total and complete crap. Sadly, complete silence from MS on this issue too. I wonder how much MS had to play netflix to use silverlight?

I know MLB dropped silverlight. I can't imagine trying to watch a sporting event using silverlight.

Netflix with Silverlight = complete failure. It cannot calculate the speed correctly, always stops after a few minutes to "adjust playback speed", but never does, just freezes. Reloading the page helps ... for the next few minutes. I have a fast machine, DSL, tried on several computers, all the same. Instant play worked with old Netflix Viewer, is unusable now. Shame!!!!!!!

I am watching on my vista media center pc as i type this and it looks great! The player automatically adjust resolution based on video capability of the pc. its possible if you are having issues your video card is not up to par

I build PCs and have several high end machines with a vast array of hardware. Everything works great.... everything but the Silverlight player inside WMC. Major tearing & low picture quality in general. Very disapointing

I totally agree with some of the people above. Since I was forced to upgrade to Silverlight the movie quality is just awful.

I've recently canceled my Netflix because of Silverlight. I've been a happy user for 2 years, but the forced upgrade turned very watchable video into total garbage on every PC I have, from an XP Athlon to a Dual core Intel less than a year old. All of them played superb quality streaming video from Netflix before. Now it's truly rubbish, about the same as youtube. Even forcing the playback up to 1500 didn't help much. Jerky frame rates, high compression artifacts, poor sharpness generally. Very poor show from Netflix and Microsoft. If I could have changed back, I would still be giving them money every month. Shame.

Netflix with silverlight? What a complete disaster.

I was dreading the day I would be forced into this DOWNGRADE. Lord, I was so right. I've 4 systems, all top of the line with the best processors and video cards you can get. Now all deliver the same massively worse video quality. Just about unwatchable. This in infuriating as the old player was great.
The problem is obviously pervasive and has not been appropriately adressed by either company. I feel so abused and cheated by netflix.


Subscription canceled........

I wish I could go back. I am out. I loved the old player but can not use the siverlight crap.

Unfortunately, I must agree. Just started a trial of netflix and the video quality is pretty bad, especially using the VMC plugin. It apparently tries to use the 2200k bitrate (which would normally be ok, since I have a 3000k downlink) but is very choppy and basically unwatachable at that setting. If I use the IE-based player, I can watch it, but the quality is pretty poor. It looked like it was just a very bad compression algorithm. If I use the MyNetflix VMC plugin, I can manually set the bitrate to one notch lower and it is watchable, but still quite poor quality. I'm not buying the "hardware's not good enough" thing, since I have a Pentium D @ 2.8 x2, 4 GB of DDR2, and an NVidia 8800GT. I can playback 1080p, 1080i, or 720p content at the full blu-ray quality bitrate, so I don't think playing back low-bitrate SD content should be a problem for the hardware.

Due to the poor picture quality, I'm considering canceling the Netflix subscription and just keeping the blockbuster subscription that we have. Looks like I may just have to stick to blu-ray (or, at worst, upconverted DVD) until Netflix can stream a higher bitrate with a better compression scheme/video encoding. It's a shame, though, because I really do like the concept of streaming just about any movie I want from media center. Maybe I'll give Netflix one more chance after I move in a few months, as I intend to get a higher-speed internet connection (probably 8 or 10 Mbps down) at that time. What I'd really like would be for Verizon to get down here with their FiOS service. You just can't beat a 100Mbps down residential internet connection.

ok... I just tried this again. Apparently if VMC is not running in full-screen mode, the picture quality is immaculate with no frame drops at all. The quality rivals upconverted DVD. Go figure. You'd think it would be the opposite (that is, you'd think quality would be better when VMC has the graphics card in exclusive mode. Btw, in the windowed mode, I have the window expanded to the full size of the screen, so the video is playing at about the same size (maybe a few pixels smaller in both dimensions.)

Ross, don't waste your cash getting a faster connection. If you can get a 2200kbps stream you're still using the old AX player. Since Netflix seem determined to force everyone onto Silverlight eventually, the maximum stream you will get is 1500 no matter what your bandwidth (and it's poorer quality than the AX player 1600 setting). The reason Netflix shelved their ambitions to provide HD video is surely because of Silverlight. Even fast modern PCs can't keep up with a 1500kbps stream using Silverlight. It's not the connection speed that's the problem, as you can see it's buffering well in advance on a 3Mbps connection. Good gaming video cards don't help that much, as they're designed to be good at 3-D, not full screen video. The Silverlight player needs a fast processor, at least dual core, to be effective, but with the low quality stream it will never be as good as you're getting now. (They were trialing 3000kbps streams on occasion at one time. It really was DVD quality, but that's not going to happen for a long time now.)

