Netflix Streaming on Windows7 : Any Fix for Tearing?

Hmm, what computer specs?

A possible solution for nVidia cards (apparently) that has been posted elsewhere.

Netflix streaming picture quality seems really sensitive to network issues. How do you connect to the Internet? If you have, for example, a PPoE DSL connection, you can try reducing your MTU at the Netflix viewing PC to match the PPoE MTU. (usually set to 1492)

If you have any intermediary firewalls or routers, you could just try reducing the MTU there. Often times, these intermediary firewalls or routers (sometimes even the DSL modem itself) doesn't relay the ICMP messages necessary for PMTU discovery and this results in some packets not making it through reliably.

Try that and see if the picture quality improves..

You can also try a couple of "hacks".

Exit Media Center if it's running.
Fire up Netflix in IE, DON'T make it full screen.
Select SHIFT+ALT on your keyboard and CLICK somewhere inside the player (which is not full screen at this point, and running within IE)
This will bring up a Silverlight Diagnostics menu.

Select A/V Stats
Observe the Playing bitrate and the buffering bitrate. Generally you'll find the playing bitrate to be 500 and the buffering bitrate to be 1500
Exit the diagnostics screen by clicking on the X at top right (the diagnostics is just an overlay over the underlying video)

Go into the diagnostics menu again by SHIFT+ALT + click
Select Stream Manager this time, and set it to "manual" and 1500. Apply

Exit Diagnostics menu
Reenter Diagnostics menu and go into AV stats again.
Observe the rates again. They "should" both be 1500 now.

These rates should persist even in the player in Media Center as the changes seem to be global. Reboot if you need to.

Now, this may still not help the tearing issue, but atleast you have removed the whole PQ based on network connection speed variable out of the equation.

You have a ATI video card "ATI HD5670" . Did you install the FULL ATI CCC driver suite ? Here is a link. Besure to pick the right windows os.
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_catalyst.aspx
Once installed you will have full control over video.
Look under 3D for V sync
And also look under Display Management and Video Settings for other useful tools. I am behind the tech curve, still with xp, much hasn't changed, but this info should help you greatly as vertical tearing is a V sync problem with panels. Use settings 60hz , 720p or 1080i or maybe 30/24 hz.. Its a try it and see which works best for your setup. Someone with the same setup as you could tell you step by step, but till then this should help you, now that you have the tools needed to solve your vertical tearing.

Good to hear its somewhat better.
I do not remember the steps on how to, but there is a way for you to lock 3D settings to 2D (desktop) FORCING the settings.
Its tearing on the big panel, is it the same on a small PC monitor, Before we get to crazy, is the source material clean ? Check it out at 800x600 or lower which is less demanding on the system, the 5670 should have no problems handling this.

Just give it some more time and check back, I'm sure your not the only one. When the kiddys get back from spring break, there good with this.

Do you have all of the Aero eye candy turned on?
I noticed that there's a setting in Aero that will convert tearing to stutter. Depending on how severe, the stutter might be more to your liking.

Mike

NP glad to help. Let us know if you end up having any stutter.

Mike

I also had annoying tearing with Flash / Silverlight streaming video. Thanks for the tip about the Aero theme; I mistakenly had the Windows 7 'basic' theme set. Now with the Aero theme, I only have slight stutter on some videos, and no tearing.

Zotac MAG Atom 330 / Nvidia ION
Panasonic TH-58PE75U plasma
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Nvidia drivers 195.62 -> 196.21 -> 197.13
Flash 10.1 p1 -> 10.1 p2 -> 10.1 p3

I'm still getting stutter on streaming videos with Aero turned on. I wish I knew what was causing the stutter. I'm not sure what Aero does, but AFAIK it justs masks the problem.

I wish I knew the actual cause of the stutter/tearing.

Mike

I have a Onboard Radeon HD 3200. The only way I was able to reduce some of the stutter using Silverlight is by downgrading my Catalyst Drivers all the way back to 9.1.

Edit: had to go back to Catalyst 8.12 because 9.1 caused wake from hibernate issues.

Read these as they may be relevant and why you get it with Netflix & don't with Hulu.

http://www.unitzeroone.com/blog/2009...creen-tearing/

http://thebackbutton.com/post_oldblogpost_64

The first article has some test videos you can play and it's obvious the difference it can make. Have you tried turning OFF hardware acceleration? Just curious...I dont use Netflix and none of my other Flash stuff has problems (Youtube & Hulu).

I have a GA-MA785GM-US2H with Windows 7 Ultimate, CCC 10.3; onboard Radeon HD4200 with an Athlon II X2 240 and all this is connected via HDMI with sound to a Samsung LN52A650 and the judder and tearing in Netflix is horrible. It seems to me that this is a problem of the Netflix player lousy coding.
I hope they fix it.

Other people around these parts are getting acceptable playback. You have some other issue if it's terrible.

Do you happen to use DSL?

Mike

Nope, I have Comcast with "Power Boost" haha, I don't think is a broadband issue, It's something related to either the drivers, the Netflix Player or Silverlight. I have just downloaded Silverlight 4 and still have the same issue, altough it is a little better. The picture is not unwatchable, I mean my kids enjoy Kids movies and stuff, but I can never pay attention to anything since the thing is so distracting.

