Netflix on HTPC

Has anyone managed to get streaming Netflix to display properly on their PC?

To me it looks like the player is not displaying frames at a consistent rate. The result is jerky motion and hitches, especially apparent on scenes with lots of movement or pans.

It is not telecine judder, I know what that looks like. This is more random and distracting, it might hit once every few seconds.

It is not a 23.976 vs 24 issue as that should only hit once every 40 s or so.

It is not a network bandwidth issue. All machines are wired, with good internet connections. Same problem on SD and HD streams.

It is not dropped frames or a decoding performance issue. If I use the Ctrl-Alt-Shift-M mode in the player, it doesn't report dropped frames. All machines were using < 25% CPU while playing.

I've had the same problem on 4 different machines in two different locations. I've never not seen the problem.

I've tried Win7 32-bit and 64-bit. Silverlight 3 and 4. Media Center plug-in or browser player. Same problem on NVidia, ATI and Intel GPUs.

I've got the latest versions of all software/drivers/etc.

Anyone have this working properly? Anyone else see the same issue?

I'm interested in knowing your configuration. OS? Video card? Silverlight version?

Thanks.

pkscout:

I tried watching "Race to Witch Mountain" and I found a scene that exhibits the problem in a fairly obvious way, at least to me. Try viewing the crane shot of the taxi in the desert that starts around 13m18s. Instead of moving smoothly the scenery or the taxi will jerk along. You may not notice it every time, try playing it several times. The jerking/hitching will happen a different points in the shot.

I've tried this on a 32-bit Vista install as well and the exact same symptoms. In all cases DVD playback is fine, but Netflix via Silverlight has a problem.

As an experiment I tried playing something that was encoded at 24fps (I verified this with the Ctrl-Shift-Alt-M mode in the player) and also set my display refresh to 24Hz. With this configuration, DVD playback is perfect, even the 3:2 judder is gone. However, Netflix is really awful. It looks like frames are being doubled almost constantly, almost as though it were playing at 12Hz but not for every frame. It should be perfect at this refresh rate.

These experiments have convinced me that PC playback of Netflix has a problem with display and rendering refresh synchronization. It must be something more subtle than attempting to update during a display refresh because I don't see tearing, but there is still something not quite right.

I'm particularly sensitive to these kinds of temporal artifacts, I cannot watch DLPs without seeing rainbows and I even see plasma trails under certain circumstances, and this hitching/stutter/jitter makes it unwatchable for me.

I might pick up a Roku or equivalent to see if it is something inherent with Netflix or it is just PC playback.

If PC playback was working properly then the Roku should not be smoother. The is especially true if the Roku is connected to a non-HD display which presumably cannot do inverse telecine nor 24 Hz refresh.

Can the display on your HTPC accept 24 Hz? If so would you mind trying to set your PC to output 24 Hz and then viewing some 24 Hz Netflix content, for example "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"? With the display at 24 Hz the jerkyness should be very apparent almost all the time. Even with a 60 Hz display at around the 1:50 mark, the shot of the moving chocolates is very jittery.

I think some people are more sensitive to this than others. My wife can see it, but it doesn't bother her as much as me. I guess I'm lucky she's not that picky or I might still be single. :-)

Interesting, do you have a link?

I get at least 5 Mb/s sustained, with burst up to 25 Mb/s. I would be surprised if that is the issue, because AV stats indicates I have plenty of buffered data even on HD titles.

I just popped down to my local BestBuy and picked up a WD Live Plus. Netflix streams perfectly on it. There are no frame rate jitters. It has a number of other problems including random crashes, but the actual quality of the playback is fine.

This is not a compression or streaming issue. I can live with high levels of compression. I find even Netflix SD acceptable on the WD and the high levels of MPEG2 compression on most OTA is also ok.

The frame rate jitter on PCs is purely due to a bug or substandard implementation of video playback in Netflix/Silverlight. This problem is on every machine/OS/network/Silverlight/video card combination I've tried, and I've tried quite a few.

I guess it depends on your particular physiology, some people just don't notice it or don't find it bothersome. However, the frame rate jitter on Netflix PC playback makes it completely unwatchable for me.

Thanks for the suggestion.

If I turn Aero off I get tearing AND jitter, which to me seems like yet another bug with Netflix/Silverlight on PCs. I can't think of a good reason why turning Aero off should result in tearing, but it does on all the machines I tested.

A recently acquired WD Live Plus can play back without these issues on the same display and network that causes problems with my PCs. This would indicate that there is nothing fundamental about streaming that makes it impossible to implement properly. I'm convinced the framerate jitter on Netflix PC playback is a Netflix player or Silverlight limitation/bug.

Good to hear I'm not alone in finding it very annoying.

I guess it hasn't been fixed because no one is taking the issue seriously. I'm sure the owners of this are swamped with so many complaints due to networking or other unrelated issues that it gets lost in the noise.

I'm going to try to raise this with Netflix, but I have doubts I'll get anywhere. It sucks because I really wanted to use my newly built HTPC, but without working Netflix support it has lost a large amount of value to me. I can't justify having a PC and a seperate box for Netflix, and the incremental value of an HTPC over something like the WD Live is minimal. Especially since the WD Live Netflix app does most/all of what the 7MC Netflix plug-in does. Unlike a lot of the Netflix implementations you can see more than just what is in your queue, which is a big deal for me.

I've done this and it has no effect on the issue I'm seeing and I've not experienced the problems in that thread. If you install from the netflix site you get Silverlight 3, which has the same problem I'm seeing on Silverlight 4. I've seen the same problem on 4 different PCs with different operating systems, video cards, Silverlight versions and networks, so I'm certain this is not an errant configuration or strange set of coincidences. It is something inherent in the Netflix player or perhaps the Silverlight video playback system. I know the hardware, drivers and OS are capable of smooth jitter-free playback because DVD and high-def H.264 playback works perfectly, it's just the Netflix player that has the problem.

Thanks for this info, given that you are seeing this on a recent NVidia card has convinced me that the problem is not video card related. If it doesn't work on newer NVidia, ATI and Intel GPUs then it must be behaving the same for almost everyone.

What you are describing is tearing, it is a different issue to the jitter that I am discussing. If I disable Aero I get tearing, there may be other settings for your GPU that controls this. Tearing is a result of the updates occuring during a refresh cycle, you get part of one frame and part of the next on the screen at the same time. To fix this updates should by synchronized to occur during the interval between frames. There is really no excuse for a video playback system to be affected by this, especially given that it is a well known problem and has a solution that all modern video hardware supports.

It is also possible that the Netflix/Silverlight playback software will not exhibit the same level of jitter if this synchronization is disabled. A pick your poison proposition. Neither one is really acceptable.