I gotta say, I have been streaming Netflix to my Xbox and the quality has been great. I recently hooked my PC up to my home theater with Vista Windows Media Center and the Netflix quality is HORRIBLE. Extremely disappointing. I'm just glad it looks great on Xbox.... :(

Glad I found this, misery loves company. Just upgraded Silverlight to v3 and hoped it would be an improvement, but unforturnately it's not. Obviously MS is lending a deaf ear to our problems and Netflix, well they know they screwed up but just won't admit it. How do you get performance guarentees from a bully like MS? I've been using Media Center from the begining with Vista being without a doubt the best so far. If the problem is inside of VMC I hope they fix it, but with Windows 7 being released I'm not holding my breath. It sounds like Netflix got dupped by MS with the silverlight plugin and it's customers are left holding the bag.

What in the world are you all complaining about? I use netflix on three different computers and it works fine. The quality is very good and I've only had one or two occasions (while watching DOZENS of movies) where, FOR A FEW SECONDS, the image was pixilated and jerky. I don't understand why some people need to complain so much. If you don't like Netflix, go back to renting.......Not very cost effective but it will solve your "problems".

In case anyone is interested, if you have an AMD Athlon 64 x2 processor, silverlight2 is not compatable with your comuter, it will install but will not work. I spent sometime with Microsoft on this, they indicated that will be fixed in 3.0, but I had the same problem with the 3.0 beta. So I suspect it isn't.

...Do you get mad when you upgrade your browser, but amazon doesn't take advantage of new features yet?...

When Amazon begins charging dues and the quality of it's wares diminishes significantly as have Netflix streaming video this analogy will be more relevant.

Things being what they are the following is more applicable:

Netflix advertises streaming video avaliability w/most membership packages, however, due to it's choice of streaming video matrix a majority of it's members will find this service largely overpriced and entirely unuseable.

I, like many, was completely satisfied w/Netflx streaming video previous to this "upgrade". In the weeks since implimentation I've seen audio/video quality severely diminished, tolerable and severely diminished again. Our $$ are too precious to wait around to see when/if Netflix and/or MS work the kinks out. Perhaps, we'll return when/if they do.

I was stoked when I fired up media center and was browsing though the watch instantly titles with my remote... but as soon as I picked one, I could tell within the first 10 seconds that the quality was significantly lower than just going through IE.

Anyone who says it's because of an underpowered system or low bandwidth... I'm running a quad-core with an 8800GTX and I generally get about 10-16Mbps down.

It's just kind of a bummer, but people can still just use IE. Not nearly as slick though.

im about to cancel my netflix.. since the upgrade.. i get nothing at all. i bought netflix just for the streaming, but its pretty worthless.. low quality. its not the same as before, which i liked better.

anyways, does anybody know any other site that does good movie streaming? thx =D

I never used the IE plug-in referenced here - I saw the Netflix option appear in my Vista MCE one day and then signed up for Netflix to try it out. Yes - the movies tend to start out pixelated - but within a minute or two, they are usually just fine. Quality is not DVD, but I did find it quite reasonable on my 46in LCD. The convenience can not be beat - i love it. Sadly, I switched my HTPC to Win 7 MCE, so no Netflix plug-in, but I am looking forward to it when it arrives.

V3 of Silverlight is somewhat better than the previous versions, but it's nowhere near as good as the old Netlfix player. I have a really good connection and PCs that were really great with the old player. I thought was Netflix was amazing and wonderful quality, way better than anything else available, but not only does the new player stop and say it needs to buffer more and more frequently, but the 'top' quality is often very poor, and it often starts dropping more frames than it shows. It's rare to get through a movie without losing quality or starting to buffer so often I get fed up with it. With the old player, it NEVER needed to buffer (not once!), and quality was always top-notch. 'Upgrading' to Silverlight was a terrible mistake. I've spent hours and hours trying to get the quality back that I had before, and I've a good solid 20 years of experience tuning PCs, but it's just not available through Silverlight. Worst of all, Netflix could easily allow me to go back to the old player, but policy doesn't allow it. I watch Netflix online about 25% of the time I used to, and now often watch things on hulu.com instead. Its quality is better most of the time (though it buffers just as often) and the ads aren't too intrusive, but it's free! Netflix could make all their customers happy again by allowing access on the old player for those who want it. I might dump them soon, as it doesn't give the value it used to and there are more alternatives every day.

forced silverlight upgrade today. cancelled 2/3 yr membership right after. horrible quality.