Sorry to wake this thread from a couple months in the grave....

I have my HTPC connected to a 120hz TV via HDMI and one thing I know for certain, this thing is sensitive to dropped frames when I run it at any refresh rate 23.976hz, 24hz, 29hz, 30hz, 59hz or 60hz. With smooth motion on or off, I can definitely see hiccups when the card is not accelerating video.

Sadly, my HTPC is the only entertainment medium in my house, with my goal of solely relying on Media Center to launch any video/music/multimedia. When there are problems, I suppose Im bound to find them given how frequently I interact with WMC. Maybe other people haven't ran into some of these issues yet. Netflix though is my last hurdle to jump.

When I run any BluRay vids, either from BD DVD or H.264 container, things run great. I'm using TMT3 integrated into Media Center for BD playback and the Klite Codecpack 64bit for k.264 playback. I can verify video is accelerated with "AMD GPU Clock Tool." No Blu Ray playback problems.

When I run Hulu Desktop (also integrated into Media Center with Media Center Studio) or Hulu browser version, things run great. "AMD GPU Clock Tool" reports video is accelerated. No flash problems at all.

When playing Netflix through the browser all content is accelerated verified by shift-alt-left click. The video is very smooth. When playing Netflix through WMC plugin, only cartoons are accelerated and some standard video. When switching from an accelerated video to one that wasn't previously accelerated (Enabled - False) and choppy (without stopping the video), somehow the flag stays on for the next video and there are no hiccups or choppiness!

This only occurs on the AMD/ATI based HTPC, even after a fresh install of the Win7x64 OS with no codec packs installed. It does not occur on my Intel based laptop with integrated graphics. Netflix with the Silverlight engine appears to be the only content type suffering from this problem accelerating certain video with the HTPC.

Hey, thanks.

I just wanted to thank you and append extra information for problems your solution also fixes.
I don't have a problem anymore and just came to add more information.

I have a netbook that I gave to my wife as a gift.

The problem was the netflix video and audio falling out of sync in all browsers. Horrible annoying, unwatchable annoying.

I am still having minor tearing in Netflix (minor, not going to put any more effort in).

Okay what is the base problem? Hardware. The lenovo S10-3 netbook is barely powerful enough to handle netflix with it's atom processor and anemic video hardware running Windows 7 Starter that no one likes-- no one.

So in order:

I tried running netflix in the Google Chrome browser. -- Better playback, same problems after a slightly longer span of time.

I bumped up the memory to the fastest 2GB module it would take which is the maximum quantity as well since there is only one slot. --No noticable improvement.

I removed as many (TSR) crapware lenovo helper utilities I could; veriface, something else (at this time I kept the hard drive drop protection utility because we are butterfingered people). But TSRs were heavily reduced. --Slight improvement, barely noticeable.

I defragged the factory installed platter hard drive which is very active, often. --No noticeable improvement.

I replaced the factory installed WD Blue 250GB platter HD with an Intel 330 series 180GB HD and cloned the old hard drive to it using Clonezilla. (Clonezilla no longer automatically lets you clone a bigger hard drive to a smaller hard drive even if the data will fit, you may need to resize your partitions and you will need the advanced menu options and specifically the -icds option http://sourceforge.net/projects/clonezilla/forums/forum/663168/topic/5125793 ) -- Much better playback, same problem after yet more time and especially if ANY multitasking whatsoever. Resizing the window would throw it out of sync.

Remove the last TSR I felt safe getting rid of, namely the disk protection utility that tries to eliminate damage to your platter disk in the event of a drop. Didn't need this anymore, the new disk has no moving parts. --No noticeable improvement.

Turned off scheduled disk defragmentation. Reran the Windows Experience Index (in computer properties). --No noticeable improvement.

Lowered most of my video settings to turn off advanced features my non-gaming wife will never use. --Barely, any improvement.

Left hardware acceleration on. --No change in setting, no change in performance.

And here was the breakthrough.
In the post I am replying to, the avsforum member suggested setting the buffer doodad to 1500 in the Silverlight diagnostics menu.
I did not have a 1500 and was set at 1750.
The onboard video seemingly powered by gerbils on a wheel had a 1050 buffering setting which was the highest that was below 1500.
I used IE 8 in the regular standard windowed mode holding shift + alt then clicking on the playing selection to get the diagnostics menu.
This key combination also worked in Chrome when I tried it because I was curious.

--You sir are a man among men. This solved all of the audio and video syncing issues I had allowing a full episode to be played with the sounds matching the moving pretty picture. Thank you so much.

I wanted to reply to at least one of the main forums recently discussing this, since it took me a lot of digging to find. I recently was dumbfounded myself as to why, with more than ample hardware and bandwidth, would I get such horrible, abnormal and unacceptable video tearing with Netflix on Windows 7 64-bit. After trying many different things, it turned out that the cause was because I had Aero turned off, because I had set my visual settings to the "adjust for best performance" mode. Once I re-enabled it, NO TEARING AT ALL!!

It seems like if you turn off Aero / choose "adjust for best performance", it actually puts Windows into a reduced video performance mode, hah! Oh, the irony...anyway, just re-enable Aero / Apply the default Windows 7 theme (customize afterwards but leave Aero on) and you're good! Spread the light, spread the love!