Are these people serious? I let them change my player to the new one a few weeks ago, and the quality of the picture and the actual service has taken a dramatic dive. My PC's less than two years old, but it seems I would need something way more powerful to get the new player to work right. I couldn't recommend Netflix to anyone now, since it seems I'm not allowed to change back to the PLAYER THAT WAS WORKING GREAT. I've advised my friends not to update, but some already have and find the same problems. Some people on the net say that the new player is working fine for them, but they either didn't see the old one or must have really fast PCs that can keep up (or they're blind, stupid, or working for Netflix...) I really hate it now. Not cool...

Tim, we are upset because we were forced to upgrade to an inferior product, not because they are failing to utilize the latest features in Silverlight. They should have waited until they had parity in the new product before forcing the upgrade.

As with everyone else, I have a high end computer and the old player was a selling point to me and friends. I was 'flagged as a forced switch' (the term used by the CSR I spoke to) and the quality is terrible. Hard to compare because it is so bad. Like many others, I shall do my duty and speak with my wallet.

I will now support hulu (and other stream media, as even the low quality 480p setting on hulu is above top settings on the new netflix viewer. The high quality hulu smokes it) and rent elsewhere. This is perhaps the worst business move of 2009 by a customer supported company. More and more people are watching online and to offer a lower quality viewing experience in a player forced upon you was a terrible move. Lower quality than what else is out there is fatal in the long term, forced change and 'optional' software puts the last nails in. This is just begging for a competitor to pick up the ball and smoke netflix in the same consumer Darwinism that put netflix so high up.

I solved this problem on my computer - might work for you. The problem is with something called the user agent. Google MSDN user agent. It's basically an identifier for your browser and it starts simple but more and more junk gets added on. If it's too long, Netflix crashes WMC. To shorten it, you must edit your registry - not a big deal but BE CAREFUL!!! BACKUP WHATEVER PART OF THE REGISTRY YOU MESS WITH FIRST!

Check out http://whatsmyuseragent.com/ and it will show you how long your string is. Mine was huge.

To fix this run regedit then navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent\Post Platform] and make a backup of that section (File ->export or right-click on Post Platform, choose export) then delete the entries under Post Platform that say office live connector, office live patch and if you have to, SLCC1. (I left the .net stuff and 'media center PC"). Hopefully you don't use office live connector as this might break it. It certainly doesn't break the regular use of IE8.

If this isn't working and your string appears reaaaaly long, keeping trying to shorten it. If you run into problems with Internet Explorer, restore the registry changes by double-clicking the registry file you backed up.

Good luck!

It seems like everytime I try to watch a Netflix video on media center I have to update silverlight. Updating isn't really the problem. What pisses me off is that the Silverlight package isn't even smart enough to uninstall the old version automatically before attempting to install. I have to manually uninstall the f...ing thing everytime and then install the update (which i suspect is actually the same version anyway but media center doesn't keep track of what version is installed). THIS IS SO F...ING ANNOYING!!! !!@#(*&@#^%@#

Netflix is excellent, when it works. I've been using it for a month now and it just suddenly stop streaming movies. They are doing a favulous job in making a lot of customers lose their temper. Please hire smarter developers or tell microsoft not to mess with Netflix users through Silverlight.....I'll just take a deep breath!

I am with many others I've seen while spending days reading comments from April 2008 until November, 2009 - on other blogs & sites that are of this opinion:

That the early comments of Silverlight being better MUST HAVE BEEN PR PLANTS - Departments and Developers of Microsoft, Silverlight or Netflix.

I agree with them, since if anyone researches - mostly ONLY the very EARLIEST testers and responses are positive, but us regular beta-testers and "forced-switch" subscribers pretty much all agree after Force-Switch to Silverlight and 9 months now of hoping it would get better: Netflix made a mistake and will lose business (mine for sure, and I can't get Cable, netflix was my FAVORITE thing for having options to watch streaming).

The Fact Remains: No matter the bandwidth, congestion, or all the PR about how many home computers, time of day,: We all worked FINE with the old player.

The Fact Remains: The MAJORITY of regular users who were fine before: We all now have freeze-frame issues with the new. Enough to ruin the Netflix Instant Watch experience, and we are turning to HULU. I'm even willing to PAY HULU (oh, $10/mo or so - their selection is different/less).

NOTE: Interesting: I use FireFox, but it wasn't getting any less CHOPPY - so I tried IE. Kept saying I needed to install Silverlight. VIP: I spent 3 hours on the phone with Mircrsoft (and who's expense I may ask?) to help them get that Silverlight to work with IE7 on my brand-new $1,500 laptop. They couldn't. At who's expense that 3 hours?

In Firefox the playback was (and still is after 9 months of "we aim to be the best streaming" retrorec - - still choppy with freeze-frame and blurs even after it's buffered more than 50% of where I am at!

Fact remains, regardless of the machine type, technical or hardware or ISP issues, I'd say 69-75% of your paid market (Netflix) WAS WORKING JUST FINE BEFORE SILVERLIGHT AND SIMPLY PUT, NOW ISN'T. It matters not all the PR does it.

Bottom Line: PR won't work. I've been patient 9 months since release. But now - I'm dropping down to 1-2 DVD's at a time, since I can no longer tolerate the pain of trying to watch what was once perfect, chop and blur and OUCH, Silverlight.

And when I want to watch streaming, well I Love HULU, NBS, TNT, THE CW, CBS, FOX and ABC online. They work well, and I'm not paying for it. I could care less about 3 minutes of commercials.

I am sorry to lose my Netflix - it was one of the main reasons I signed up, and went to 6 DVD's at a time - I figured it was worth it with all the Instant - which I need without Cable. But not at the expense of the total frustration and aggravation I've endured.

Silverlight is as dysfunctional as Vista, just another Microsoft mess.

The quality sucks? I never even noticed a difference.. In fact, the day that I told my wife the streaming movies really seem to be a higher quality lately we saw that it was silverlight. I was going to cancel my subscription with them because I don't watch the dvds anymore so there was really no point, but now that the streaming quality is so much higher, I kept my subscription going.

I found this post in the wake of Youtube going 1080p. I haven't used Netflix for a while, but when I did a trial, it had the Silverlight player and I thought it was really good. I can't see what may have gone wrong since then so maybe it CAN be because there are many more subscribers and it's a scale issue. Unfortunately, if this is the case, there prolly insn't a fast solution for this as it just has to play out and they need to upgrade capital equipment to go with the expansion. When I tried it, there was no XBox streaming so if more ppl use NetFlix, then it might just be like when DTV was new and had intermittant outages.

OK, I believe I have a solution for Netflix users and Nvdia cards and this has appeared to completely solved the problem. I don't know if this works on Macs, but this worked for me running Windows XP and having a Nvidia 7900 GT card. Anyway, first of all, so we're all on the same page, download the latest drivers from nvidia. They release new ones every other month or so, so don't think you have the newest version. This may not be necessary, but do it anyway so you can properly follow along.

www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Secondly, open the Nvidia control panel. Right click on the green nivida symbol that should be in your icon tray next to the system time in lower right hand corner of the monitor, and open the "Nvidia Control Panel". Expand "Display" if it isn't already expanded in the left bar and choose "Adjust desktop size and position". Under section 2. that says "When a resolution lower than my display's native resolution..." mine was originally set on "Use my display's built in scaling". Personally, I changed that to, "Use NVIDIA scaling with fixed aspect ratio" and my tearing problems were completely solved. Use the other Nvidia scaling option if you dont like the result.

This actually leads me to believe that the problem is not necessarily with Nvidia and Silverlight, but perhaps with Silverlight and my monitor. In any event it works perfectly and I'm happy now.

Silverlight is garbage. I can't watch a single Watch Now movie without my screen going blank several times during playback. I do not have Nvidea graphics. Intel graphics. Silverlight support's answer was to ask me to 'install Silverlight'. Netflix's response was 'too bad for you'. Screw 'em both. NEVER HAD A PROBLEM BEFORE I WAS FORCED TO SWITCH TO SILVERLIGHT. THE QUALITY OF THE VIDEO SUCKS. ANOTHER PILE OF CRAP FROM MICROSOFT. YOU CAN BE PROUD BILL GATES.

I have experienced the same problem with Silverlight. I thought the quality would be at least ok... but it's not.

My specs
Network: 8mbps down/1mbps up
CPU: Amd Phenom II x4 2.8GHz
Ram: 2gb DDR3
OS: Windows XP

I used to use Linux as my HTPC, but I wanted Netflix... now I'm thinking of going back to Linux due to this crappy quality.

I'm an IT professional, and I just have to say that Silverlight is a steaming pile of &^$%. This is utter BS. Typical Microcrap. Blocky as hell when it use to be fine before the implimentation of Silverlight. Way to bend over for Microsoft Netflix.

Just watch the movie!!!